Dickens’ prose, his narrative style, is the star of the show. It’s famously circumlocutious—wordy, discursive, full of asides and flourishes. Something that helped my understanding of it was knowing that Dickens himself was a big hammy showman, something I read in this wonderful essay by Ethan Warren. A lot of lurching prose is transformed into sweeping, entertaining oratory by simply being imagined like that—oratory, told with the same sort of gusto as an uncle telling ghost stories at a campfire.
The best reading for the story is as a morality play about vice, sin, and temptation. Fagin is the Devil, who tempts and lures his minions to their own destruction with vices (drinking, gambling), threats, and the false brotherhood of sinners (who all turn on each other at the end).
The story Dickens tells is one of good or evil that is buried deep in the soul. Once the Good has been corrupted, the stain is difficult, perhaps impossible, to wash out. And then some people (Monks) seem to just be born bad and there’s not much to do for them.
The thing is that no characters in this story defy their station. The Good Guys are Good and they remain so (especially Oliver Twist, the little Christ-child). The Bad Guys may sell each other up to the police, but none achieve salvation: they are all swept up in an apocalypse of police raids and mob action in the end.
The nature of the story as a morality play is its greatest strength by far—once you see “oh, Fagin is literally just a Satan metaphor,” every turn of the story is read simply as a sort of prediction or judgement on the souls of those within and without Satan’s orbit, and the showy bombastic Charlie-Dick prose ties it all up into a sort of wild preacher-man’s summary of the sordid world around him and omen of the Kingdom Come. It’s cool! HOWEVER.
The morality play is also the story’s greatest weakness. Oliver Twist himself is unfailingly good and a little bit heart-wrenching, but he’s also a child, and he doesn’t do anything the whole book but stumble from misfortune to misfortune until a few of the cleverer men piece it all together and help him recover his proper station. We’re supposed to see that he resists the call of evil at all times in ways that others do not (Noah and all the other boys) and that his goodness perhaps radiates from him to touch others (Nancy) but it’s all a little bit thin and dreadful and actually pretty boring to read about. The thing is that if any of the other characters ever gave him a proper chance to escape their snares, he would (indeed, in the robbery scene he is about to attempt to), but then that would cut the story short. So, for the story to function, he’s strung along through miseries straight from page one (and Volume I is particularly awful) through the end of Volume II. He hardly exists as a character in Volume III, where the story homes in on what it does better: vice and sinners.
That said, I am also greatly annoyed by Nancy’s character. Her actions only, ONLY make any sort of sense when viewed through the frame of her being the sinner who, at the end of all things, refuses to repudiate Satan (the scene on London Bridge). The diegetic reasons she offers for not accepting offers of help—her “home” is back with them, these people who treat her worse than their dogs, and that she will someday drown herself in the Thames and that’ll be that—are not wholly impossible, but they’re unearned. An abuse narrative would be plausible and interesting but I don’t know if Dickens had it in him to describe the psychology of abuse.
Like, what the hell does she see in Sikes? That’s supposedly the thing, she loves him, and at the end pleads with him to accept angelic mercy and leave it all behind. Sure. But she spends the entire book in a ball of barely (and sometimes un-) contained nerves, being hit and verbally abused and in return expressing an unending stream of contempt for Sikes and Fagin. She doesn’t evidence any attachment to him! All she ever does is moan about how lowly she is and how ill her employment is, but then she acts like she’s permanently moored to it for no reason! I don’t buy this!
This is partly because, great as Dickens is, he’s sort of a dusty old prig the way you would imagine if I said “a Victorian…” and then trailed off looking for you to fill in the blank. The story’s treatment of its characters and setting is racist, misogynist, classist, and unrestrainedly anti-semitic. I mean, to an extent, sure, that’s the era for you, but only to an extent. You really can find authors who wrote in the 1800s who aren’t so, uh… all of that, even if only on a few axes at a time. Mary Shelley! Oscar Wilde! Mark Twain!
So, appreciate it as the fire from the un-pulpit, a sermon delivered by the wild-eyed and crazy-haired old coot who himself couldn’t really get on with the Church of England. It’s really quite good and beautiful at that. But know that he’s not holding back, and he’s going to overreach a bit (… a lot) in his grandiose pronouncements.