[This 1838 novel was published in 24 short monthly parts, but I’m reading it in ten sections. I write about what I’ve read before reading on, and so far I have finished two of the ten. Spoiler alert: If you read this running commentary, you will find out everything that happens in the book as I read it.]
Chapters 1-5
The Poor Laws, the workhouse, cruel officialdom. Everybody knows that Oliver is an orphan almost from birth, is as badly fed on thin gruel as all the other inmates in the workhouse, once he arrives there at the age of nine, and that he is punished for daring to ‘ask for more.’ His life is utterly miserable. I can only count two characters who show even a hint of consideration for his needs, and it ought to be too intolerable for any reader to bear—so how does Dickens keep us reading?
It’s one of those times in Dickens when the plot might be summarised in a few sentences, and yet the reading of it over many pages is hugely entertaining. Dickens is in his favourite mode, droll, ironic hyperbole. These don’t necessarily all come at the same time, but often they do. Like when the newborn Oliver is taken from the arms of his now dead mother to be dressed by the old woman attending. ‘What an excellent example of the power of dress, young Oliver Twist was! Wrapped in the blanket which had hitherto formed his only covering, he might have been the child of a nobleman or a beggar; it would have been hard for the haughtiest stranger to have assigned him his proper station in society. But now that he was enveloped in the old calico robes which had grown yellow in the same service…’
…and so on. It’s that ‘excellent example of the power of dress’ I like, not because of its inappropriate tone but because Dickens is setting up perhaps his most important theme: that to be born in poverty, as he puts it in the next part of the sentence, means that ‘he was badged and ticketed, and fell into his place at once—a parish child—the orphan of a workhouse—the humble, half-starved drudge—to be cuffed and buffeted through the world—despised by all, and pitied by none.’ So the drollery turns to stark, bitter truth in a single short paragraph. The jauntiness of the tone is so thin, in other words, it’s transparent. It doesn’t mask the narrator’s disgust in any way.
And he keeps it up, off and on, for chapter after chapter. The old woman attending him is sympathetic enough, but rendered absurd by her poorly disguised drinking habit and her tendency to chatter on unhelpfully. Her praise of motherhood is meant to persuade Oliver’s mother not to die: ‘when she has lived as long as I have, sir, and had thirteen children of her own, and all on ’em dead except two, and them in the wurkus with me, she’ll know better than to take on in that way….’ The narrator’s response to it is sardonic. ‘Apparently this consolatory perspective of a mother’s prospects failed in producing its due effect.’
But the plot. The chapters are short and self-contained. Oliver is born. He is ‘farmed’ to a money-grabbing old woman who neglects and starves her infants half to death. Or, ‘in eight and a half cases out of ten,’ entirely to death. At the age of nine he is transferred to the workhouse, where a new regime of daily oakum-picking and short rations of thin gruel lead to near-starvation. The boys decide they must make a stand and, when lots are drawn, it’s Oliver who must ask for more. Which he does. Then comes solitary confinement in a cold cell. But… ‘Let it not be supposed by the enemies of “the system,” that, during the period of his solitary incarceration, Oliver was denied the benefit of exercise, the pleasure of society, or the advantages of religious consolation.’ Can you guess? The ‘pleasure of society,’ for example, is derived from his being ‘carried every other day into the hall where the boys dined, and there sociably flogged as a public warning and example.’
The governing board decide to offer five pounds to any tradesman who will take him on as an ‘apprentice,’ and he is about to be taken away by a barbaric chimney-sweep when a farcical incident saves him. The doddery old magistrate, seeking out his inkstand everywhere except under his nose; ‘and happening in the course of his search to look straight before him, his gaze encountered the pale and terrified face of Oliver Twist.’ Unprecedentedly, he asks Oliver if he wants to go with the sweep. On his knees, Oliver ‘prayed that they would order him back to the dark room—that they would starve him—beat him—kill him if they pleased—rather than send him away with that dreadful man.’ The beadle, of course—I’ll come back to him—is outraged, and Oliver’s punishment is set to continue.
But there’s a helpful chance encounter before he reaches the workhouse with Oliver in tow. The beadle is having a drolly lugubrious conversation with Sowerberry the undertaker about the extra business he’s now getting. ‘In commercial phrase, coffins were looking up,’ as the narrator puts it in a later chapter. But Sowerberry likes to plead poverty and, when the beadle shows him the bill offering five pounds, he jumps at the chance. Oliver can see that he will not be a brutal master… but Mrs Sowerberry, and everybody else in the undertaker’s house, is dismissive of him, and unkind. The worst is the other boy working for Sowerberry, Noah Claypole. As a parish boy—but, crucially, not an orphan—Noah crows over his new status as only second-lowest in the neighbourhood pecking-order. He’s a bully, and things only become worse when Sowerberry finds a new role for Oliver….
