Another Version of Pastoral: Oliver Twist

Abstract

The question of how men are to live in a world which seems so little geared to their accomodation is of primary concern in all Dickens' novels. The depth and heaviness of the way in which the majority of men are compelled to live make up the travail of the actual which is variously confronted by major characters from Samuel Pickwick at the moment of his entry into Fleet Street Prison to Eugene Wrayburn in Our Mutual Friend who would prefer an existence on an isolated rock in a stormy sea (I, xii, 145) 1 over the exacerbating boredom of his present vassalage to society. It is not a matter of physical or economic survival that is at issue, though failure in both may also occur, but it is rather the human need to reconcile a widely cherished dream of what life ought to be like with the apprehension of what it really is. By the nineteenth century the world which had once seemed a sphere turning in accord with some celestial music had become a battleground where the forces of order and chaos appeared locked in tenebrous conflict. The gap between the individual and the universal appeared to be unbridgeable, for there was, as the narrator in Our Mutual Friend observes, an immensity of space between mankind and Heaven (IV, vi, 689). Such as it was, the busy, discordant world of the nineteenth-