Urban Spaces in Oliver Twist

¶ … Urban Spaces in Oliver Twist

The plot of Oliver Twist might be boiled down to an essential struggle between men and their environments. Admittedly, human antagonists -- the living, breathing kind -- exist, and even dominate, the work, however they might be understood as pieces of setting at times, rather than free-agents. if, to follow the critic Harold Bloom, we can agree that Dickens's is "a world of caricatures and grotesques," we find that many of the characters, being only partially rounded themselves, exist as facets of a larger, hidden character; they are aspects of a fully-conceived, wholly-rounded meta-character, a character who, in Oliver Twist, might be taken to be the setting itself. and, though the reader travels through many settings in these pages, each a meta-character unto itself, perhaps the most important to Oliver Twist -- certainly the most important to its cautionary aims -- are the urban settings. Oliver is bustled through a progression of urban settings from the novel's onset, a scaling crescendo beginning in Mrs. Mann's juvenile workhouse and climaxing on the "labyrinthine" streets of London. The moral corruption of these urban settings is a foil to Oliver's incorruptible nature; the prisons -- which are the workhouse, poverty, Fagin's gang, and even Middlesex itself -- attempt to trap and crush Oliver's better nature, leading him, against this nature, inexorably towards the true prison of Newgate and the ultimately the gallows outside. Largely, it may be said that Oliver Twist is the story of one boy's triumph over the streets he was raised on.

It is important then -- if we define setting as a character -- to ascertain the qualities particular to that character. First, we must delineate, for in Oliver Twist, two settings are presented as meta-characters, the one certainly more vividly than the other; the interactions and juxtapositions of these two settings form the basis for the greater part of the story's tension. The first setting is the urban setting, the most well-used in the plot, and the second is the country setting, which is a foil to the urban and presented mainly through the characters at the Maylie estate and by Oliver himself. Most broadly it can be said that the urban setting is the novel's antagonist and the country setting its protagonist.

The chief characteristic of the urban setting is its corruption. Its chief personifications are all corrupt; from the Bumbles and Manns who are corrupt in charity, to Fagin and Sikes who are corrupt in morality, to the live board and the magistrate of the court who are corrupt in justice.

To examine Mrs. Corney, she is quintessential. Her misappropriation of the parish funds -- which should be enough to feed the children well -- is so corrupt, one might almost laugh: she steals from orphans!

…she knew what was good for children… So, she appropriated the greater part of the weekly stipend to her own use, and consigned the rising parochial generation to even a shorter allowance than was originally provided for them.

In the Dickensian style, she is so much a caricature of bureaucratic corruption, that she cannot be considered fully round. Even her later marriage to Mr. Bumble is a union of two like caricatures, a marriage of convenience attended by the bureaucratic expedience and corruption innate to these two. Mrs. Corney's setting -- as Mr. Bumble's -- is the corrupt workhouse system, described often as a farm where the poor are kept and raised as cattle, albeit on scarcer provisions. She is an extension of the setting in that she mirrors in personality and function, the labyrinthine illogic of the Poor Laws and houses. This labyrinthine quality -- a complex of by-ways and laws -- is a recurring motif throughout the novel.

Sikes's corruption is also too obvious. He is a career criminal; he is cruel and violent; and by the story's end he is a murderer. The piece of setting particular to him is his apartment, attended by all the griminess and half-light one might expect; but a more interesting note in regards to Sikes and setting, is that his function is commonly to travel beyond his setting, and invade the opposing country setting. First, of course, he invades Mr. Brownlow's affluent neighborhood and stumbles across Oliver, later he leads the failed invasion of the Maylie estate. In fact, Sikes's occupation is that of an invader, he is a "robber;" and it can be well said that he invades not just setting but psyche as well, acting as an agent of the urban setting behind enemy lines. While many of the other characters are content to live in their appropriate settings, Sikes ? -- whose mark is violence -- lives by crossing the boundary and bringing the corruption of the urban setting into the goodness of the country. At the story's end, he is executed, not by the long arm of justice, but by a backlash of psyche manifestly visible in his last moments, but also permeating the whole of London, which turns out to mob and attend his capture.