The undertaker has a plan for him. He hesitates to suggest it to his comedy battleaxe of a wife, but reminds her how he’s ‘a very good-looking boy, my dear…. There’s an expression of melancholy in his face, my dear, which is very interesting. He would make a delightful mute, my love.’ Sowerberry gets away with the mildest of rebukes, for not having thought of the idea earlier, and Oliver has a new role. His introduction to the public side of the business comes quickly, when he accompanies Sowerberry to visit a newly bereaved husband. And there’s nothing droll at all about Dickens’s presentation of the scene. The man, already driven half-mad by grief, raves at the sight of Sowerberry kneeling to take the woman’s measurements: ‘kneel down, kneel down—kneel round her, every one of you, and mark my words! I say she was starved to death, […] her bones were starting through the skin. There was neither fire nor candle; she died in the dark—in the dark! She couldn’t even see her children’s faces, though we heard her gasping out their names….’
This is as harrowing for the reader as it is for Oliver, and nothing about the woman’s funeral is any easier for him. Being the polite boy he is when Sowerberry asks how he likes the business he replies, ‘Pretty well, thank you, sir,’—but he has spirit too, and honesty. After a pause, he can’t help it. ‘Not very much, sir.’ But this, it seems, is to be his life from now on.
Chapters 6-11
We know by now that it’s Oliver’s lot to be the constant victim of gross injustices. These usually stem, ultimately, from the bullying that characterises almost everybody’s behaviour, and Dickens isn’t going to change that in these next chapters. In fact, they reach a kind of climax in Chapters 6 and 7 with Oliver, at the age of ten, in deep trouble again. He is being judged as a monster for daring to react with his fists to bullying taunts that nobody should ever have to endure.
Things start off in the drolly sardonic tone we recognise by now. Oliver is kept busy as Sowerberry’s irresistible little mute by the fact that ‘[i]n commercial phrase, coffins were looking up.’ Dickens pokes satirical fun at those relatives, ‘perfectly inconsolable during the previous illness … [who] would be as happy among themselves as need be—quite cheerful and contented’ now that the dear one is departed. But Oliver’s popularity stirs Noah Claypole to fits of jealous envy, culminating in the set-piece scene that has Oliver finally punch him in the eye. Inevitably, in Sowerberry’s absence, this leads to his being both roundly condemned, and beaten, by all the three people left in the house. Bruised and bleeding, he is locked in the cellar and, with a clasp-knife ostentatiously soothing his black eye, Noah is sent to fetch Mr Bumble.
The ludicrous hyperbole of the accusations, and the equal absurdity of everyone’s supposed fear for their lives only adds to the dark drollery of the whole novel so far. Matters escalate in the way we would expect. The beadle and the gentleman in the white waistcoat sagely exchange opinions which, for the reader, only go to confirm how Oliver (in Dickens’s words in Chapter 1) is ‘badged and ticketed’—we would say labelled—‘despised by all, and pitied by none.’ Oliver can be destined only for the gallows, because of the accident of his birth. So back at the undertaker’s, after some darkly comic exchanges about how Oliver’s spirit has been aroused by too generous a diet, Sowerberry doesn’t dare to intervene on his behalf when he finally returns. Oliver is sent up to his room for the night, awaiting who knows what decision about his future. He’s clearly doomed…
…except he isn’t, of course. For some time now—did it start when he was chosen to ask for more?—Dickens has insisted on a certain spirit that Oliver possesses. He is often bowed, but never broken. Bumble didn’t break him, he spoke out when he was asked how he felt about working for the chimney-sweep, he told Sowerberry (when asked outright) that he didn’t much like the undertaking business…. With Noah, and the retribution that falls on his head, he remains defiant to the end. ‘He had listened to their taunts with a look of contempt; he had borne the lash without a cry: for he felt that pride swelling in his heart which would have kept down a shriek to the last, though they had roasted him alive.’ Strong stuff, even if now, alone and exhausted, he ‘wept such tears as … few so young may ever have cause to pour out.’
