Tag Archives: Charles Dickens

Oliver as Object: Character, Genre, and Agency in the Victorian Novel

Meegan Kennedy, Florida State University

When I teach Charles Dickens’s novel Oliver Twist, I notice that students are often frustrated by Oliver’s passivity in the face of so many wrongs. Oliver moves through many different settings in the novel—baby farm, workhouse, apprenticeships with a chimney sweep, undertaker, and crime syndicate, safe havens in the city and country. But with scant exceptions, he has little control over his movements and seldom speaks; others generally move him and speak for him. Even Oliver’s famous plea for more gruel only occurs after prodding from other boys.

George Cruikshank, *Oliver asking for more*. Etching on paper, 1838. Public domain.

Students come to Oliver Twist conditioned by the many novels, memoirs, and films they’ve encountered that present inspiring stories about protagonists struggling and ultimately triumphing over adversity. From Maya Angelou’s I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings to Marjane Satrapi’s Persepolis, from Harry Potter to Disney’s Mulan, young protagonists often challenge and inspire readers as they learn to define the self and push back against oppressive social constructs. But students are baffled by Oliver, who is anything but rebellious despite the outrageous institutional and personal abuses that children like him suffered under the 1834 New Poor Law. The law turned away from local control of public welfare, embracing instead Jeremy Bentham’s utilitarian philosophy, the new “numerical method” of statistics, and the quantification of public policy by a developing metropolitan class of administrators. It was widely decried for its harsh effects, especially on families and children. As the novel opens, Oliver is a generic “parish boy,” orphaned and indigent, without distinguishing features. Dickens shows how quickly he was “badged and ticketed” into this bureaucratic system. He becomes less than human, more an object than a person.

The New Poor Law. Poster, 1837. Credit: National Archives.

Some scholars have accounted for Oliver’s lack of personal growth and action by arguing that Dickens was, in 1837, still learning as a novelist. They find psychological complexity and development more often in his later novels, which more clearly fulfill the genre of the Bildungsroman.

But Dickens was playing with quite different genres for Oliver Twist. The novel weaves together elements of allegory, parody, statistical report, it-narrative, captivity narrative, Newgate novel, and finally romance. Many of these genres not only accommodate but demand a certain flatness of character. The genres Dickens explores in Oliver Twist support his argument that the New Poor Law treats thinking, feeling individual people as units exchangeable at will. The flatness of Oliver’s character dramatizes this critique. Where a novel of development would emphasize individual struggle, Oliver Twist instead turns its focus on systemic oppression.

Dickens especially uses the statistical report and it-narrative to demonstrate the human cost of the New Poor Law, and to show how utilitarianism and the new law constrain the richness of human experience. Dickens’s serialization of Oliver Twist was interrupted by the parodic statistical reports he published from “the Mudfog Association for the Advancement of Everything,” which mock the inadequacy of statistical thinking.[i] Even more intriguing, Dickens draws upon it-narrative (also known as object-narrative or novel of circulation) as another model for Oliver Twist. It-narratives are one of many older forms that Dickens repurposed in crafting his novels. These picaresque tales are told from the perspective of an object—a guinea, a pincushion, a shoe, or other non-human object, or an animal or other living creature—that is circulated throughout diverse social settings, from owner to owner, in adventures that depict the object’s inability to direct its destiny as it rotates through a wide range of various roles and contexts.

[i] Charles Dickens, “Full Report of the First Meeting of the Mudfog Association for the Advancement of Everything.” Bentley’s Miscellany, vol. 2, October 1837, pp. 397-413.

A description of the miseries of a garreteer poet: taken from *The History of Pompey the Little; or, The Life and Adventures of a Lap-Dog*, by Francis Coventry (1751). By John June, printmaker. Lewis Walpole Library Digital Collection, Public Domain. https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=22528183

The typical it-narrative exposes the affective damages of circulating so briskly and powerlessly through a capitalistic, bureaucratic society. In Oliver Twist, the it-narrative and its object-protagonist apply moral pressure to the category of the statistical unit. Using this frame, Dickens can expose, dramatize, and condemn the utilitarian system that dissolves human identities and connections, and solidifies financial ones—for the role of an it-narrative is to show how the protagonist is not just an unthinking object. Indeed, Oliver eventually comes into focus as what Bill Brown calls a thing—an object that shows up the systems within which we act, by resisting our unthinking use.[i] Oliver’s very inertness allows him to resist those who seek to control or use him. He’s frustratingly inept, with a lot of crying and fainting, and his frail body keeps failing when faced with the rigors of chimney sweeping or crime.

Over time, Oliver becomes, in John Plotz’s terms, a “sentimental object”: he personifies a modern tension between what is on the one hand, common, commodified, indistinguishable, and exchangeable (like a guinea or lump of coal) and on the other hand, distinctive and sentimentalized.[ii] Because Oliver doesn’t quite function within a utilitarian narrative, his friends manage to pull him into a new narrative life where he becomes a proper subject and a protagonist. He finally achieves recognition as a particular young gentleman at the end of the novel—although even then he enters into this romantic role largely due to his inherited identity and the efforts of his friends Nancy, Rose, and Mr. Brownlow.

