Dickens and Mass Culture and Charles Dickens's Oliver Twist: A Sourcebook, by Juliet John

 These are two very excellent scholarly works about Dickens which have come into my possession within the past year. Oliver Twist: A Sourcebook, of course deals with that story in particular, mostly the myriad of stage and screen versions ever since the publication of the novel. Dickens and Mass culture is on a broader topic, but contains and excellent short chapter on Oliver Twist in the popular imagination, titled "The Making of a Cultural Myth: Oliver Twist on Screen."

    Unlike some other critics, (and to an extent, perhaps myself as well), John is generally uncritical of the deviations from the canoncal test found in the myriad of film versions. Since Oliver Twist exists as what she refers to as a "culture text," the events in Oliver's life do not really have a set pattern, and are therefore fluid as they are interpreted by changing times and culture in which the medium of film exist. Indeed, as she points out, people who have never read the book, think they know the story, something even more true of A Christmas Carol. I don't doubt that there are plety of those who think that Scrooge visited the Crachits on Christmas Day, even though, strictly according to canon, he didn't.Oliver is a bit more problematic  though, since due to the time constraints of some versions, the rich novel must be pruned for an abreviated time slot.

    John's acanonical approach to the text, however, allows room for the numerous divergent interpretations, such as Oliver asking for more gruel out of his selfless compassion for another starving boy, as in 1982's film, or as a direct protest against the system, as in the 2007 one. Approaching the story as a cultural myth, allows both versions, and others, a greater degree of legitimatecy. In a mythic sense, Oliver's request may be seen as a protest and/or a demand by all impoverished children, both within the era when Dickens wrote, and beyond.

     Again appraoching Oliver's story as mythic and fluid, John is accepting, and even appreciative ,of the diverse interpretations of Fagin that have shown up over the years, especially it seems, of the less conventional ones such as Timothy Spall's take on the character.

     She also points out that one of the earlier silent versions set the stage for subsequent versions, as to what scenes from the book were kept in and left out. Among the scenes that have become a staple for most adapters are Oliver's asking for more gruel (of course!), Oliver's meeting with the Artful Dodger, Oliver's introduction to Fagin's lair, and Dodger and Charlie picking Mr. Brownlow's pocket with Oliver getting blamed. With Oliver  having become a cultural myth, those scenes are the ones most impressed upon the collective concsiousness. Similarly, that early version's ommissions were also copied, and John lists several canonical indicents/characters that seldom show up on screen. "It is very rare," she tells us, "to encounter little Dick on screen, or see Fagin and Monks appearing at the window at Maylies, or Oliver reading the Newgate calendar, or the trial of Fagin, though these scenes do appear on occasion."

     Dick, Oliver's starving workhouse friend, does appear in the 1982's version (Goldman's script gives him the vital role of the boy for whom Oliver asks for more gruel), as does the scene where Monks and Fagin peer in the window at Oliver. Fagin's trial appears appears in the 2007 version, and (surprisingly), in the Filmation cartoon; perhaps some space should have been giving to the cartoons, for are they not, too, part of culture? Fred Guida does consider the various animated Carols, along with the rest. I can't recall a version offhand that has Oliver reading the newgate calender.

    John does mention, however, that 1982's Oliver is the only version she's aware of that makes mention of the 'New Poor Laws,' what Dickens wrote the novel to protest against. That occurs in the scene where Bumble thunders at Oliver about the infallibility of the system, though it occured to me that this refence might be cinematically unique.

   Though I haven't seen quite all of them (the 1962 version still escapes me, and likely will for some time),  one scene I'm fairly certain has never been filmed even in BBC's meticulous production in 1985 (which even included Gamfield, the chimney sweep), is the incident with the raving hunchback in chapter 32. This is probably because the incident makes no sense in the context of the plot, and would be an even more obvious loose end if presented onscreen.

     The final chapter in John's Mass Culture examines "Dickens World," an amusement-park like attraction in Britain, in which visitors can see and interact with live actors portraying the characters from Dickens' novels:Fagin, Scrooge, Miss Havishham, et. al. There are verying opinions as to whether such an attaction is good or bad by Dickens buffs; on one hand it preserves the legacy of Dickens' stories and and characters, and (perhaps) introducies them to new generations. On the other, it s seems to cheapen Dickens' legacy by turning them into fodder for the masses. If, however, Dickens' works exist as "culture texts," the public imagination is the medium in which they continue to persist. There is, indeed, a tendacy to devalue mass popularity and consumption as cheapness. That is, in fact, often not the case, as Dickens most popular works are arguably also his best, a case that I beleive Juliet John makes well in these texts.

