Essay “Analysis of Dickens’ novel “The Adventures of Oliver Twist.” Analysis of Dickens's novel “The Adventures of Oliver Twist”

The plot of the novel “The Adventures of Oliver Twist” is structured in such a way that the reader’s focus is on a boy who is faced with an ungrateful reality. He is an orphan from the first minutes of his life. Oliver was not only deprived of all the benefits of a normal existence, but also grew up very lonely, defenseless in the face of an unfair fate.

Since Dickens is an enlightenment writer, he never focused on inhumane conditions, in which the poor people of that time lived. The writer believed that poverty itself is not as terrible as the indifferent attitude of other people towards this category of people. It was because of this misperception by society that the poor suffered, as they were doomed to eternal humiliation, deprivation and wandering. After all, workhouses, the creation of which was intended to provide ordinary people shelter, food, work, were more like prisons. The poor were separated from their families and imprisoned there by force, fed very poorly, and forced to do backbreaking and useless labor. As a result, they simply slowly died of starvation.

After the workhouse, Oliver becomes an undertaker's apprentice and a victim of bullying by the orphanage boy Noe Claypole. The latter, taking advantage of his advantage in age and strength, constantly humiliates the protagonist. Oliver escapes and ends up in London. As you know, such street children, whose fate no one cared about, for the most part became the dregs of society - vagabonds and criminals. They were forced to engage in crime in order to somehow survive. And cruel laws reigned there. Young men turned into beggars and thieves, and girls made a living with their bodies. Most often, they did not die a natural death, but ended their lives on the gallows. IN best case scenario they faced imprisonment.

They even want to drag Oliver into the criminal world. An ordinary boy from the street, whom everyone calls the Artful Rogue, promises the main character protection and an overnight stay in London, and takes him to a buyer of stolen goods. This is the godfather of local scammers and thieves, Fagin.

In that crime novel Charles Dickens portrayed London's criminal society in a simple way. He considered it an integral part of the then metropolitan life. But the writer tried to convey to the reader main idea that the soul of a child is not initially prone to crime. After all, in his mind, a child personifies unlawful suffering and spiritual purity. He is simply a victim of that time. The main part of the novel “The Adventures of Oliver Twist” is devoted to this idea.

But at the same time, the writer was worried about the question: what influences the formation of a person’s character, the formation of his personality? Natural inclinations and abilities, origin (ancestors, parents) or still the social environment? Why does someone become noble and decent, while others become vile and dishonest criminals? Can he not be soulless, cruel and vile? In order to answer this question, Dickens introduces storyline the novel's image of Nancy. This is a girl who got into the criminal world back in early age. But this did not stop her from remaining kind and sympathetic, capable of showing empathy. She is the one who tries to prevent Oliver from going down the wrong path.

Charles Dickens's social novel "The Adventures of Oliver Twist" is a true reflection of the most pressing and pressing problems of our time. That is why this work is very popular among readers and since its publication has managed to become popular.

The most difficult thing when writing a book, as in any other endeavor, is to competently continue and finish what you started. Having caught inspiration, you run into a blank wall of despair. In a poem you cannot express yourself beyond the fourth line, realizing the stupidity of the situation. A beautiful beginning is ruined by an attempt to create a continuation adequate to the initial impulses. Things don’t go well – the process stands still – the author tries to get out of it – fills it with volume – goes sideways – develops other lines – desperately looks for a means to fill in the gaps. Dickens's first two books are written this way. I don’t know how things turned out for Dickens later, but “The Posthumous Papers of the Pickwick Club” and “The Adventures of Oliver Twist” have all the features of a blissful, exciting beginning and absolute emptiness in the middle of the story. Patience is running out; appealing to the author’s conscience is useless. Don't forget that Dickens wrote books like periodical newspapers. His works are periodical newspapers. If you want to live and eat well, earn money. If you can’t think it through to the end, write as best you can. This approach to literature is offensive. Perhaps things will be better for Dickens in the future - after all, “The Adventures of Oliver Twist” is only his second book.