Overall, Dickens’s experiments with genre in Oliver Twist enable the work of the novel: to dramatize systemic oppression and to lift Oliver out of the brutal jurisdiction of the New Poor Law and propel him instead toward a more humane (though unlikely) horizon. When students learn about how genre relates to character and plot in Oliver Twist, they can more clearly see not just the novel’s social critique but also, more generally, how the stories we tell shape our work in the world.

[i] Bill Brown, “Thing Theory,” Critical Inquiry, vol. 28, no. 1, 2001, pp. 1-22.

[ii] John Plotz, Portable Property (Princeton: Princeton UP, 2008), p. 28.

Horse-racing Fraud, Then and Now

Leave a reply

by Nancy Henry

This past March, twenty-seven people involved in U.S. horse racing, including trainers and veterinarians, were federally indicted for doping racehorses with banned substances. A New York Times article by Benjamin Weiser and Joe Drape reported: “To avoid detection of their scheme, the indictment said, the defendants routinely defrauded and misled federal and state regulators ‘and the betting public.’”

Three bookmakers are watching a horserace. Lithograph by Tom Merry, 7 September 1889. Credit: Wellcome Collection. Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0)

This ongoing case is part of a long, troubling history of horse-racing fraud. In Victorian Britain, attempts to cheat sometimes erupted into full-blown scandals. For example, the 1844 Epsom Derby was compromised by a series of deceits that included entering a four-year old as a three-year old. There are many ways to “fix” a race, but drugging or injuring the horse is particularly shocking because it involves a betrayal of trust, as well as physical harm. Fiction is uniquely able to create sympathy for the horse, and in some cases, imagine his thoughts. In Ouida’s Under Two Flags (1867), for example, the steeplechaser Forest King has his bit painted with poison, and we see the ensuing delirium through his eyes.

In Victorian fiction generally and racing fiction in particular, there is tension between the horse as a living, feeling creature and the horse as source of monetary value. Jane Smiley observes that in the eighteenth century, “horseracing, fiction, and capitalism came to form a mutually nurturing threesome” (44). In the nineteenth-century racing plots are also financial plots; horses are characters and commodities. Forest King’s loss results in financial ruin for his owner Bertie Cecil, and it redirects the novel’s plot. In Anthony Trollope’s The Duke’s Children (1880), Lord Silverbridge’s horse Prime Minister has a nail driven into his hoof on the morning of his race, causing Silverbridge to lose the tremendous sums he had bet on the horse.

In Charles Dickens’s The Old Curiosity Shop (1840-41), Little Nell attends the races, reflecting, “how strange it was that horses who were such fine honest creatures should seem to make vagabonds of all the men they drew about them” (157). Later novelists like George Moore in Esther Waters (1894) agreed. More recently, The Sport of Kings (2016) by C.E. Morgan explores the economic cultures of racing and breeding horses in Kentucky.

While many tracks closed temporarily, horse racing is one of the few sports that remained available for live viewing (and betting) in the US throughout the Covid-19 pandemic shut downs. For many gamblers, racing is entirely removed from the horses, who are represented by statistics in the racing form and numbers on a screen. Outrage over doping is apt to be more about financial loss than animal cruelty. Victorian literature is a good place to start when considering how horse racing, literary criticism and Animal Studies might intersect in order to bring attention to the harm done to horses when humans put money above the integrity of the sport and the safety of the horses.

This post forms part of a special issue on “Fraud and Forgery in Victorian Culture.” To read more see Nancy Henry, “Horse-Racing Fraud in Victorian Fiction.” Victorian Review, vol. 45, no. 2, Fall 2019, pp. 235-251.

Works Cited

Dickens, Charles. The Old Curiosity Shop. Ed. Elizabeth M. Brennan. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2008.

Smiley, Jane. “The Fiction of Horseracing.” Cambridge Companion to Horseracing, edited by Rebecca Cassidy. Cambridge UP, 2013, pp. 44–56.

Interview with Martha Stoddard Holmes at VSAWC 2015

At the 2015 VSAWC conference, Victorian Bodies, Dr. Martha Stoddard Holmes gave the inaugural McMaster Lecture, “Liminal Children: Making Disability and Childhood in Nineteenth-Century Fiction,” which examined the intersecting developments of disability and childhood as cultural constructs. Victorian Review had the opportunity to talk to Dr. Stoddard Holmes, who wrote Fictions of Affliction, the seminal book on disability in Victorian literature, about her research and what led her to it. She told us that her interest in disability was instigated by Victorian studies, just when the field of disability studies was emerging in the humanities in the 1990s.

In the following video clip, Dr. Stoddard Holmes discusses the need for critically studying disability’s cultural construction, and she relates how examining Wilkie Collins and Charles Dickens novels led her to become aware of that need. Additionally, she explains how the Victorian era was a crucial time in the development of disability as an object of discourse and social identity.