Fagin can be taken as the chief personality of this constellation of corrupted personalities, and his very business is to corrupt the youth; an occupation which, isolated, should morally shock the reader. Fagin is depicted, frequently, as a devil, perhaps the devil himself. He is a Jew -- and the anti-Semitic currents of the time associated Jews with the devil -- his hair is bright red, he is shown brandishing a tri-pronged fork; he is a corruptor, a beguiler, and when Oliver first escapes the clutches of the urban setting, by running away from the Sowerberrys', the urban setting responds by escalation. The bureaucratic devils of the parish -- reminiscent of C.S. Lewis's Screwtape, more hateful than truly evil -- have proved ineffective, and a greater devil -- the devil, in fact -- is sent in to handle this particular case. Fagin's settings are his apartments, another place described as labyrinthine, with the entrance in an alley, and the visitors often going by labyrinthine paths to evade police on their way there.

The chief action of the urban setting, by which the story's main tension is created, is to attempt to corrupt Oliver and trick his better nature into an end at the gallows. The agents of the urban setting attempt to accomplish the deed by trapping Oliver in their webs, becoming jailors as effective as any to be found at Newgate, and forcing him to participate in their illegal activities. Oliver's response is always in accordance with his quintessentially good nature, although it is shown that the courts and bureaucracy of the system do not distinguish between "guilty" and "innocent" criminals, nor even between "good" and "bad" paupers. Oliver has been branded from birth with the preconception which that society had of the poor, and it is this preconception of itself which the urban setting works with to attempt to brand Oliver one of its own. Were it successful, only one fate can be possible, as is repeatedly shown, and that the gallows.

Another important characteristic of the urban setting, with which Dickens treats extensively, is its corrupted, governmental, earthly justice. The characterizing elements of this justice are the Poor Laws of 1834, which required that

(a) no able bodied person was to receive money or other help from the Poor Law authorities except in a workhouse;

(b) conditions in a workhouse were to be made very harsh to discourage people from wanting to receive help.

A Catch 22 as perfectly closed as was ever penned by the United States military. Beyond the Poor Laws, Dickens repeatedly takes us into the court rooms of Victorian England, before the wigged magistrates and whispering jurors and sets us amidst the "firmament, all bright with gleaming eyes." The two characteristics of the courtroom justice of the day are that it is arbitrary and cruel. The veracity of a witness is based on his social status, the needs of evidence are few and, in the lack thereof, summary conviction recommended. Punishments are harsh, ranging from six weeks at hard labor when an un-evidenced conviction is rendered, and, for those convicted under evidence, transportation for life or death at the gallows; no middle-ground between the extremes exists. The workings of justice -- at least in the case of Oliver's pick-pocketing trial -- are shown to be mechanical, bureaucratic; gears ground by bored functionaries who interest themselves not and care even less. Justice, less of a label, is an epithet for these proceedings.

It is interesting to remark on the Artful Dodger's performance during his own trial. Being an intelligent, if corrupt, young man, the Dodger understands the preconceptions and influences at work in the courtroom. Because both he and the court are members -- at different caste levels -- of the same urban setting, he understands its corruption; he and the judge are the same, cut from the same mold! So he makes no issue of seeking for justice in that courtroom -- he knows he won't find it there just as he knows he won't find it in himself -- and approaching the situation with an air of bravado, emerges with greater dignity than any character who turns defendant throughout the story.

If the villain of Oliver Twist is the meta-character of urban setting, then the protagonist must be the meta-character of country setting, of which Oliver is as much a chief as Fagin is of the urban setting. The principle characteristic of the country setting is its goodness, in direct opposition to the corruption of the urban setting. The incorruptible goodness, which Oliver bears, is that which permits him to remain unchanged and moral despite his deep immersion in the urban setting.

In many ways Oliver Twist might be read as a refutation of Dickens's contemporary, Leo Tolstoy, who asserted that destiny is the product of historical forces driving each from his birthing station to an unavoidable end. Oliver Twist, rather, presumes that despite the terrible circumstances in which Oliver is reared, goodness prevails in his character and actions. So can we read the character of Nancy, who though corrupted by her long association with the urban setting, retains enough vestiges of her own inherent goodness to die while saving Oliver. and, we have the character of Monks, Oliver's half-brother, who, though reared in the most affluent and advantageous of circumstances, finds his way to villainy in despite. Indeed, perhaps because they are related by blood, Monks has in common with Oliver a certain tenacity of character, in that, despite the intervention of Brownlow and others, he persists -- even into the epilogue -- in a life of crime; just as Oliver, despite every temptation of circumstance, persists in a life of goodness.