As I already said, the beginning is written perfectly. Dickens himself says that he is disgusted by the ennoblement of criminals. He does not develop the topic with examples, but we know very well how, under the pen of writers, the worst villains became noble. Dickens decides to change the situation by showing the life of the bottom of society from the true side. He succeeds quite well. Only Dickens persists too much in describing the bottom, lowering the bottom below the bottom. He is too categorical and overreacts on many points. Where he is good - very good, there is also evil - very evil. Time after time you are amazed at the unfortunate fate of Oliver Twist. Life constantly brings the poor boy to his knees in front of insoluble dilemmas, depriving the guy of hope for a bright future.

Dickens finds a diamond in the rough in the mud. This gem Circumstances could not break him - he blinked and wished for a different outcome. It is known that the environment influences a person in the most in a strong way. But Oliver is above this - nobility and understanding of the wrong structure of the world play in his blood. He will not steal, he will not kill, he will hardly beg for alms, but he will greedily eat rotten meat and fawn under good with a gentle hand. There is something of a rogue in him, only Dickens idealizes the boy too much, drawing him better fate. Although, if you start talking about punks, then take him to the crooked road leading to the city executioner's square. Instead, we have the Mowgli of the urban jungle and a future version of the noble Tarzan with exorbitant ambitions, but Dickens does not tell the reader about this. And good! Continuing to read the adventures of Oliver Twist would be simply unbearable.

You have to believe in a successful outcome until the very end; perhaps someone is writing about your life too.

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"The Adventures of Oliver Twist" is Dickens's first social novel, in which the contradictions of English reality appeared incomparably clearer than in "The Pickwick Papers." “Hard truth,” Dickens wrote in the preface, “was the object of my book.”

In the preface to the novel Oliver Twist, Dickens declares himself a realist. But he immediately makes the exact opposite statement: “... It is still far from clear to me why the lesson of the purest good cannot be drawn from the most vile evil. I have always considered the contrary to be a firm and unshakable truth... I wanted to demonstrate in little Oliver how the principle of good always triumphs in the end, despite the most unfavorable circumstances and difficult obstacles.” The contradiction that is revealed in this programmatic statement of the young Dickens arises from the contradiction that characterizes the writer's worldview at the early stage of his creative activity.

The writer wants to show reality “as it is,” but at the same time excludes objective logic facts of life and processes, tries to interpret its laws idealistically. A convinced realist, Dickens could not abandon his didactic plans. For him, fighting this or that social evil always meant convincing, that is, educating. The writer considered the correct education of a person to be the best way to establish mutual understanding between people and the humane organization of human society. He sincerely believed that most people are naturally drawn to goodness and a good beginning can easily triumph in their souls.

But it was impossible to prove the idealistic thesis - “good” invariably defeats “evil” - within the framework of a realistic depiction of the complex contradictions of the modern era. To implement the controversial creative task that the author set for himself, it was necessary creative method, combining elements of realism and romanticism.

At first, Dickens intended to create a realistic picture of criminal London only, to show the “pathetic reality” of the thieves’ dens of London’s “Eastside” (“Eastern” side), that is, the poorest quarters of the capital. But in the process of work, the original plan expanded significantly. The novel depicts various aspects of modern English life and poses important and pressing problems.

The time when Dickens collected material for his new novel was a period of fierce struggle over the Poor Law, published back in 1834, according to which a network of workhouses was created in the country for the lifelong maintenance of the poor. Drawn into the controversy surrounding the opening of workhouses, Dickens strongly condemned this terrible product of bourgeois rule.

“... These workhouses,” Engels wrote in “The Condition of the Working Class in England,” “or, as the people call them, poor-law-bastilles, are designed in such a way as to frighten away everyone who has even the slightest hope of living without this form of public charity. In order for a person to turn to the poor fund only in the most extreme cases, so that he resorts to it only after exhausting all possibilities of getting by on his own, the workhouse was turned into the most disgusting place of residence that the refined imagination of a Malthusian can come up with.”

The Adventures of Olever Twist is directed against the Poor Law, workhouses and existing political economy concepts that lull public opinion with promises of happiness and prosperity for the majority.

