Charles dickens and oliver twist

Artistic features of the novel
Oliver Twist, as well as novels like Nicholas Nickleby (1838-1839) and Martin Chasseluit (1843-/1844), best proved how outdated the plot scheme, which Dickens still continued to hold on to. This plot scheme, it is true, allowed for the ­description of real life, but real life existed in it only as a significant background (cf. " Pickwick Club"), and Dickens in his realistic ­novels had already outgrown such a conception of reality.
For Dickens, real life was no longer a "background". It gradually became the main content of his works. Therefore, it had to come into ­inevitable collision with the plot scheme of the traditional bourgeois novel-biography.
Therefore, the content of early Dickensian novels ­(where no adequate expression has yet been found for it) has a dual character.
In the realistic social novels of Dickens of the first ­period, despite their broad content, there is one protagonist in the center. Usually these novels are called by the name of their protagonist: "Oliver Twist", "Nicholas Nickleby ", "Martin Chasseluit ". Adventures ­, "adventures" ( adventures ) of the hero, on the model of the novels of the 18th century (meaning biographies ­of the type "Tom Jones"), create the necessary prerequisite for depicting the world around us in that diversity and at the same time in that random variegation in which contemporary reality appeared to the writers of this comparatively early period in the development of realism. These novels plotly follow the experience of an individual and, as it were, reproduce the randomness and natural limitations of this experience. Hence the inevitable incompleteness ­of such an image.
And indeed, not only in the novels of the 18th century, but also in the early novels of Dickens of the late 30s and early 40s, we observe the foreground of this or that episode in the biography of the hero, which can simultaneously serve as material and means for depicting some or a typical phenomenon of social ­life. So in "Oliver Twist" a little boy finds himself in a den of thieves - and before us is the life of scum, outcasts and fallen ones ("Oliver Twist").⁸
Whatever the author portrays, no matter what unexpected and remote corner of reality he throws his hero into, he always uses these excursions into one or another area of life to draw a broad social picture that was absent from the writers of the 18th century. This is the main feature of early Dickensian realism - the use of any seemingly random ­episode in the hero's biography to create a realistic picture of society.
But at the same time, the question arises: how comprehensive is the picture that the writer unfolds before us in this way? To ­what extent all these separate phenomena, so important in themselves - since it is they who often determine the color, character and main content of this or that Dickens novel - are equivalent from a social point of view, are they equally characteristic, is their organic connection with each other shown? in a capitalist society? This question must be answered in the negative. Of course, all these phenomena are unequal.
The early works of Dickens, his realistic novels, thus give us an extremely rich, lively, diverse picture of reality, but they paint this reality not as a single whole, ­governed by uniform laws (it is precisely this understanding of modernity that Dickens will later have), but empirically, as a sum of individual examples. During this ­period, Dickens interprets contemporary capitalist reality not as a single evil, but as a sum of various evils, which should be fought one by one. This is what he does in his novels. He confronts his hero, in the course of his personal biography, with one of these primary evils and takes up arms against this evil with all possible means of cruel satire and withering humor. Now the barbaric methods of raising children, now the hypocrisy and vulgarity of the middle philistine classes of English society, now the corruption of parliamentary figures - all this in turn causes an angry protest or ridicule of the writer.
As a result of summing up these various aspects, do we get any general impression ­regarding the nature of the reality depicted by the author? Undoubtedly, it is created. We understand that this is a world of venality, corruption, and crafty calculation. But does the author set a conscious goal to show the internal functional connection of all these phenomena? So far, this is not the case, and it is precisely here that the difference between the two periods of Dickens's realistic work lies: while in the first period, which has just been discussed, Dickens is still largely an empiricist in this respect, “in his further artistic development he will more and more to subordinate his work to the search for generalizations, drawing closer in this respect to Balzac.