What is there to do now, but run away to London? Why not? Starting on his way, he gives a blessing to a boy he remembers from his childhood days in the old woman’s cottage—who seems about to fall victim to the fate Oliver has avoided. But seventy miles is a long way, and he has to scurry through towns and villages that advertise the penalty for his kind of tramping. Only two people offer him food, but it’s enough…. And then he meets the Dodger. He’s astonished by this boy, dressed like a gent, who treats him kindly and offers a bed at the house of a kind gentleman. Fagin’s trade would be obvious to anyone not sequestered in a workhouse for most of his life, but perhaps Oliver’s honest innocence is as bred in the bone as that spirit of his. Waking from sleep, he sees Fagin gloating over his watches, jewellery and fine handkerchiefs—and Fagin has to persuade him he is just an eccentric old miser. ‘Oliver thought the old gentleman must be a decided miser to live in such a dirty place, with so many watches.’
He is just as innocent when Dodger and Charley Bates arrive with a handkerchief and two pocketbooks, assuming they must be learning how to make them. The pickpocketing game he watches them play with Fagin is just that, a game, and he is happy to try it for himself. But he learns, all too soon, what they are really being taught to do. And, of course, he runs when he sees the elderly victim realising he has been robbed. This, of course, is Mr Brownlow, who does his best to get Oliver released when he is summarily brought before Fang—Fang!—the most obdurate magistrate in London. Luckily, there’s a witness not only to Oliver’s innocence, but to the guilt of two other boys.
Mr Brownlow, of course, doesn’t know Oliver, but there’s a certain something he recognises in him. What on earth can it be? Not simply his almost palpable innocence and honesty, despite his poverty, but— ‘“Bye the bye,” exclaimed the old gentleman, halting very abruptly, and staring up into the sky, “Bless my soul!—where have I seen something like that look before?”’ He trawls through his memory for anybody, living or dead, who Oliver reminds him of. But he comes up with no one, and as soon as Fang gives up trying to lock him away, Oliver is being whisked away in a coach, with Brownlow and the witness, the book-stall owner who saw everything.
those relatives, ‘perfectly inconsolable during the previous illness … [who] would be as happy among themselves as need be—quite cheerful and contented’ now that the dear one is departed. But Oliver’s popularity stirs Noah Claypole to fits of jealous envy, culminating in the set-piece scene that has Oliver finally punch him in the eye. Inevitably, in Sowerberry’s absence, this leads to his being both roundly condemned, and beaten, by all the three people left in the house. Bruised and bleeding, he is locked in the cellar and, with a clasp-knife ostentatiously soothing his black eye, Noah is sent to fetch Mr Bumble.
The ludicrous hyperbole of the accusations, and the equal absurdity of everyone’s supposed fear for their lives only adds to the dark drollery of the whole novel so far. Matters escalate in the way we would expect. The beadle and the gentleman in the white waistcoat sagely exchange opinions which, for the reader, only go to confirm how Oliver (in Dickens’s words in Chapter 1) is ‘badged and ticketed’—we would say labelled—‘despised by all, and pitied by none.’ Oliver can be destined only for the gallows, because of the accident of his birth. So back at the undertaker’s, after some darkly comic exchanges about how Oliver’s spirit has been aroused by too generous a diet, Sowerberry doesn’t dare to intervene on his behalf when he finally returns. Oliver is sent up to his room for the night, awaiting who knows what decision about his future. He’s clearly doomed…
…except he isn’t, of course. For some time now—did it start when he was chosen to ask for more?—Dickens has insisted on a certain spirit that Oliver possesses. He is often bowed, but never broken. Bumble didn’t break him, he spoke out when he was asked how he felt about working for the chimney-sweep, he told Sowerberry (when asked outright) that he didn’t much like the undertaking business…. With Noah, and the retribution that falls on his head, he remains defiant to the end. ‘He had listened to their taunts with a look of contempt; he had borne the lash without a cry: for he felt that pride swelling in his heart which would have kept down a shriek to the last, though they had roasted him alive.’ Strong stuff, even if now, alone and exhausted, he ‘wept such tears as … few so young may ever have cause to pour out.’