However, it would be a mistake to consider that a novel is only the fulfillment by the writer of his social mission. Along with this, when creating his work, Dickens joins the literary struggle. “The Adventures of Oliver Twist” was also the author’s original response to the dominance of the so-called “Newgate” novel, in which the story of thieves and criminals was told exclusively in melodramatic and romantic tones, and the lawbreakers themselves represented a type of Superman that was very attractive to readers. In fact, in the Newgate novels, criminals acted as Byronic heroes who turned into a criminal environment. Dickens strongly opposed the idealization of crimes and those who commit them.

In the preface to the book, Dickens clearly stated the essence of his plan: “It seemed to me that to portray real members of a criminal gang, to draw them in all their ugliness, with all their vileness, to show their wretched, miserable life, to show them as they really are , - they always sneak, overcome with anxiety, along the dirtiest paths of life, and wherever they look, a black terrible gallows looms before them - it seemed to me that to depict this means to try to do what is necessary and what will serve to society. And I did it to the best of my ability.”

The author shows that evil penetrates into all corners of England; it is most common among those whom society has doomed to poverty, slavery, and suffering. The darkest pages in the novel are those devoted to workhouses.

Workhouses were contrary to the beliefs of Dickens the humanist, and their depiction becomes the writer's response to the controversy surrounding a deeply pressing issue. The excitement that Dickens experienced in studying what he saw as a failed attempt to alleviate the lot of the poor, and the acuteness of his observations, gave the images of the novel great artistic power and persuasiveness. The writer draws a workhouse based on real facts. It depicts the inhumanity of the Poor Law in action. Although the order of the workhouse is described in only a few chapters of the novel, the book has firmly established the reputation of a work exposing one of the most dark sides English reality of the 30s. However, a few episodes, eloquent in their realism, were enough for the novel to firmly establish its reputation as a novel about workhouses.

The main characters of those chapters of the book in which the workhouse is depicted are children born in dark dungeons, their parents dying of hunger and exhaustion, eternally hungry young inmates of workhouses and hypocritical “trustees” of the poor. The author emphasizes that the workhouse, promoted as a “charitable” institution, is a prison that degrades and physically oppresses a person.

Liquid oatmeal three times a day, two onions a week and half a loaf on Sundays - this was the meager ration that supported the pitiful, always hungry workhouse boys, who had been shaking hemp since six o'clock in the morning. When Oliver, driven to despair by hunger, timidly asks the warden for more porridge, the boy is considered a rebel and locked in a cold closet.

Dickens, in the first of his social novels, also depicts the dirt, poverty, crime that reigns in the slums of London, and people who have sunk to the “bottom” of society. The slum dwellers Fagin and Sikes, Dodger and Bates, who represent thieves' London in the novel, in the perception of the young Dickens are an inevitable evil on earth, to which the author contrasts his preaching of good. The realistic depiction of the London bottom and its inhabitants in this novel is often colored with romantic and sometimes melodramatic tones. The pathos of denunciation here is not yet directed against those social conditions that give rise to vice. But whatever the writer’s subjective assessment of the phenomena, the images of the slums and their individual inhabitants (especially Nancy) objectively act as a harsh indictment against the entire social system that generates poverty and crime.

Unlike the previous novel, in this work the narrative is colored with gloomy humor, the narrator seems to have difficulty believing that the events taking place belong to a civilized England that boasts of its democracy and justice. There is a different pace of the story here: short chapters are filled with numerous events that make up the essence of the adventure genre. In the fate of little Oliver, adventures turn out to be misadventures when the ominous figure of Monks, Oliver’s brother, appears on the scene, who, in order to obtain an inheritance, tries to destroy the main character by conspiring with Fagin and forcing him to make Oliver a thief. In this novel by Dickens, the features of a detective story are palpable, but the investigation into the mystery of Twist is not carried out by professional servants of the law, but by enthusiasts who fell in love with the boys and wanted to restore good name his father and return the inheritance that legally belongs to him. The nature of the episodes is also different. Sometimes the novel sounds melodramatic notes. This is especially clearly felt in the scene of the farewell of little Oliver and Dick, the hero’s doomed friend, who dreams of dying quickly in order to get rid of cruel torments - hunger, punishment and overwork.

