Of the Spirit of Narratives Past in Oliver Twist

Abstract

Oliver Twist, literature’s most famous orphan, made his first appearance in this world swaddled in the sheets of Bentley’s Miscellany in February 1837. Since then, his history has been retold in all kinds of textual and audiovisual media. As a result, the image of the infant of unknown family origins, whose innocence leads him to triumph before ever-lurking social injustice, is closely linked to that of Charles Dickens. Oliver’s diegetic parentage is discovered in the final pages of the book. His literary and artistic ancestry, however, works as a whispered truth throughout the story, and it becomes instrumental in the shaping of peculiar characters and a narrative scaffolding built upon coincidences and revelations. This article explores some of the most relevant connections between Oliver Twist and preceding fictions from the eighteenth century. Specifically, it investigates the legacies of Henry Fielding and William Hogarth’s novelistic and graphic productions upon Dickens’s second novel, which determined not only the tragicomic representation of the lower classes—as scholarship has suggested—but also the very conception of the protagonist, the portrayal of secondary characters, and the laying out of the main plot.