What is there to do now, but run away to London? Why not? Starting on his way, he gives a blessing to a boy he remembers from his childhood days in the old woman’s cottage—who seems about to fall victim to the fate Oliver has avoided. But seventy miles is a long way, and he has to scurry through towns and villages that advertise the penalty for his kind of tramping. Only two people offer him food, but it’s enough…. And then he meets the Dodger. He’s astonished by this boy, dressed like a gent, who treats him kindly and offers a bed at the house of a kind gentleman. Fagin’s trade would be obvious to anyone not sequestered in a workhouse for most of his life, but perhaps Oliver’s honest innocence is as bred in the bone as that spirit of his. Waking from sleep, he sees Fagin gloating over his watches, jewellery and fine handkerchiefs—and Fagin has to persuade him he is just an eccentric old miser. ‘Oliver thought the old gentleman must be a decided miser to live in such a dirty place, with so many watches.’
He is just as innocent when Dodger and Charley Bates arrive with a handkerchief and two pocketbooks, assuming they must be learning how to make them. The pickpocketing game he watches them play with Fagin is just that, a game, and he is happy to try it for himself. But he learns, all too soon, what they are really being taught to do. And, of course, he runs when he sees the elderly victim realising he has been robbed. This, of course, is Mr Brownlow, who does his best to get Oliver released when he is summarily brought before Fang—Fang!—the most obdurate magistrate in London. Luckily, there’s a witness not only to Oliver’s innocence, but to the guilt of two other boys.
Mr Brownlow, of course, doesn’t know Oliver, but there’s a certain something he recognises in him. What on earth can it be? Not simply his almost palpable innocence and honesty, despite his poverty, but— ‘“Bye the bye,” exclaimed the old gentleman, halting very abruptly, and staring up into the sky, “Bless my soul!—where have I seen something like that look before?”’ He trawls through his memory for anybody, living or dead, who Oliver reminds him of. But he comes up with no one, and as soon as Fang gives up trying to lock him away, Oliver is being whisked away in a coach, with Brownlow and the witness, the book-stall owner who saw everything.
Chapters 12-16
Any surprises? Not really, but we do get a couple of new characters and a new dog. Plus Mrs Bedwin, Mr Brownlow’s aging housekeeper, a capable nurse who contrasts with the well-meaning heap of uselessness who tried to tend Oliver’s mother in the workhouse. She looks after Oliver while he’s terribly ill, suffering from a high fever for maybe two or three weeks. He would have died if he hadn’t been rescued, but she brings him through. In her kindness and instinctive appreciation of Oliver’s good qualities, she’s like a clone of her master. And speaking of clones…
…we remember how Mr Brownlow saw a strong resemblance between Oliver and somebody else, but couldn’t place who it was. Well, it turns out he has a portrait of a woman on the wall, one that mesmerises Oliver when he sees it, and it’s a lightbulb moment for the old man. Or whatever lightbulb moments were called before there were any lightbulbs: ‘he pointed hastily to the picture over Oliver’s head, and then to the boy’s face. There was its living copy. The eyes, the head, the mouth; every feature was the same. The expression was, for the instant, so precisely alike, that the minutest line seemed copied with startling accuracy!’ What are the chances? And who is the woman? Mrs Bedwin, the kindly housekeeper, doesn’t know. And Mr Brownlow, her kindly master, isn’t saying. But we file away what is clearly a family resemblance for later.
Dickens showily interrupts himself at this point. We knew he would, because he told us in the old-style chapter subtitle: In which Oliver is taken better care of than he ever was before. And in which the narrative reverts to the merry old gentleman and his youthful friends. Oliver has just fainted from exhaustion, ‘which affords the narrative an opportunity of relieving the reader from suspense, in behalf of the two young pupils of…’ guess who. We’re whisked back in time to the hue and cry following the theft of the handkerchief, and to more than enough of Dickens’s droll commentary on the admirable behaviour of Charley and the Dodger in preserving their own skins. How we laughed…
…but when they tell him, Fagin isn’t laughing. What if Oliver blabs? Somebody needs to check out how he’s getting on—but all three of them, plus Bill Sikes, plus his dog, ‘happened, one and all, to entertain a violent and deeply-rooted antipathy to going near a police-office.’ Nancy, unknown in this district, is persuaded to go, and she shows how ten years of this kind of work have turned her into an acting diva. She becomes the desolate sister looking for her lost little brother—but the only good news she can bring back is that Oliver was taken away by an old gent, and hasn’t implicated any of them yet. But from now on, the watchword is vigilance. Or skulking about, as Fagin puts it, for any news of Oliver—and moving to a different hideout.