The writer introduces a significant number of characters into his work and tries to deeply reveal them inner world. Of particular importance in “The Adventures of Oliver Twist” are the social motivations for people’s behavior, which determined certain traits of their characters. True, it should be noted that the characters in the novel are grouped according to a peculiar principle arising from the unique worldview of the young Dickens. Like the romantics, Dickens divides heroes into “positive” and “negative”, the embodiment of goodness and bearers of vices. In this case, the principle underlying this division becomes a moral norm. Therefore, one group (“evil”) includes the son of wealthy parents, Oliver’s half-brother Edward Lyford (Monks), the head of the gang of thieves Fagin and his accomplice Sikes, the beadle Bumble, the workhouse matron Mrs. Corney, who is raising Mrs. Mann’s orphans, and others. It is noteworthy that critical intonations in the work are associated both with the characters called upon to protect order and legality in the state, and with their “antipodes” - criminals. Despite the fact that these characters are at different levels of the social ladder, the author of the novel endows them with similar traits and constantly emphasizes their immorality.

The writer includes Mr. Brownlow, the sister of the protagonist’s mother Rose Fleming, Harry Maley and his mother, Oliver Twist himself, to another group (“kind”). These characters are drawn in the traditions of educational literature, that is, they emphasize ineradicable natural kindness, decency, and honesty.

The defining principle of the grouping of characters, both in this and in all subsequent novels by Dickens, is not the place that one or another of the characters occupies on the social ladder, but the attitude of each of them to the people around him. Positive characters are all persons who “correctly” understand social relationships and the principles of social morality that are unshakable from his point of view, negative characters are those who proceed from ethical principles that are false for the author. All “kind” people are full of vivacity, energy, and the greatest optimism and draw these positive qualities from their performance of social tasks. Among Dickens's positive characters, some (“the poor”) are distinguished by their humility and... devotion, others (“rich”) - generosity and humanity combined with efficiency and common sense. According to the author, fulfilling social duty is the source of happiness and well-being for everyone.

The negative characters of the novel are the bearers of evil, embittered by life, immoral and cynical. Predators by nature, always profiting at the expense of others, they are disgusting, too grotesque and caricatured to be believable, although they do not leave the reader in doubt that they are true. Thus, the head of a gang of thieves, Fagin, loves to enjoy the sight of stolen gold things. He can be cruel and merciless if he is disobeyed or his cause is harmed. The figure of his accomplice Sykes is drawn in more detail than the images of all the other accomplices of Fagin. Dickens combines grotesque, caricature and moralizing humor in his portrait. This is “a strongly built subject, a fellow of about thirty-five, in a black corduroy frock coat, very dirty short dark trousers, lace-up shoes and gray paper stockings that covered thick legs with bulging calves - such legs with such a suit always give the impression of something unfinished if they are not decorated with shackles.” This “cute” character keeps a “dog” named Flashlight to deal with children, and even Fagin himself is not afraid of him.

Among the “people of the bottom” depicted by the author, the most complex is the image of Nancy. Sykes's accomplice and lover is endowed by the writer with some attractive character traits. She even shows tender affection for Oliver, although she later pays cruelly for it.

Ardently fighting selfishness in the name of humanity, Dickens nevertheless put forward considerations of interest and benefit as the main argument: the writer was possessed by the ideas of the philosophy of utilitarianism, widely popular in his time. The concept of “evil” and “good” was based on the idea of ​​bourgeois humanism. To some (representatives of the ruling classes), Dickens recommended humanity and generosity as the basis of “correct” behavior, to others (toilers) - devotion and patience, while emphasizing the social expediency and usefulness of such behavior.

The narrative line of the novel has strong didactic elements, or rather, moral and moralistic ones, which in “ Posthumous notes The Pickwick Club" were just insert episodes. In this Dickens novel they form an integral part of the story, explicit or implied, expressed in a humorous or sad tone.

At the beginning of the work, the author notes that little Oliver, like his peers who find themselves at the mercy of heartless and morally unscrupulous people, awaits the fate of “a humble and hungry poor man going through his life path under a hail of blows and slaps, despised by everyone and not meeting pity anywhere.” At the same time, depicting the misadventures of Oliver Twist, the author leads the hero to happiness. At the same time, the story of a boy born in a workhouse and immediately left an orphan after birth ends happily, clearly contrary to the truth of life.