Quigsnip: The Untold Tale of Charles Dickens' Oliver Twist

Here is the "Oliver Twist" pastiche story that I have just completed!

http://www.amazon.com/Quigsnip-Untold-Charles-Dickens-Oliver/dp/150063476X/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1409418750&sr=1-1&keywords=quigsnip



Here is an excerpt, BTW:

“You stole the money, Oliver! That you did! The money's here, Oliver!” Quigsnip held forth the familiar silk sack containing the inheritance money. “It's all here, Oliver! I checked! Oh, what a kind, brave, selfless, lad you are! Such a pity not one farthing will be spent on account of the children!”

“N-no!” cried Oliver, his thin, soprano voice nearly breaking with anguish, “You're lying!” But in his despairing heart, Oliver knew his monstrous captor spoke the truth.

“Am I?” roared Quigsnip, his voice filling with fury. “Just wait, boy, until the London Times runs the article! 'Oliver Twist Guilty of Robbing Shaftesbury's Charity!'” He snatched a letter from his pocket and held it out for Oliver to see. “And here is irrefutable proof of your guilt, and your personal indictment Dr. Losberne, right on this letter in your own handwriting! Not even your contemptible family can spare you now! Now, not even your dear Rose and Mr. Brownlow will believe you!”

“NOOOOOOOOO!” wailed Oliver, in anguished misery. The boy fell on his knees, head downcast.

The men jeered at him.

Limbkins, though he would not liked to have admitted it, was terribly unsettled at the moment, more so now by the boy's harrowing cry.

Noah swaggered over to where Oliver slumped. “'Ow do ya like it now, Nolly?” the older lad sneered. “'Ow's that fer breaking my nose back at Sowerberry's?”

To Claypole's astonishment, the smaller boy sprang to life. Oliver sprang from his position like a stroke of lightening and drove his small, hard fist into Claypole's nose with savage force.

Noah reeled back, screaming and clutching his face.“My nose! 'Ee broke my bloody nose! Oliver broke it again!”

Oliver stood before his towering captors, tears of rage leaking down his cheeks, his small hands closed into fists.

“What are you dolts waiting for?” Quigsnip ordered. “Get him!”

Oliver stood his ground, but there was nothing such a small, slim boy could do against the burly adults. They seized the frail lad and dragged him to the edge of a pier.

“Now--”ordered the monstrous Quigsnip. “Bind him.”

The men bound Oliver's arms behind his back with heavy ropes. Two of them carried concrete blocks over to where they had Oliver bound.

“Do his feet,” Quigsnip ordered.

They lashed the heavy weights to Oliver's thin legs.

As the boy stood in a stupor of despair, arms and legs bound on the edge of the pier, Quigsnip ordered his gang to step back.

Oliver was past caring. If what Quigsnip said was the truth, he didn’t care if he died.

Quigsnip stepped forward, an oily grin on his face. “And so I bid you a final farewell, young Oliver Twist. At last you've paid the price for the money I've lost, and for what your family did to me, the richest crime-lord in London! You'll serve as a prime of example of why no one ever crosses Zebedias Quigsnip and lives to boast of it! Know that that doctor friend of yours will pay along with you! Despair, young Oliver—and die!

With that, Quigsnip slashed out savagely with one leg. His booted foot smashed into the boy's middle with tremendous force. The wind knocked out of him, Oliver was propelled backward by the force. The bound boy flew of the pier. The polluted water surged over his head.

In seconds, Oliver was swallowed by the Thames.

Jacob T. Marley by William Bennet

     This is an interesting little book that I happened to read the Christmas before last at the local library, essentially in one sitting. A lot of people probably wonder why Dickens didn't delve deeper into the personal history of Jacob Marley, Scrooge's ill-fated partner in Carol, especially since he was so central to the story. Unlike his more famous business partner,we learn nothing of Marley's childhood or younger years, only that he lived much of his life as a ruthless business man.
    
      Just who was Jacob Marley? What made him into the sort of man he became, and how did he and Scrooge meet? The answers to those questions and others come to light in R. William Bennett's small novella. There have been a number of pastiches of A Christmas Carol over the years, two of the most memorable for me, being God Bless Us Everyone, a book detailing the years following Scrooge's conversion, and Christmas Carol II, The Sequel, a spoofy version that finds Scrooge going too far in the other direction, hosted by George Burns back in 1986. No pastiche is or should be considered canonical; however Bennet's tale is not only better than most, it fills out what the life of Marley may well have been like. One almost wishes for Dickens' stamp of approval--though what the author's opinion would be is anyone's guess.

      One more thing: the author does deal with the issue of Marley's salvation. When we meet in the story, it appears that Marley is a lost soul, doomed to an eternity of hopeless wandering. Not tom divulge the ending, but the author comes up with a scenario in which this might not necessarily be the case, and he does without altering anything that Dickens wrote in the original. I've also read that the author happens to be a Mormon; as I'm only marginally familiar with the Mormon concept of an afterlife, so I can't say for certain to what degree that might have shaped his writing.