Back at Mr Brownlow’s… the next chapter’s subheading sums it up. Comprising further particulars of Oliver’s stay at Mr. Brownlow’s, with the remarkable prediction which one Mr. Grimwig uttered concerning him, when he went out on an errand. As soon as he’s well enough, Mr B buys Oliver a new suit of clothes, talks to him in his library—Oliver seems to have an instinctive respect for books that Bill Sikes definitely doesn’t share a few chapters later—and all’s well. We know it won’t last, but we don’t know how it will end. Question: how can Dickens plausibly get Oliver recaptured by Fagin’s gang? Answer: a series of unfortunate events. The curmudgeonly Grimwig is visiting when Mr Brownlow just misses the delivery boy from the bookstall. He has some books to return, and owes five pounds. Oliver, who couldn’t present himself as more willing and honest if he tried, offers to go. Grimwig tells Brownlow that Oliver isn’t to be trusted, which goads Brownlow into rashness. And, trusted with the money and books, Oliver gets lost on the way… to be accosted by Nancy, still in her desolate sister outfit after all these weeks and playing her part to perfection. Plausible? Not a bit of it, but that’s Dickens for you. And meanwhile, Brownlow and Grimwig stare at the watch, ticking away between them.
And it’s all up for Oliver. Fagin plays the merry old gentleman part at first, but Dickens wants to point up the moral chalk-and-cheesiness of his moral universe and Oliver’s. Oliver is revolted by the life he knows he will be forced to live, and does his best both to run away and call for help from the police. Oh dear. The gloves are off for Fagin, who is about to use a cudgel on Oliver after he’s caught and brought back. It’s Nancy who saves him, wrenching the club from Fagin, throwing it into the fire, and using all her strength to come between them.
Ah, Nancy. Bill Sikes intervenes, but Dickens has endowed her with the epic passion of a heroine. Bill can’t stop it, and we see the cracks in the relationship between him and Fagin as they both suffer Nancy’s scorn. She and Bill both insult Fagin, and when he calls for ‘civil words’—he’s being shown up before the boys—we see the root of her passion. ‘“Civil words, you villain! Yes, you deserve ’em from me. I thieved for you when I was a child not half as old as this!” pointing to Oliver. “I have been in the same trade, and in the same service, for twelve years since. Don’t you know it? Speak out! Don’t you know it?”’ There’s no answer to this, and Fagin lets it all pass. Soon, it’s ‘a relief to have the disturbance over; but neither he, nor Sikes, nor the dog, nor the boys, seemed to consider it in any other light than a common occurrence incidental to business.’ Maybe so, but at least Oliver has a friend now.
Chapters 17-22
In Chapter 17 Dickens addresses the reader with one of his most famous literary metaphors. ‘It is the custom on the stage, in all good murderous melodramas, to present the tragic and the comic scenes, in as regular alternation, as the layers of red and white in a side of streaky bacon.’ We know he’s right—it isn’t only in melodramas that suddenly we might be a thousand miles away—but he likes to remind us that he’s the one running this show. He compares the sudden shifts in scene—one of which is coming right up—to the shifts in our own fortunes: ‘the transitions in real life from well-spread boards to death-beds, and from mourning-weeds to holiday garments, are not a whit less startling.’
Of course, whenever authors make a plea for the realistic nature of the twists in their narratives, it means a particularly cute one is about to take place. What are the chances—a phrase I use too often when commenting on Dickens’s plots—that Mr Bumble, on his way to London with poor Dick and another parish-boy, would happen to see an advertisement in a newspaper left at the inn? But no matter, Dickens needs to present an elaborate pantomime of removing any shred of hope for Oliver’s eventual rescue by Mr Brownlow. Bumble sees the ad, goes to Mr Brownlow’s, and is rewarded for the unwelcome information he brings. Five guineas will be offered to anyone able ‘to throw any light upon his previous history, in which the advertiser is, for many reasons, warmly interested.’ Is Mr Brownlow fooled? Does Grimwig’s presence in the house influence him at all? When Mrs Bedwin refuses to believe any of Bumble’s stories, telling Grimwig only people who know about children should try to judge them, Brownlow is ‘feigning an anger he was far from feeling’ when he tells her never to speak of Oliver again. Dickens-watchers will take this as an indication that we haven’t heard the last of Mr Brownlow, for all his assumed vehemence.