The image of Oliver is in many ways reminiscent of the characters in Hoffmann's fairy tales, who unexpectedly find themselves in the thick of the battle between good and evil. The boy grows up, despite the difficult conditions in which the children being raised by Mrs. Mann are placed, experiences a half-starved existence in the workhouse and in the family of the undertaker Sowerbury. The image of Oliver is endowed by Dickens with romantic exclusivity: despite the influence of his environment, the boy strictly strives for good, even when he is not broken by the lectures and beatings of the workhouse trustees, and has not learned obedience in the house of his “educator,” the undertaker, and ends up in Fagin’s gang of thieves. Having gone through the life school of Fagin, who taught him the art of thieves, Oliver remains virtuous and pure child. He feels unsuited to the craft for which he is an old swindler, but he feels easily and freely in Mr. Brownlow’s cozy bedroom, where he immediately pays attention to the port of a young woman, who later turned out to be his mother. As a moralist and Christian, Dickens does not allow the moral fall of the boy, who is saved by a happy accident - a meeting with Mr. Brownlow, who snatches him from the kingdom of evil and transports him to the circle of honest, respectable and wealthy people. At the end of the work it turns out that the hero is illegitimate, but long-awaited son Edwin Lyford, to whom his father bequeathed a fairly significant inheritance. A boy adopted by Mr. Brownlow finds a new family.

In this case, we can speak not of Dickens’s strict adherence to the logic of the life process, but of the romantic mood of the writer, confident that the purity of Oliver’s soul, his perseverance in the face of life’s difficulties need to be rewarded. Together with him, others also find prosperity and a peaceful existence. positive characters novel: Mr. Grimwig, Mr. Brownlow, Mrs. Mailey. Rose Fleming finds her happiness in marriage with Harry Maley, who, in order to marry his beloved girl of low birth, chose a career as a parish priest.

Thus, a happy ending crowns the development of intrigue, the positive heroes are rewarded by the humanist writer for their virtues with a comfortable and cloudless existence. Equally natural for the author is the idea that evil must be punished. All the villains leave the stage - their machinations have been unraveled, and therefore their role has been played. In the New World, Monks dies in prison, having received part of his father’s inheritance with Oliver’s consent, but still wanting to become a respectable person. Fagin is executed, Claypole, in order to avoid punishment, becomes an informant, Sykes dies, saving him from pursuit. Beadle Bumble and the workhouse matron, Mrs. Corney, who became his wife, lost their positions. Dickens reports with satisfaction that, as a result, they “gradually reached an extremely miserable and wretched state, and finally settled as despicable paupers in the very workhouse where they had once ruled over others.”

Striving for maximum completeness and convincingness of a realistic drawing, the writer uses various artistic means. He describes in detail and carefully the setting in which the action takes place: for the first time he resorts to subtle psychological analysis (the last night of Fagin, sentenced to death, or the murder of Nancy by her lover Sikes).

It is obvious that the initial contradiction of Dickens's worldview appears especially clearly in Oliver Twist, primarily in the unique composition of the novel. Against a realistic background, a moralizing plot deviates from the strict truth is built. We can say that the novel has two parallel narrative lines: the fate of Oliver and his fight against evil, embodied in the figure of Monks, and a picture of reality, striking in its truthfulness, based on a truthful depiction of the dark sides of the writer’s contemporary life. These lines are not always convincingly connected; a realistic depiction of life could not fit within the framework of the given thesis - “good conquers evil.”

However, no matter how important the ideological thesis is for the writer, which he is trying to prove through a moralizing story about the struggle and final triumph of little Oliver, Dickens, as a critical realist, reveals the power of his skill and talent in depicting the broad social background against which the hero’s difficult childhood passes. In other words, Dickens's strength as a realist appears not in the depiction of the main character and his story, but in the depiction of the social background against which the story of the orphan boy unfolds and ends successfully.

The skill of the realist artist appeared where he was not bound by the need to prove the unprovable, where he depicted living people and real circumstances over which, according to the author’s plan, the virtuous hero was supposed to triumph.

The advantages of the novel “The Adventures of Oliver Twist,” according to V.G. Belinsky, lie in “fidelity to reality,” but the disadvantage is in the denouement “in the manner of sensitive novels of the past.”