The justice of the country setting is also set in opposition to that of the urban setting, and might be described as spiritual justice. This justice is best illustrated by the incidents of chapters 30 and 31, wherein the residents of the Maylie estate endeavor to alibi against officers of the law Oliver's part in the attempted break in. Mrs. Maylie herself exclaims, "This poor child can never have been the pupil of robbers," despite all empirical evidence to the contrary. What we see is a tendency to judge with the eyes of the heart, and a strong devotion to the maxim "Mercy is better than justice." Whereas governmental justice is mechanical, spiritual justice is seen to be fluid and involves even a few white lies on the parts of Giles and Brittles.

The climax of spiritual justice found in the book comes in the circumstances surrounding Sikes's accidental death. Immediately after Nancy's murder, we see Sikes tormented not by pursuers but by his own conscience. A reader might even suppose a fault of characterization in the extreme guilt which the hitherto psychopathic Sikes suddenly begins to display. Sikes is tortured by his own mind, and he flees it, but finds no recourse; governmental justice he has, so far, escaped, but it is spiritual justice which plagues him and, ultimately hangs him. "The eyes again!" he screeches and falls, loop 'round his neck, to his death and we know that it was no mere accident. No, a hand has reached from the other world -- the world which whispered in Mrs. Maylie's heart about Oliver's innocence -- and that hand has chosen its moment and hung Sikes from a pole as surely as any government could do it. In this situation, even the crowd -- the people of London who are one with the bridges burgeoning under their weight, with the muddy banks and the oily Thames and the labyrinthine streets -- even the setting has risen up and cried out for justice which, by the hand of god, is delivered. Sikes has invaded and defiled their goodness too long, and now stepped beyond the bound where he can be tolerated. The country goodness which is in the people of London -- though mixed with the urban bloodlust -- rises up and cries out against him.

So the plot tension essentially occurs between the goodness of the country setting, personified in Oliver, and the desire of the urban setting, personified in Fagin, to corrupt that goodness. Dickens's intent, as per his 1841 foreword, is to present a fable of sorts, a cautionary tale, wherein the romances are stripped back from poverty and crime and the reader may glimpse truly what it is to be a Robin Hood. Dickens even alludes to kinship with Cervantes and perhaps the comparison is appropriate because the outlaws of that author's canon are of precisely the type which were in vogue in Victorian England. So, at the center of this outlaw story is not the wild freedom of Sherwood Forrest, as Robin Hood enjoyed, but a gray, confining progression of prisons in which Oliver is born and raised.

The story begins with prisons for the poor, albeit of a sociably acceptable kind. In Mrs. Mann's juvenile farm we find Oliver celebrating his ninth birthday while "locked up" in a "coal cellar" for "presuming to be hungry." Very well, then. The reader is acquainted with Dickens's ironic style and gains a sense that justice -- and its misappropriations -- will be one element of the meta-characters of setting present in the novel. Oliver's incarceration continues in the larger parish workhouse, in fact, Dickens makes it visceral when, after famously asking for more gruel, Oliver is locked up again "in a dark and solitary room." His crime, as in the farm, was that of hunger and the willingness to express it, and here we must see Dickens taking aim at His Majesty's Poor Law of 1834. The poor of Dickens's time were, like Oliver, imprisoned for their hunger, and starved in the prisons thereafter.

Oliver's imprisonment continues in Mr. Sowerberry's workshop, where, despite ostensibly increased freedom, the image of prison is reinforced by the confined quarters, by the imposing "death-like" coffins, by the unfinished wood-boards "looking in the dim light, like high-shouldered ghosts with their hands in their breeches-pockets," and by the jailors themselves: the Sowerberrys and Claypole, who have replaced Mrs. Mann and Mr. Bumble, are facets of the meta-character, pieces of scenery to an extent. Ironically, Oliver wishes then, as he crept into his narrow bed, that that were his coffin, and that he could be lain in a calm and lasting sleep in the churchyard ground, with the tall grass waving gently above his head, and the sound of the old deep bell to soothe him in his sleep.