But Jacob T. Marley is a worthy "sequel", and one well-worth picking up. 

The Faith of Charles Dickens

       In God and Charles Dickens, Christian author Gary L. College argues that Dickens was an important Christian voice, and the messages of faith that his stories are rife with are seldom discussed or appreciated. Some have argued that Dickens was only nominally a Christian, and even that his works were overtly anti-religious. While it is very true that the author was very critical of how the tenants of the Christian faith were abused or preached hypocritically by those in power, a closer reading of his text reveals that Dickens was NOT condemning Christianity itself--far from it. As I've argued elsewhere, citing hypocrisy among Christians (or those who identify themselves as such)is a very poor way of finding fault with the faith itself. In fact, as College argues, it was the Christian faith of Charles Dickens that lead him to attack hypocrisy he identified in the religious as he sought to change it. The subject of Victorian religious hypocrisy brings almost immediately to my mind the characters of Mr. and Mrs. Bumble in Oliver Twist, the gross, hypocritical Mr. Bumble in particular famous for preaching Christian charity with wallowing in gluttony in front of the starving poor. A line from the 1982 movie stands out in particular, spoken by the future Mrs. Bumble: "Forgive these children their sins; their sinners every one of them; they wouldn't be here is they wasn't. Help me make them better Christians, Lord." Also of particular not note is the incident in the book where Mr. Bumble deliberately lies to Mr. Brownlow about Oliver's good nature.
      College spends time discussing a little-known work of the author, The Life of Our Lord, in which he expounds on the life and acts of Jesus Christ, and their relevance to his present world. This work is little known precisely because it was never intended to be sold to the public; it was a private work intended as a guide to Christian living for his children, and only brought to light years after his death. But even a casual reading of Dickens reveals what amounts to an essentially Christian world-view. While A Christmas Carol is sometimes criticized by the religious as almost entirely secular, Tiny Tim Crachit's enduring phrase God Bless Us, Everyone!, and Bob Crachit's observation of Tim's wish that people would see he was a cripple so that they should remember "Who made lame men walk and blind men see," speak volumes, as do the final pages of Oliver Twist, which reference God and heaven and speak of the narrator's belief that the shade of Agnes Fleming (Oliver's deceased mother) will visit her gravesite. College goes further, pointing out the good characters in Dickens' novels exemplify Christian values, while his villains demonstrate their antithesis.
   One thing that struck me in particular while reading this was how much emphasis Dickens placed on human charity and working for the common good, and how this so contrasts with today's evangelism, in which "good works" are continually downplayed, sometimes to the point of vilification, while "faith" is exulted. Often (though not always) such evangelists recognize that a saving faith will produce works, though it does not always come across that way. Dickens, however, put the importance of charity and defense of the weak, poor, and disenfranchised at the forefront of Christian living. Nor did he confine such philanthropy to his fiction; as College shows, Dickens own life shows much evidence of personal charity.
    So different from the culture-war oriented evangelism of today that often dumbs down faith to a "get out of hell free card." Not that Dickens disbelieved in or disregarded hell's existence: he did not. College provides passages where Dickens strongly suggests that certain non-repentant characters, such as Fagin and Sikes in Oliver Twist, and Rigaud in Little Dorrit were beyond moral redemption at the time of their deaths.
      Curiously, however, College neglects to mention a very powerful presentation of a damned soul, perhaps the most powerful in literature: Jacob Marley. However, as I'll discuss in my next post, it is possible that Marley was not as beyond moral redemption as one might have thought--although I'll say right now that that is according to a different author's interpretation.
  

BBC's Recent Great Expectations--the Gothic Dickens

I wasn't really sure about starting a blog on Charles Dickens, as I figure there may not be many posts for it in the near future, though I could be wrong. I'm reading two works about Dickens right now.  I've read a number of his books, mostly during my college years--though with only one real exception--out side of class. Most classes, in fact, avoid reading Dickens, mainly because of the length and complexity of most of his novels. The only one we did actually read was Hard Times, a good novel so far as his harsh critic of the Victorian industrial conditions and attitudes, but hardly his most important work or his best. There was class offered every once in a blue moon which specialized in Dickens, and offered a Marxist approach to his work, but I was never able to take.

I'm familiar with a lot of Dickens' films though, especially back during the eighties era--see my Clive Donner blog for descriptions of that director's version of Oliver Twist and A Christmas Carol. Those films, along with the Chris Sanderson version of A Tale of Two Cities, were shown on CBS TV as part of their "Read More About It" program. The extravagant Royal Shakespeare company version of Nicholas Nickleby, starring Roger Rees as Nicholas (you might remember him as Scrooge's nephew Fred in George Scott's Carol) was shown on ABC. It was PBS, however, that showed the most productions, however, as part of masterpiece theater, including one biography of the author's life, called Dickens of London, which I was able to acquire only fairly recently.