In “Oliver Twist,” Dickens’s style as a realist artist was finally defined, and the complex complex of his style matured. Dickens's style is built on the interweaving and contradictory interpenetration of humor and didactics, documentary transmission of typical phenomena and elevated moralizing.

Considering this novel as one of the works created at an early stage of the writer’s work, it should be emphasized once again that “The Adventures of Oliver Twist” fully reflects the originality of the worldview of the early Dickens. During this period, he creates works in which positive heroes not only part with evil, but also find allies and patrons. In Dickens's early novels, humor supports positive characters in their struggle with the hardships of life, and it also helps the writer to believe in what is happening, no matter how gloomy the reality may be painted. The writer’s desire to penetrate deeply into the life of his characters, into its dark and light corners, is also obvious. At the same time, inexhaustible optimism and love of life make the works of the early stage of Dickens’s work generally joyful and bright.

In the novel “The Adventures of Oliver Twist,” Dickens builds a plot centered on a boy’s encounter with an ungrateful reality. Main character novel - a little boy named Oliver Twist. Having been born in a workhouse, from the first minutes of his life he was left an orphan, and this meant in his situation not only a future full of hardships and deprivations, but also loneliness, defenselessness in the face of the insults and injustice that he would have to endure. The baby was frail, the doctor said that he would not survive.
Dickens, as an educational writer, never reproached his unfortunate characters with either poverty or ignorance, but he reproached a society that refuses help and support to those who were born poor and are therefore doomed from the cradle to deprivation and humiliation. And the conditions for the poor (and especially for the children of the poor) in that world were truly inhuman.
Workhouses, which were supposed to provide ordinary people with work, food, and shelter, were in fact similar to prisons: the poor were forcibly imprisoned there, separated from their families, forced to do useless and hard work and practically not fed, doomed to a slow death of starvation. It was not for nothing that the workers themselves called workhouses “bastilles for the poor.”
From the workhouse, Oliver is apprenticed to an undertaker; there he encounters the orphanage boy Noe Claypole, who, being older and stronger, constantly humiliates Oliver. Oliver soon escapes to London.
Boys and girls who were of no use to anyone, who by chance found themselves on the streets of the city, often became completely lost to society, as they ended up in the criminal world with its cruel laws. They became thieves, beggars, girls began to trade own body, and after that many of them ended their short and unhappy lives in prisons or on the gallows.
This novel is a crime novel. Dickens portrays the society of London criminals simply. This is a legitimate part of the existence of capitals. A boy from the street, nicknamed the Artful Rogue, promises Oliver an overnight stay and protection in London and leads him to a buyer of stolen goods, godfather London thieves and swindlers to the Jew Fagin. They want to put Oliver on a criminal path.
For Dickens, it is important to give the reader the idea that the soul of a child is not inclined to crime. Children are the personification of spiritual purity and unlawful suffering. A considerable part of the novel is devoted to this. Dickens, like many writers of that time, was concerned with the question: what is most important in shaping a person’s character, his personality - the social environment, origin (parents and ancestors) or his inclinations and abilities? What makes a person what he is: decent and noble or vile, dishonest and criminal? And does criminal always mean vile, cruel, soulless? Answering this question, Dickens creates in the novel the image of Nancy - a girl who fell into the criminal world at an early age, but retained a kind, sympathetic heart and the ability to sympathize, because it is not in vain that she is trying to protect little Oliver from the vicious path.
Thus we see that social novel Charles Dickens's “The Adventures of Oliver Twist” is a lively response to the most pressing and pressing problems of our time. And judging by the popularity and appreciation of readers, this novel can rightfully be considered a folk novel.

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History of the creation of the novel: Dickens's novel was first published under the title "Oliver Twist, or the Way of a Parish Boy" in the magazine "Bentley's Mixture" from February 1837 (the writer began working on it in 1836) to March 1839. Even before the publication of this publication was completed (in October 1838), by mutual agreement with the founder of the magazine, Richard Bentley, the writer published the novel as a separate book under everything already famous name"The Adventures of Oliver Twist", which contained illustrations by the famous English artist and publicist George Cruikshank. And in 1841, the third edition of the novel was published with forewords by the author. "The Adventures of Oliver Twist"

