Content area
Full Text
"'We name our fondlins in alphabetical order,'" Bumble informs Mrs. Mann; "'The last was an S. - Swubble, I named him. This was aT. -Twist, I named him" (23; ch. 2). Arguably, being called "Twist" is better than being known as Swubble,"' although Bumble, whose name suits him perfectly, is hardly fond of either of these foundlings. Thanks to the beadle's onomastics, however, Dickens could predicate Oliver Twist on twists; these extend beyond twistings and turnings of a labyrinthian plot in which an orphan discovers who his parents were and claims his inheritance. Dickens gives most of his materials a twist away from the expected. For example, Nancy, a prostitute, gives her life to preserve Oliver's innocence; she thwarts the underworld's efforts to turn him into a thief. Even diabolical Fagin, frantic in the condemned cell, becomes a victim of society who excites the reader's pity. From one angle, he is the devil incarnate2; from another, as one of Oliver's surrogate fathers, he offers the outcast shelter and companionship before Mr. Brownlow does.
One can stomach most of the twists or turnabouts in Dickens's second novel, the chief exception being Rose Maylie's mysterious illness and miraculous recovery in chapter 33 of installment 15. She is a flower about to give the lie to the spring of her life by withering prematurely. Perhaps the second syllable of her surname contains an inadvertent confession, for if the onset of Rose's malady seems digressive, her return to health was untrue to life as Dickens had experienced it. Restoring Rose, he in effect postponed his emergence as a full-fledged realist from June 1838, the date for installment 15, until 30 January 1841, when, in installment 39 of The Old Curiosity Shop, he killed Little Nell.
The cleverest twists occur in the early installments. Dickens satirizes the imbecility of the workhouse system set up under the Poor Law of 1834. Workhouses were designed to offer the destitute the meagerest subsistence possible lest they prefer welfare to work; also, by keeping the sexes separated, they were supposed to curtail what Malthus dismissed as the surplus population. The twist is that Oliver is born in a workhouse, thereby augmenting the surplus.3 When he has the audacity to request another helping of gruel,...