[youtube]https://youtu.be/QAzGqpENryM[/youtube]

In our discussion with her, Dr. Stoddard Holmes also informed us how activism plays an important role in the field of disability studies, particularly since the study of disability in the humanities came out of disability rights movement that began in the 1970s. In the video below, Dr. Stoddard Holmes describes some of the social restrictions faced by an important Victorian activist for the blind, Elizabeth Margaretta Maria Gilbert—restrictions that appeared even after her death through the biography written by her good friend and fellow women’s activist, Frances Martin.

[youtube]https://youtu.be/5bDwZ_Daw1s[/youtube]

Dr. Stoddard Holmes also noted that in her research experience, she has often found that the Victorians engaged in issues regarding disability that we are still engaging with in the twenty-first century, sometimes in “less imaginative ways than in the nineteenth century.”

Floating Academy: Stuttering in Victorian Studies

By Daniel Martin

I’ve been working on a book project about Victorian representations and narratives of speech dysfluency for a number of years now, and I’m starting to see a dim shape for the entire project. I think it now has an introduction and a skeleton of chapters, but who knows if I’ll radically blow things up and completely reorganize the thing. As of today, I’m staring, with excitement, at what I hope will be a summer of relatively uninterrupted writing, so I thought I would give our readers a glimpse at some extraneous material from my introduction and early chapters. Basically, some of this material is in the book, some of it isn’t, and some of it is in the book but written in different ways. In a sense, the following paragraphs attempt to outline what I see as some fundamental problems in the ways in which Victorian studies and cultural studies appropriate or misuse metaphors of stuttering and stammering, or dysfluency in general. This is my contribution to thinking about speech dysfluency both within the paradigm of disability studies and more broadly in current critical practices in Victorian studies. Continue reading →

Julianne Smith: Adaptations and Unpublished Manuscripts

By Sabrina Schoch and Reba Ouimet

At last year’s Victorian Studies Association of Western Canada conference, we were fortunate enough to have the opportunity for a discussion with Dr. Julianne Smith, a speaker at the conference and the recipient of the 2004 Innovative Teaching Award, Center for Teaching & Learning, from Pepperdine University. Dr. Smith sat down and talked with us about lost manuscripts, different adaptations of Charles Dickens’s Bleak House, and her address at the conference. We were interested in discovering how she describes Victorian studies to undergraduate students and in finding out what she thinks is the best way to introduce these studies to students. Dr. Smith explained her teaching philosophy in regards to Victorian literature: “I think the best way to introduce Victorian studies to undergraduates is to talk about the things that you’re excited about yourself, and so I love the context and history of the period…. I talk about the weird and wonderful things the Victorians did, and then with those in mind, [I] begin to look at the text…. I rely on my own interests and ability to convey interest.”

In addition to inquiring about Dr. Smith’s teaching methods, we also asked about her address at the VSAWC conference. Dr. Smith’s current research concerns the unpublished manuscripts of plays, and she acknowledged that “no one has done much analysis on [these plays nor has anyone taken] those plays into the scholarly conversation to look at how they add to or shape the reception of Bleak House itself as a novel.”

We noted that “Jane Eyre changed the way the story [of Bleak House] is being told” and asked whether the Bleak House adaptations have had the same effect. Dr. Smith responded, “Bleak House changes, and because Bleak House is a novel that doesn’t identify a central character in its title, even the first reviewers ask[ed] questions and tried to figure out whose story [it is], and the theatrical adaptations tend to identify a central character and tell that story.”

Not only does the original story lack a central character but the resulting adaptations, the changes in perspectives, and the competing characters also reveal what and who interested the Victorians most. Nobody particularly cares about Esther, the “sometimes” protagonist; Joe and Lady Dedlocke compete for the starring role. Much like today’s readers, the Victorians were most interested in the tragic characters and melodrama.

We then touched briefly on the BBC adaptation of Bleak House, and Dr. Smith stated that the BBC version “compares shifting class focus on how we receive Bleak House and interpret it, versus how the Victorians did.”

Finally, we asked Dr. Smith if she was aware of any exciting new directions in which Victorian studies could go. “Well for me,” she said, “when I started grad school in the mid ’90s, all of the technology and ways of searching online publications, or even searching the British library catalogue online, was … new and exciting. I didn’t realize the implications of this at the time, and things have really gotten better from there…. Access to those texts, [which] have been so obscure and remote for most scholars, has changed everything. Expectations are higher for students now.”

Julianne Smith

Dr. Smith is an associate professor of English at Pepperdine University in Malibu, California. She holds a PhD from Texas Christan University, and both a master and bachelor of arts from Abilene Christian University. Her academic interests include gender, religion, Victorian women writers, and Victorian theatre. She is currently working on “Victorian Drama in the 1850s and the Transformation of Literary Consciousness,“ to be published shortly in Victorian Transformations.