Atmosphere shown in the novel: In 1834, the so-called “Poor Law” was adopted in the English Parliament. According to this document, workhouses were opened. Since then, according to Dickens's bitterly ironic remark, "all beggars were given a choice of two options (for, of course, no one wanted to rape anyone!): either slowly starve to death in the workhouse, or die a quick death outside its walls." . In fact, workhouses were miserable shelters, in which a family could be forcibly separated to live in, where there was almost no food, and residents were deprived of basic civil rights and were completely dependent on parish authorities like the beadle Bumble, the hero of the novel The Adventures of Oliver Twist. These terrible conditions were aggravated by the fact that, according to the apt definition of the scientists of the time, the English bourgeoisie perceived the poor dispossessed people as bandits, and the workhouses as prisons, and the inmates kept there as people who were outside the law. houses were well known to Dickens, since he worked as a reporter and collected material everywhere: from parliament to a poorhouse or in prison. Let us also remember that the Dickens family lived for some time in a debtor's prison, which was similar to a workhouse. These houses were then in. people called them “prisons”, because the conditions in them were so terrible that the poor were ready for any working conditions, any hardest exploitation by employers, just to avoid ending up there. And since there were millions of poor people in the then Great Britain, the question of their image was a question. life acquired a national scale. social evil and portrayed Dickens with all the skill of his writing talent.

Summary novel: Oliver Twist is a boy whose mother died in childbirth in a workhouse. He grows up in an orphanage at a local parish, whose funds are extremely meager. Starving peers force him to ask for more for lunch. For this obstinacy, his superiors sell him to the undertaker's office, where Oliver is bullied by the senior apprentice. In the workhouse. After a fight with the apprentice, Oliver flees to London, where he falls into the gang of a young pickpocket nicknamed the Artful Dodger. The den of criminals is ruled by the cunning and treacherous Jew Fagin (Feigin). The cold-blooded killer and robber Bill Sikes also visits there. His 17-year-old girlfriend Nancy sees a kindred spirit in Oliver and shows him kindness. London The Artful Dodger FaginBill Sykes The criminals plan to train Oliver to be a pickpocket, but after a robbery goes wrong, the boy ends up in the house of a virtuous gentleman, Mr. Brownlow, who over time begins to suspect that Oliver is his friend's son. Sykes and Nancy bring Oliver back into the underworld to take part in a heist. As it turns out, Monks is behind Fagin. step-brother Oliver, who is trying to disinherit him. After another failure of the criminals, Oliver first ends up in the house of Miss Rose Meili, who at the end of the book turns out to be the hero's aunt. Nancy comes to them with the news that Monks and Fagin are still hoping to kidnap or kill Oliver. And with this news, Rose Meili goes to Mr. Brownlow’s house to resolve this situation with his help. Oliver then returns to Mr. Brownlow. Sikes becomes aware of Nancy's visits to Mr. Brownlow. In a fit of anger, the villain kills the unfortunate girl, but soon dies himself. Monks has to open his dirty secrets, come to terms with the loss of his inheritance and go to America, where he will die in prison. Fagin goes to the gallows. Oliver lives happily in the house of his savior Mr. Brownlow.

Film adaptations and theatrical performances Oliver Twist silent film, 1922 Oliver Twist Oliver Twist classic film adaptation 1948, dir. David Lin. Oliver Twist 1948 David Lean Oliver! musical, 1960 (West End, London), 1962 (Broadway), 1984 (Broadway revival), 1994 (West End revival), 2002 (Australasia Tour), 2003 (Tallinn), 2009 (West End revival) Ende), from December 2011 (UK tour) Oliver!West End LondonBroadway AustralasiaTallinn UK Oliver! film-musical, based on the musical of the same name, 1968 Oliver! Oliver Twist cartoon, 1982 Oliver Twist Oliver Twist television series, 1985. Dir. Gareth Davies (UK) Oliver Twist Oliver Twist film, 1997. Director Tony Bill (USA) Oliver Twist Oliver Twist film, 2005. Directed by Roman Polanski. Oliver Twist Roman Polanski Oliver Twist series, 2007. Directed by Coky Giedroyc. Oliver Twist In Memory of Oliver Twist Documentary, year 2014. Directed by Ronald Uklanism. In memory of Oliver Twist