¹ Steven Marcus has recently explored Dickens' progressive creation of his distinctive authorial persona in Pickwick Papers: “Language into Structure: Pickwick Revisited,” Daedalus, 101 (1972), 183–202. As Dickens returns from the fictive past of Pickwick to the contemporary realities of Oliver Twist, he is impelled to experiment not only with his own narrative voice but also with the foundations of fictional representation.

² Kathleen Tillotson, ed., Oliver Twist (London: Oxford Univ. Press, 1966), p. lxiv. Subsequent references to the novel are incorporated into the text and refer to this edition by chapter number. My comments on the significance of Dickens' revisions of the novel in its early editions are based on the changes traced in Tillot-son's textual notes.

³ Arnold Kettle has pointed out the shift within the novel from one mode to the other in his chapter on Oliver Twist in An Introduction to the English Novel (London: Hutchinson, 1951; 2nd ed. 1967), I, 121–25. Kettle argues that the novel fails because the “plot makes impossible the realization of the living pattern and conflict of the book.” But Kettle's definition of “the core of the novel” as “the plight of the poor” is too narrow and dogmatic; he identifies the novel's “essential pattern” on the basis of the indignant topical satire of the opening chapters alone, and Dickens' social vision quickly expands beyond the limits of the initial mode. According to Kettle, when Oliver becomes involved in “the romantic escape-world of the lost wills and dispossessed foundlings and idiotic coincidences which make up the paraphernalia of the conventional romantic plot,” “a complete transformation has taken place in the organization of the novel.” But Kettle here fails to distinguish plot mechanisms from the substance of the plot: the business of the lost will is nothing more than a convention that serves as a vehicle for the thematically crucial struggle between Oliver's patrons and the thieves for control over the development of the boy's character. Fagin's attempts to make Oliver a thief and Nancy's efforts to save him propel the plot and connect its movement directly to the novel's fundamentally serious concern with the extent to which human “nature” can be corrupted by experience; the conflict of good and evil extends beyond the class issue. A “transformation in the internal organization of the novel” does indeed occur, as Kettle suggests, but its development is more sustained and complex than he allows.

⁴ James R. Kincaid, Dickens and the Rhetoric of Laughter (London: Oxford Univ. Press, 1971), p. 71.

⁵ Humphry House has commented, “It is not so easy to say what was exactly the point of Dickens's satire in the early part of Oliver Twist,” The Dickens World, 2nd ed. (London: Oxford Univ. Press, 1942), p. 10. The difficulty is that several kinds of protest are rapidly superimposed in the opening chapters. The satire expands so quickly that the topical attack on the Poor Laws becomes incidental to the main brunt of Dickens' anatomy of the social system that produced them.

⁶ According to Tillotson's textual note on this passage, Dickens amended it, in 1850, to read: “shows us what a beautiful thing human nature may be made to be” rather than merely “what … human nature sometimes is.” The revision reinforces Dickens' emphasis on the corrupting influence of social usage. Not “human nature” in itself but the acquired power and presumption of rank are explicitly identified in the later version as producing this kind of behavior.

⁷ Mark Spilka has demonstrated the imaginative conflict between Fagin's theatrical semblance and the vital self within: “The life, the imagination, the cleverness of the old man, shine forth from beneath his matted hair,” Dickens and Kafka: A Mutual Interpretation (Bloomington: Indiana Univ. Press, 1963), p. 73. Precisely this duplicity enables Fagin later to become the most compelling instance of Dickens' shift from the detached external view of the thieves to intensely felt sympathy with them. The ultimate humanization of the thieves has also been discussed by Joseph Gold in Charles Dickens: Radical Moralist (Minneapolis: Univ. of Minnesota Press, 1972), pp. 28–29.

⁸ Steven Marcus has explored Dickens' “representation of the values, habits, and structure of ordinary respectable society as analogous to those which inform the world of the thieves and paupers,” in Dickens: From Pickwick to Dombey (London: Chatto and Win-dus, 1965), p. 359. He does not sufficiently consider the shifts in the relation between the two worlds as the novel evolves.

⁹ “Oliver Twist: ‘Things as They Really Are,‘ ” Dickens and the Twentieth Century, ed. John Gross and Gabriel Pearson (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1962), p. 59. Bayley fails to take into account the modification of narrative technique in the latter half of the novel, perhaps because his concern with the fusion of dream and reality in Oliver Twist disallows their dissociation in the closing chapters.

¹⁰ “Oliver Twist: The Fortunate Foundling,” Fiction with a Purpose (Bloomington: Indiana Univ. Press, 1967), p. 134.

¹¹ Charles Dickens: The World of His Novels (Harvard Univ. Press, 1958; rpt. Bloomington: Indiana Univ. Press, 1969), p. 66.

¹² “The Macabre Dickens,” All in Due Time (London: Rupert Hart-Davis, 1955), pp. 184–85.

¹³ J. Hillis Miller argues that for Dickens the ending is “a resolution which is essentially based on self-deception and on an unwillingness to face fully his apprehension of the world” (p. 84). This view of the ending is largely valid, although Miller does not acknowledge the extent to which Dickens gives full expression to his “apprehension of the world” in the structure and technique of the chapters preceding the final flight to the countryside.