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| Dodger punished, Oliver neglected. Link. |
About a fourth of the way through his adventures in Dickens’ novel, Oliver has already left the baby farm, heroically asked for “more” and was subsequently foretold of his inevitable hanging, barely escaped the clutches of the chimney sweep Mr. Gamfield, apprenticed for the undertaker Mr. Sowerberry, escaped the funeral home and walked 65 miles (in the winter!) to London, took up residence into Fagin’s gang of child-thieves, was arrested for robbery and later adopted by the man whom he allegedly robbed, and lastly, was kidnapped and returned to Fagin’s lair where he is imprisoned as a threat to confess Fagin’s whereabouts and crimes. It is Oliver’s imprisonment that provides the context for the quotation that begins these reflections.
It’s
so easy to teach Dickens thematically.
Any teacher who even is merely conversant in Dickens can spout off on
Dickens and social justice, Dickens and women, Dickens and the New Poor Law,
Dickens and the theater, Dickens and abused children. I find
that whenever my mind gets lazy in the classroom, it generalizes. I take a transformative text like Dickens’
Oliver Twist and stage conversations
that, while true, are not what make Oliver
Twist special OR Dickens Dickensian.
Yes, it’s interesting that Dickens himself grew up for a time near a
workhouse and must have heard what transpired inside its walls.[1] Yes Oliver
Twist is the first novel that features a child protagonist. But
the most important question remains: what is peculiarly interesting about how
this book is written? The answer to
that question determines whether anyone who is NOT an English teacher should
open the book in the first place.
I ask my seniors
every year to compose a Dickensian deleted scene. They are to imagine a scene that Dickens had
edited out of the novel and then they are to write it. LIKE DICKENS. This choice of assignment by necessity
changes how I must read and teach the novel.
If I remain lazy and mired in quasi-sociological generalizations (see
above), my students will politely take notes, have a few more anecdotes for
cocktail parties later in life, but will not be able to discuss Dickens’
writing in all its uniqueness. More
importantly, there will never be inspired on their own to read Dickens. So my students’ assignment to imitate Dickens’s
writing makes me teach the novel as a creative writing manual of sorts. Here is an example of how this assignment
forces me to teach differently.
The
other day I stood in front of a class and flipped through the novel’s pages,
like a card-dealer with an absurdly large (Dickensian) deck. I then told one my students to tell me when
to stop. If you’re wondering about this
strange tactic, YES, teaching can
sometimes feel like a really nerdy version of a magic show, Chriss Angel with
elbow-pads! The student told me to
stop at a specific page. He chose a
random paragraph (the one that begins this reflection) and we spent about 30
minutes thinking about it. I was very
clear that we were reading the paragraph less for ‘what it means’ (the LEAST
interesting topic in any literary conversation) but rather how it moves. I told them that I wanted them to write a
descriptive paragraph in the style of Dickens modeled on the paragraph we
landed on here. Here are some discoveries from reading Dickens
as movement rather than just meaning.
SENTENCE
ONE: “It was a very dirty place.”
Yes,
this sentence doesn’t sound like Dickens, does it? Well, actually, it does. He often begins his rich, descriptive
paragraphs with a simple sentence, imposing a single adjective onto a setting,
person, or mood. Later in class while
looking for their own super-Dickensian moments, many of my students noticed the
importance of the simple sentence in the novel, particularly beginning highly
descriptive paragraphs.
SENTENCE
TWO:
“The rooms upstairs had great high wooden chimney-pieces and large doors, with panelled walls and cornices to the ceiling; which, although they were black with neglect and dust, were ornamented in various ways.”
“The rooms upstairs had great high wooden chimney-pieces and large doors, with panelled walls and cornices to the ceiling; which, although they were black with neglect and dust, were ornamented in various ways.”
Next,
my students and I talked about the Dickensian narrative movement, what some
scholars believe to be the precursor to cinematography. Dickens begins with general categorization
(“dirty room”) and then moves his eye to the top of the room. We first get a basic description of what is
literally there “chimney pieces and large doors.” Next, Dickens offers a little more detail, as
if he is in the room with Oliver and is moving throughout (with the help of a
ladder!). He tells us that the walls are
paneled and that the cornices go all the way to the ceiling. Now, Dickens does a third thing in this one
sentence by moving even closer to these cornices and noticing they were “black
with neglect and dust.” Instead of
simply telling us that the “cornices were black” (and thereby syntactically
echoing his first sentence, “the room was dirty”), Dickens tells us WHY the cornices
were black. He tells us the condition of
the cornices was due to “neglect and dust.”
Almost any other imagination would move this sentence in chronological
order of observation, noticing the dust first and then reflecting on its cause
- - neglect. But Dickens’s imagination moves by order of importance, not time. He wants the reader to prioritize the neglect
of Oliver’s environment here, making us land on that word first. And
since Dickens’ entire imagination is a symphonic echo chamber, it struck one of
my classes that “black with neglect” could almost be a subtitle for the novel
or an epithet for many of its villains’ hearts. I told them at that point that they sounded
too much like English teachers!!
SENTENCE
THREE:
“From all of these tokens Oliver concluded that a long time ago, before the old Jew was born, it had belonged to better people, and had perhaps been quite gay and handsome: dismal and dreary as it looked now.”
“From all of these tokens Oliver concluded that a long time ago, before the old Jew was born, it had belonged to better people, and had perhaps been quite gay and handsome: dismal and dreary as it looked now.”
Students
felt that this sentence was the real Dickensian moment in the paragraph. First, it is important to notice that the
narrator recedes into the background and Oliver
takes over the imaginative direction of the scene. I reminded my students that in their
Dickensian imitations, they will notice many of the normal “rules” of writing
no longer apply. Shifts in perspective
like the one in this sentence are usually discouraged but not so in Dickens’
hands. Oliver has a say in
characterizing his prison and, despite his history of neglect has the imaginative
openness to see his environment as something other than what it is, something
belonging to “better people” and “looking quite gay and handsome.” But even at this early stage, he (along with
the reader) senses that Fagin carries with him death and decay.
So who cares? Why do this? The idea of taking 30 minutes to look at
three sentences is not something normal people do. Well, I agree. But I don’t have a normal job. I hope my students learn that great artists
see and feel deeply, more deeply than most of us as we live our busy
lives. In Dickens’ hands, he moves our eyes and opens our ears in a way that
is new and exciting. This alone is
reason enough to read him.
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