Most of these were done by the BBC. It was their version of Great Expectations , first broadcast back in 1981, before I even knew anything of Dickens other than Carol, that I liked the best. Like other BBC productions Dickens, it stretched on for many episodes, in fact longer than it needed to be to encompass the richness of Dickens' writing. It was played straight, with all the significant details intact. Well, maybe not quite--I seem to recall that no mention was ever made that Compeyson, Magwitch's nemesis, also being the man who deserted Miss Havisham on her wedding night. This incident, in fact ,forms the entire basis for the plot of the story. Now, I won't exactly say that it was left out, merely not brought out, and I can't recall if it was mentioned in the recent 20011 version either. I do recall that the big-screen modernization back in the nineties, which starred Rober DeNiro, eliminated the Compeyson character altogather. This was a very significant error, as what happens in the story therefore makes little sense. The most recent adaptation of GE, initially released only in Britain, ommits Orlick, or so I've heard. This also would create problems, especially in relation to the fate of Pip's sister, but eliminating Compeyson is far more serious.

It's the 2011 version Great Expectations that concerns me here, though. What is most obvious upfront about this film, in common with quite a few other recent Dickens movies by the BBC, seems to be attempting to "modernize" Dickens text. An even more obvious example of this would be the 2007 version of Oliver Twist
with a jarringly modern soundtrack, a Fagin, played by Timothy Spall, who was nearly unrecognizable as the character Dickens created, and which recast Nancy as a Black woman. Other recent BBC productions, such as Bleak House, take a dark, almost Gothic approach. This appears to be the approach they took here. The soundtrack for GE, the atmosphere and photography, seem even to suggest a horror tale. The entire film seems pervaded by a sinister air of lurking menace which is absent from any previous version. The moment when Magwitch reveals himself as Pip's benefactor, is in particular, rife with dark import.

Whether of not this is actually a "problem" with the movie, though, I'm not sure. The original obviously contains elements of the Gothic, the most obvious being Miss Havisham, draped in her wedding shall in her decaying mansion. The fact that this gothic atmosphere has invaded the entire film, however, is a bit disconcerting. Ironically, though, the character of Orlick is a creepy bug-eyed teenager in this film. He seems more like a juvenile bully, and is far less menacing than the burly, adult Orlick from 1981. Also, significantly, the scene near the end where Orlick captures and threatens Pip with death is absent. Miss Havisham is appropriately spidery, and emaciated looking, as well as a bit younger than she is generally portrayed. The character of Bentley Drummle is arrogant, swaggering and rather handsome in this version, compared to the 1981 film when he merely smarmy and oafish. Both Drummles manage to be thoroughly despicable, though the 1981 is perhaps a bit more so. Still it's easier to see in this version why Drummle presents Pip with a serious rival.

Though this version exceeds two hours, it is shorter by far than the rambling 1981 version. Most of the significant episodes manage to remain, though many have been shortened or revamped to fit the shorter running time.

One subtle, though very significant, change from Dickens' novel takes place in during the early scene in which Pip brings food and a file to Magwitch. In the book (and the other film versions as near as I recall), Magwitch threatens the boy into bringing him both the file and food. In this version, he demands the file only. But Pip, being the good-hearted young lad that he is, brings him his tyrannical sister's Christmas cake anyway. This seemingly insignificant fact comes to light years later, after Magwitch finally reveals his identity :"the file you took because you were scared--but the cake you took because of the goodness of your heart."

This is one of the rare incidents in which I beleive the writers actually one-upped Dickens. The author seemingly intended for Pip's bringing the convict what he needed to demonstrate the boy's compassion, yet the fact that he did so out of fear undermines this. Pip's compassion is, in fact, evident, in his concern for Magwitch's alleged companion (who, in fact, he has been told is a murdering psychopath!), when he asks Magwitch if he will not share the cake with his friend. But this is merely incidental to what actually occurs in the story. Having Pip bring Magwitch the cake on his own steam not only makes of point of the boy's compassion, but also makes more sense in light of what Magwitch does for him as a return favor. It never quite made sense that the convict would go to all that trouble for a lad whom he'd merely frightened into helping him.

Like the 1982 and 2007 versions of Oliver Twist it makes the protagonist more heroic--in those versions Oliver takes his bowl up for another starving boy, unlike the book, in which the boys drew lots and Oliver lost. Oversights by Dickenss in my opinion.

Still, the Gothic atmosphere which pervades this production makes the story seem overly bleak. And in regard to "modernization" of the classics, this, in general may be a bleak sign--that the great literature of the past may be less versatile than previously thought. Otherwise, if the work be a classic, why modernize it?