Dangerous Crossings: Dickens, Digression, and Montage

Abstract

In its serial form, Oliver Twist is a text in the course of writing itself, and re-writing its aims, changing its shape as it progresses. Through it, I want to examine the early Dickens re-reading his text and a text by one of his predecessors, Fielding, who is named and unquestionably drawn on in the novel. I want also to discuss writers commenting directly or indirectly on Dickens's text. 'The Author's Preface to the Third Edition' of I84I creates for the text a distinguished parentage (as the text invents parents for Oliver as it develops), and was written with the grandeur of the name 'Author' to counter objections by Thackeray in Catherine and by others to the question of the novel's realism.1 Though I see the techniques of Oliver Twist, despite Dickens's affirmation in the Preface 'IT IS TRUE',2 as a break with realism, I am not here concerned with Thackeray, and the debate over the Newgate novel, but with other criticisms of Dickens from George Eliot and Henry James that concern the question of how to read Dickens adequately. The issue I want to focus on is that of digression. In Chapter 14 of Oliver Twist, Mr Grimwig asks, 'And when are you going to a hear a full, true and particular account of the life and adventures of Oliver Twist?' (p. 9I). The title of these putative adventures of the hero is eighteenth-century in style, Smollett-like; it suggests the various titles the text went through, where the 'author' becomes part of the title and what it projects, and where the title constructs an author, the actual author's signature being fictional. Oliver Twist; or The Parish-Boy's Progress. By 'Boz' (1838) is thought of as a very different kind of text from Oliver Twist. By Charles Dickens Author of 'The Pickwick Papers' (also 1838). Four more editions, three with slightly different titles, appeared before The Adventures of Oliver Twist; or, The Parish-Boy's Progress (I846), repeated in I850 and thereafter, but with the subtitle dropped. Mr Grimwig's question is metafictional, for it comes at a turning point, where Dickens is twisting and questioning what kind of text this is. In a passage he subsequently deleted at the beginning of Chapter 15, Dickens called Oliver Twist in its first version in Bentley's