Once upon a time, in the ninth grade, I was handed a thick little book with an unprepossessing yellow cover. It was the first book assigned for reading in English class that year, and I opened it with great expectation as I was an avid reader as a child and never considered school books a chore to get through. This novel was by an author I had never read before, a classic novel about a boy named Pip growing up on the English moors and a dusty old broad who lived in her wedding dress and zzzzzzz.
Yup, the book was Great Expectations and it was a total snoozefest for a 14-year-old me. I might not have done so great in English class that year, but I slept well. Of course, it put me off Dickens for over a decade until I finally sat down and read A Christmas Carol one year. My favourite movie version is the Alistair Sims black and white one from 1951. I watch it every Christmas, so decided it was high time to read the book from whence it comes. I loved the book so much I figured I should give Dickens another try…but I’m chicken you see. Just didn’t want to be sucked into another bad read. This year, however, I’m studying Victorian Literature at the U, with Oliver Twist on the reading list. No opportunity to avoid Dickens now, thankfully, because much to my surprise, I quite enjoyed it. I believe I’ll have to tackle Great Expectations again one day soon. Who knows? From my advanced years of maturity J I just might find I like it after all.
Back to Oliver Twist, this is Dickens’ first fully realized novel (his previous publication was the Pickwick Papers consisting of serialized sketches of loosely-related adventures that were suggested to him to write. Oliver Twist on the other hand is directly out of his own head) and was first published in serial form. Being an early novel of a young writer, it has its numerous flaws, and yet the trials and tribulations of poor, orphaned Oliver (“Please sir, I want some more”) are quite griping. Born of an unwed mother, raised in the workhouse and tossed upon the streets of London to fall victim to pickpockets (like the Artful Dodger) and other unsavoury characters, Oliver manages to retain his inherent goodness and is suitably rewarded in the end.
What I love about this and other classic novels is how they’re woven into the framework of our modern day existence. Who hasn’t heard of the Artful Dodger? Little perhaps did you know he found poor Ollie starving on the streets of London and took him home to become yet one more of Fagin’s boys. Of course there is also the iconic “please sir can I have some more?” from the movies, which is actually “I want some more,” an incredibly important distinction in the earlier Victorian period when man’s spiritual being was being ignored for the benefit of mechanism (it was the industrial age, after all). I joke about this phrase, since it was in my head from the moment I picked up the book, only to discover it happens in the second chapter, probably about as far as most people get when reading Dickens haha. But truly, the novel has much to offer in the way of suspense. It is a story that takes many twists and turns and comes to a rather satisfying end, and as I’ve already mentioned, I very much enjoyed the reading of it.
Till next time, happy reading!
L J
| TBR = 23 | WPL = 28 |
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