The image of the coffin as a prison -- the ultimate and final prison found after a trip to the gallows -- is inverted somewhat by association with freedom from the anxiety of Oliver's everyday life, and also by association with the churchyard, the grass and open, country spaces.

By which we enter the liberating episode of his escape from Sowerberry's workshop. This is only the second truly willful act perpetrated by Oliver yet -- the first being the famous request for more -- and it is an expression of Oliver's true, better, "country" nature against the oppression of the urban setting. Where does Oliver escape to but to the country, and, though he finds hardship on the road to London, we can take that he has perpetrated a willful act of self-improvement by this enterprise, he has done all that is capable in a nine-year-old boy, to re-align his nature with his circumstances. For Oliver Twist, as many critics would have it, is a novel of identities, of the disparity, in one respect, between who Oliver is within and what he might appear to be without. Oliver endeavors to align the two, while the antagonists of the urban setting devise to so far disjunction Oliver from his nature that his fate would be as their own.

So Oliver escapes, and yet the devil is persistent; unwilling to lose Oliver at such a childish stroke, he finds the orphan again before long. The denouement of Oliver's adventure on the road to London is that he is picked up by the Artful Dodger, taken in by Fagin and his gang, and graduated into a new and more secure prison, the streets of Middlesex. Thus far Oliver's story has been a graduation from prison to prison; from the childhood coal-cellar, where a mean governess might send an unruly child, to the "dark solitary room" where he is sentenced by a board, to Sowerberry's workshop where seven years minimum seems to be the term and now into Fagin's labyrinthine rooms, set amidst the labyrinthine streets and having at their center only one logical conclusion.

The labyrinth is one of the oldest symbols of mythology, explains Joseph Campbell, "denoting the plunge and dissolution of consciousness in the darkness of non-being," or, more colloquially, death. The classical labyrinth was that of King Minos, which was itself a prison both to its monster and to the unfortunates sacrificed therein. Those unfortunates, being trapped by circumstance, progressed deeper and deeper into the complex, finding no escape, and came at last to death at the center; the Minotaur, then, is a classical counterpart of the gallows in Trafalgar Square.

The streets of London are, to Oliver, a labyrinth. He is imprisoned within them and as long as the jailors -- who are Fagin and his gang -- remain at large, he is not safe. The labyrinth of the streets oppresses Oliver's better nature, frustrating his desire to return promptly and faithfully to Mr. Brownlow with the money and books, seducing his judgment with charismatic pickpockets, and leading -- always leading -- inexorably deeper and deeper to the center. At that center -- as in the labyrinth of King Minos -- lies only death; only two more correctional graduations remain possible for Oliver -- he has, at this stage, nearly completed his urban education -- the first graduation remaining is into a true prison, Newgate, and from there to the gallows themselves.

A noteworthy incident, occurring within the confines of the labyrinth, is Oliver's first adventure with Mr. Brownlow. It is interesting to note that this episode is set off from the labyrinth, somewhat parenthetically, by certain breaks with reality occurring at its beginning and end. At the beginning, Oliver is taken with an inexplicable fever -- a disease of the mind, often producing delusions, as it was seen in Dickens's time -- and he awakes to find himself in an unexpected Idyll. Nor would the situation have been possible had not Fagin's boys taken Oliver to a more affluent neighborhood, thereby juxtaposing the opposing meta-characters of the story. The end of the episode is marked by the mists and confusion which surround Oliver's kidnapping as he is hurried from the Idyll back deep into the labyrinth. Both of these cognitive lapses serve to bridge the worlds of the country and the urban, providing for dialogue between. This direct congress between the two meta-characters, though scarcely presented, in this and all other episodes of the story, results in conflict and if peace is to be found in the ensuing tension it is always only because of the willingness of the country meta-character to be good. The nature of the urban meta-character -- with its trapping labyrinths, absurd laws, and corrupting justices -- is always to triumph and never to reconcile.

Another bridge figures heavily into the narrative -- and this a most famous one: London Bridge, which spans the Thames from the ghettos of Middlesex to the more genteel byways of Surrey. Dickens lays on the metaphor of a bridge between two worlds rather heavily, in his grand style, as the "heavy bell of St. Paul's" tolls: