Reflections
on beginning Oliver Twist
with
my High School Seniors
March
28, 2016
With
essentially one month to go before my seniors take their exams and graduate, I
had a choice to make. I could read a
high-interest contemporary novel – Nick Hornby’s High Fidelity perhaps, or Alan Lightman’s mind-bending Einstein’s Dreams. I’ve had success with both of these books. Former students have enjoyed them. My other options included a creative writing
unit or some short stories or maybe some World War one poetry. Nothing says “spring” like the trenches! Seniors would consider all of these choices reasonable. It’s
nice Mr. Pawlyk cares enough to still assign things, they’d think. These would be sane springtime schoolwork options
for seniors accepted into college and waiting for their lives to really
start. But in our British Literature
course, a vast majority of my seniors have never read Dickens.
‘God
forbid,’ you might say. Or ‘heaven
forfend!’ Or ‘bollocks!’ Yes he’s my favorite writer but you
may think, ‘well sure, you’re an English teacher.’ You might further believe that I am
contractually obligated to like books in which a painting is described for two
pages, characters gaze endlessly out of windows, and the funny parts are never
laughed at by anyone outside of a tweed sport-coat. Strangely, most English teachers I know don’t
love Dickens. My 18 years in the
classroom have taught me that Beowulf,
Chaucer, and Shakespeare are ALL easier sells to the modern high school
student. Like epic poetry and Hamlet, Dickens is work but he seems to
be the sort of work that makes students grimace in a uniquely Dickensian and
theatrical way. I could describe their
grimaces for, like, two pages.
Early
in my career, I taught Hard Times,
arguably the most commonly taught Dickens novel in American High Schools. Like a flue shot, however, its best quality
is its brevity. Its worst quality is
that it’s like the funny bits that pepper each Dickens novel were taken out,
leaving only a sour-faced seriousness, the Scrooge without the Fezziwig. It’s heartless and formulaic. My students read it because its plot was
easy, its satire obvious, and it was a little over 200 pages long. Then, during two particularly delusional
years, I decided to teach what I consider to be Dickens best, if not certainly his
most ambitious novel - - Bleak House. God bless my students, seriously. Those guys read all 12 books of Milton’s Paradise Lost and just a few short months
later a 900 page Victorian novel. The
fact that my tires were not slashed that spring is nothing short of a
miracle. I loved and knew Bleak House well. I just didn’t spend enough time thinking
about how I would teach it. If I was
Oedipus and Oedipus was an English teacher, this would be my hamartia, my fatal flaw. I sometimes let my affection for a book trick
me into thinking my sheer love of it will be enough to make it work in the classroom. Nerdy love is never enough in teaching,
however, so I have settled onto Dickens’s second novel, Oliver Twist. It fits my
three basic criteria for a Dickens novel in a high school survey course:
relative brevity (about 450 pages[1]),
some amazing condition of England satire[2],
and regular comedy.[3]
So
this past weekend I read the first six chapters of Dickens’s Oliver Twist for class. Oliver has asked for more and punched Noah
Claypoole so Bumble is on his way to Sowerberry’s. Despite my love of Dickens, I can readily
admit that my students may not feel equally enthusiastic about these opening
pages.
I
have two observations about the novel so far.
First,
my favorite detail. One prominent reader
of Dickens (whose name I forget) stated that Dickens’s narrative lens
prefigured the film camera. There is a
conscious zoom that his narrators use. We
have spent many early pages watching Mr. Bumble the parish Beadle verbally and
physically beating the kids in his charge.
Sowerberry, the caretaker and coffin-maker, notices the elegant button
on Bumble’s parochial coat on which is imprinted the ‘Good Samaritan healing
the sick and bruised man.” Most authors
stop there and enjoy their moment of irony but Dickens takes it one more step,
with Bumble telling Sowerberry that the board gave it [the button] to him and
the first time he wore it was the night he “attended the inquest on that
reduced tradesman who died in a doorway at midnight.” I think that in order to enjoy Dickens one
needs to imagine him smirking in verbal victory as he writes these lines. I think we all love the exposure of the unjustifiably
self-important. This exposure is the
root of much of Dickens’s comedy and is the reason why Bumble, while an awful
man, is so much fun to read.
Second,
in Dickens’s youth he lived next to a workhouse and across the street from a
cemetery. Early in the novel, Oliver and
his new employer Mr. Sowerberry attend to the burial of a woman. Dickens describes the circumstances with
eerie authenticity (including the indifference of the minister and the
shallowness of the grave, prefiguring Nemo’s burial in Bleak House). If one learns
to read with the heart and not just the head, this burial scene is one of many
that should move the reader of Dickens.
Like Shakespeare, Dickens is aware of the social panorama of any human
scene, especially its margins. Remember
in Romeo and Juliet, Shakespeare
knows that at Juliet and Paris’ wedding there would have been musicians. In Macbeth,
some hung-over Porter would have to open Macbeth’s gate. And in Hamlet,
someone needed to dig Ophelia’s grave.
Wedding musicians, porters, and gravediggers were not new ideas to
Shakespeare. He was just the first
writer to make them real people. Having
read his Shakespeare (the most quoted author in Dickens), early in Oliver Twist Dickens is writing this
emotional burial scene. It would be easy
for him too focus solely on the burial, the loss of this nameless woman, and
the tragic circumstances of her remaining family. But Dickens always reminds us that there are
other perspectives, other lives, men who just dig and fill graves, boys who
play games in the graveyard, and workers who read the paper as families bury
their dead. The next time someone tells
me that Dickens’ isn’t realistic, I need to remember moments like this. I need to remember that someone will have the
job of picking up my trash tomorrow morning as I go busily to work. Other people will be mopping my school’s
floors and making the students’ hamburgers.
And all of these people have hobbies, loves, fears, and dreams that make
them infinitely interesting. And if a
writer can make me pay more attention and can make people more mysterious and
interesting to me, isn’t that enough?
[1] Dickens’s best
books, in my opinion, are David
Copperfield, Bleak House, and Our Mutual Friend. Each of these novels exceeds 800 pages and
could be used as weapons if attacked while reading.
[2] Leaves you wanting
“more,” if you know what I mean!
[3] Particularly dark
comedy, if you’re into that kind of thing.
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