Chapters 18-22 make up a single unit, concerning the use Fagin intends to make of his protegé. But first he intends to break any spirit of rebellion in him. Physical threats aren’t the way, he knows, so he goes for psychological methods. First, he makes Oliver understand the terrifying reality of his situation. He can’t possibly hope to report Fagin’s crimes, unless he wants the same fate as anyone who tries: ‘he related the dismal and affecting history of a young lad whom, in his philanthropy, he had succoured under parallel circumstances, but who, proving unworthy of his confidence and evincing a desire to communicate with the police, had unfortunately come to be hanged.’ Affecting that grotesquely friendly tone of his, he tells Oliver he would hate to have to turn king’s evidence against him in the same way. ‘Little Oliver’s blood ran cold, as he listened to the Jew’s words, and imperfectly comprehended the dark threats conveyed in them.’
Once Oliver is suitably terrified, Fagin isolates him for days on end (an interesting parallel with his treatment in the workhouse), with nothing and nobody for company. Then he is allowed to wander the near-derelict house, once grand but now a pitiful near-ruin, but he’s still alone. All he can find to occupy him is a book on the lives of great criminals, all of whom meet bad ends, and Fagin’s mind-games take their effect. When the Dodger is finally given leave to ask Oliver to help him get ready, ‘Oliver was but too glad to make himself useful; too happy to have some faces, however bad, to look upon; too desirous to conciliate those about him….’ Soon he is cleaning the Dodger’s boots, and playing those endless pickpocketing games.
Oliver’s education continues. Another confederate of Fagin’s arrives, Tom Chitling, the opposite of the brutal Sikes. Except he’s the same, another housebreaker, of use to Fagin because of his own particular skillset. He might be shabby—he’s just finished a six-week jail sentence—but he affects the appearance and manner of a gent. He’s useful, usually, for persuading servants in big houses to open locked doors for him—except, we later hear, he hasn’t had any success at a house Fagin has had his eye on in Chertsey, nearly 30 miles from London. This is why Bill Sikes needs Oliver. The next best thing after an unlocked door is a small window and a small, willing boy to go through it. That’s what Fagin thinks he now has in Oliver. ‘Having prepared his mind, by solitude and gloom, he was now slowly instilling into his soul the poison which he hoped would blacken it, and change its hue for ever.’ He’s been getting life lectures from Dodger and Charley from the moment he’s out of solitary—but will it work? We’ll have to wait a few more chapters to find out.
Starting with the next one, ‘In which a notable plan is discussed and determined on.’ Not that Oliver understands anything that’s going on, for all his quickness of mind. Mrs Bedwin had been impressed by how quick he had been to learn the rules and strategies of cribbage, but he’s hopeless at picking up the patois these people speak, much to Charley’s amusement. Perhaps it’s for the best that he has no idea why he is taken to Sikes’s hideout—or that Fagin knows Sikes will kill Oliver if he isn’t good enough. If between them they can’t get Oliver properly onside, Bill will simply get rid of him. We see Sikes’s viciousness, openly threatening Oliver and terrifying him with a pistol he carries. Nancy, meanwhile, is mortified that she trapped Oliver into this. All she can hope to do now is make sure he knows what the stakes are. She offers a helpful precis for his benefit by taunting Bill: ‘if you’re crossed by him in this job you have on hand, you’ll prevent his ever telling tales afterwards, by shooting him through the head….’ Thanks, Nancy, got it.
Chapters 21 and 22 are just what their titles tell us. The Expedition describes a journey, through a long day and into the night, and their arrival at a safe house. Tom Chitling is there, and a Jewish thief and fence we’ve met before. He’s the one with a comedy voice that makes him sound as though he has a permanent cold. How we laughed. But now it’s time for the last chapter in this section, The Burglary. Not that Oliver has any clue, of course. It’s as though Dickens wants to make it clear, however far-fetched it might be, that Oliver remains the constant innocent. None of Fagin’s threats and the other boys’ coaching sessions have changed him at all—so it comes as no surprise how he behaves when he finally realises what is happening. How does it go? ‘In the short time he had had to collect his senses, the boy had firmly resolved that, whether he died in the attempt or not, he would make one effort to dart upstairs from the hall, and alarm the family.’
Oh dear. As Oliver leaves his post, Sikes is maddened enough to shout out and wake the household. One of the two terrified men who appear upstairs fires a shot, Oliver staggers, Sikes fires back… and Oliver can’t possibly survive this one. Can he? ‘How the boy bleeds!’ mutters Sikes as he drags him back out through the window, and to Oliver, ‘the noises grew confused in the distance; and a cold deadly feeling crept over the boy’s heart; and he saw or heard no more.’
He’ll live, obviously, but I’m wondering how he’ll survive being identified by two witnesses as the accessory to a robbery….
We can read it for you wholesale 