Oliver Twist Research Articles

After This, Nothing Happened: Indigenous Academic Writing and Chickadee Peoples’ Words

Canadian Indigenous scholars valiantly search for stores of resilience and strength in contemporary Canada to demystify the tragic place of Indians in Canada. It is very much a journey of self-discovery and recovery of a positive identity and lost human dignity that allows the restoration of pride to succeed with the gifts Creation provides to Indigenous peoples. Cook- Lynn (2007) addresses this quest to locate safe places of connecting to those stories in her important work Anti-Indianism in Modern America: Voice from Tatekeya’s Earth, where she writes about the obligation of Indigenous scholars to project strong voices to people who “believe in the stereotypical assumption that Indians are ‘damned’.. vanished, or pathetic remnants of a race” and “let’s get rid of Indian reservations” or “let’s abrogate Indian treaties.” Instead of feeling inspired to find places of good will far too much energy is sapped escaping spaces of hate, indifference and inexcusable innocence. The cultural, historical and social confusion of a one-sided portrayal of Canadian colonization creates for researchers/witnesses at all levels of education huge gaps in understanding the unresolved pain and injury of Canada’s colonial past on Canada’s First Nations. Indigenous peoples are invisible in most areas of academic study, normally relegated to special programs like Aboriginal Studies as if Indigenous world-views, knowledge, culture and vision for Canada’s future required mere comma’s in course material that feel like “oh yea, then there are aboriginal people who feel” that stand for inclusion but feel like after thoughts only if a visible “Indian” finds a seat in the class. Indigenous students’ experience within the academy has is often a ‘Dickenish’ tale. It is a tale of two extremes; the best of times and the worst of times mostly simultaneously as each glorious lesson learned carries the lonely burden of responsibility to challenge the shame and humiliation of each racist, ignorant and arrogant colonial myth perpetuated. Like Oliver Twist we want more. This paper was conceived out of an invitation by Indigenous author Lee Maracle at the 2009 University of Toronto SAGE (Supporting Aboriginal Graduate Enhancement) writing retreat where Lee and the Cree Elder Pauline Shirt spun webs of stories to encourage Indigenous scholars to explore and express our survival of vicious, traumatic and intentional cultural upheavals.

SLAVERY IN CHARLES DICKENS’ NOVEL OLIVER TWIST

This research discusses the slavery experienced by the characters in the Oliver Twist novel. Those who have no family and no place to stay eventually become slaves who are forced to work for the benefit of the owner. They are treated as property and often get physical violence. This research aims to analyze the types of slavery that are reflected in Oliver Twist novel. This research using descriptive qualitative methods. Researchers used the Marxist approach and slavery theory to find the types of slavery contained in Oliver Twist novel. From the results of the analysis, it was found that there are 4 types of slavery in Oliver Twist novel, namely forced labor, sex slavery, child slavery and domestic servitude.

Urban Theme Embodiment in the Novels of Charles Dickens

The article analyzes the features of London image and the representation of urban theme in Charles Dickens’ novels “The Adventures of Oliver Twist”, “Dombey and Son”, “Bleak House”. As anthropomorphic characters of novels, the city acts as a full-fledged artistic image. It is established that London is a center of plot nodes contraction and appears to be versatile and multifaceted. On the one hand, it is a city in which all provincial residents rush. They dream of finding themselves here and occupying a worthy position in life. On the other hand, the writer portrays London as the personification of cold, deceitful relationships, alienation of people in high society. It combines contrasting pictures of luxury and poverty, grandeur and squalor; it lives by a separate independent life and affects the feelings and actions of heroes. The article notes that London is always accompanied by landscape sketches in Dickens' novels. Most often, these are stable and multifunctional images of fog and cold. In the novel “The Adventures of Oliver Twist,” fog and cold become symbols of the concealment of the dirty deeds of the cruel and criminal world of London, in which the protagonist is originally immersed. In the novel “Bleak House”, they are the personification of the Supreme Court, and in “Dombey and Son”, the descriptions of cold, foggy, and gray London represent the cold of human relations that reigns in the family of financial magnate Mr. Dombey.

Characteristics of Tragi-Comedy in Charles Dickens's Novel Oliver Twist

The English novelist Charles John Hoffman Dickens (1812-1870) is well known for scholars and students of English literature. His name is always accompanied to some( classics) in the history of the English novel such as: ( Oliver Twist( 1839), David Copperfield (1850), Hard Times ( 1854 ), The Tale of Two Cities ( 1859 )Great Expectations (1860) and other novels. He is one of the most professional novelists of the Victorian age; rather, he is regarded by many critics as the father of the realistic trend and the greatest novelist of his age.
 In his fiction, Dickens created some of the world's best-known fictional characters that became prototypes not only in English but in world literature as well. Oliver Twist presents a unique depiction of evil and good characters in English society through a highly serious and powerful conflict full of dramatic events like a traditional tragedy, but the line of action turns to satisfaction and happy end just like a work of comedy. This paper claims that the novelist employs the dramatic genre: Tragi-comedy into a novel by mixing elements of both tragedy and comedy. Although the action in the novel is highly tragic and full of miseries and evil plots, the novel ends happily.

A Lexical Analysis of Words Signifying Happiness in Dickens' Novel Oliver Twist

Being a transient state, happiness extends from the highest degree of pleasure to the lowest one. It differs from one person to another. Lexically, happiness can be fulfilled by using certain words that are used to describe this feeling. The existing study tries tofind answers for the subsequent queries:
 
 What are the most common words uttered to express happiness in Dickens' novel Oliver Twist?
 Is there a distinction between happiness and other negative feelings in the texts above?
 Do they all have the same indications of happiness?
 
 This paper aims at:
 
 Examining the semantic aspects of words denoting happiness in Dickens' novel Oliver Twist.
 Identifying the correlation between happiness and other negative feelings in the text above.
 
 3.Investigating the implied meaning of that words used in this particular novel. 

The Two Versions of Sketches of Young Gentlemen

The Two Versions of Sketches of Young Gentlemen William F. Long (bio) In February 1838 Chapman and Hall published a small book written anonymously by Dickens called Sketches of Young Gentlemen. At about the same time, a similarly named volume appeared, the publisher of which claimed that his work had been fraudulently imitated. Consideration of the publication history of the two books, revealed in contemporary press advertisements and notices, allows that claim to be evaluated. Background At the end of June 1837, Chapman and Hall, in addition to bringing out the fifteenth monthly number of “Boz”’s phenomenally successful Pickwick Papers, issued another, more modest pseudonymous production. Sketches of Young Ladies by “Quiz” was a slim volume containing humorous, gently mocking descriptions of 24 contemporary female “types” – “The Literary Young Lady,” “The Abstemious Young Lady,” “The Clever Young Lady” – and so on. Illustrated, like Pickwick, by “Phiz” (Hablot Browne), the book sold well, and by the end of the year was in its fifth edition.1 The identity of its author, a young future cleric called Edward Caswall (ODNB, 1814–78),2 remained unknown until revealed in a biographical note in 1908 (Ballasis). Caswall and Chapman and Hall followed up Young Ladies with a book for children called Morals from the Churchyard; in a Series of Cheerful Fables. In it, graves in a churchyard take turns to tell their (highly moralistic) stories. Illustrated by Browne, Morals was published anonymously to good reviews in December 1837. Caswall claimed later to have also written a companion book to his Young Ladies which contained descriptions of similarly classified young gentlemen, but, “on calm deliberation,” to have “put it aside” and [End Page 7] to have concentrated instead on studying for the ministry.3 Dickens was said to have expressed a wish, presumably at about this time, to meet him (Ballasis 7). No evidence for such a wish (or meeting) is recorded elsewhere. As the 1837 Christmas holiday season approached, Chapman and Hall began a modest press campaign designed to promote items in their current portfolio: Pickwick, the second number of the monthly part issue of Sketches by Boz, Young Ladies, Morals, a book on wines, another on chess, and a few additional “improving” children’s books.4 They did so no doubt elated by a recent formal agreement with Dickens that he produce for them “another and new Book or work the title whereof has not yet been decided on of similar character and of the same extent and contents in point of quantity as the […] work entitled ‘The Posthumous Papers of the Pickwick Club’” (Dickens, Letters 1: 659). In the meantime, their star author, fresh from a triumphal dinner to mark the completion of Pickwick, and the more modest celebrations which accompanied the christening of his first-born, was engaged in editing the monthly Miscellany owned by another publisher, Richard Bentley. To it, he was himself contributing installments of Oliver Twist. He was also, for the same publisher, rather reluctantly converting into something commercially viable an unsatisfactory revision of the memoirs of the clown Grimaldi. In December 1837, then, the possibility of an imminent exploitation of the formula successfully used in Young Ladies is unlikely to have been high on the agenda either of Chapman and Hall, or of Dickens. Such a possibility had occurred, however, to another, enterprising publisher. William Kidd The firm of Edward Chapman and William Hall had begun in the early 1830s as a bookselling establishment and gradually taken on the additional business of publishing. William Kidd’s was one of several other businesses [End Page 8] which, at about the same time, followed the same path. By 1837, Kidd (ODNB, 1803–67)5 was operating from premises in Tavistock Street, Covent Garden. He dealt in a wide variety of what proved to be ephemeral novels, periodicals, pocket-sized travel and guide books, and miscellanies the commercial attractiveness of which lay at least as much in their illustrations as their letterpress. In one such miscellany, in 1834, a snippet of text taken from “The Bloomsbury Christening,” an anonymous story originally published in the Monthly Magazine, had been reproduced without authority as a basis for a small illustration...

A Study of the Use of Satire in the Novels of Charles Dickens with Special Reference to Oliver Twist

This study was designed to examine Dickens' use of satire in his writing style through his Novel Twist” . It examines the author's techniques and effectiveness of the style. The researcher used the conceptual approach to analyze authors' writing style through diction, narrative voice, images. The results of analysis shows that Dicken’s novel Oliver Twist is highly satirical as he uses a lot of really sharp irony-to satirize the various institutions( the parish workhouse system, the justice system, the poor laws, etc) that he thought inhumane and unjust.

Depiction of Human Tragedy in Literary Works

Nickolas Nickleby is a romantic novel written by Charles Dickens, one of the prominent English writer of Elizabethan era remembered as the greatest novelist with his literary contributions in the form of novels, short stories, poetry and plays. Famous works among his numerous writings include “A Message from the Sea”, “Great Expectations”, “Oliver Twist”, and “A Tale of Two Cities”.Nicholas Nickleby is one of examples of the romantic genre in Charles Dickens works and it is his third novel. This novel explores the life and adventures of a young man named Nicholas Nickleby, who has to support his mother and sister, due to unexpected failure of his father. Nicholas Nickleby’s father loses his entire life savings and this results in his death. The family leaves from the comfortable life style and reaches their relative for support. The work shows real human tragedy which is analysed in this article. Keywords : Human tragedy, sense of moral val

THE REFLECTION OF THE WORKING-CLASS LIFE CONDITIONS DURING THE VICTORIAN ERA FOUND IN OLIVER TWIST IN DICKENS’ OLIVER TWIST

This study examines Oliver Twist novel written by Charles Dickens as the object of the research. The aims of this research are to find out the conditions of working-class life during the Victorian era which are reflected in Oliver Twist novel, and to show the way Dickens reflected the conditions of working-class life during the Victorian era in Oliver’s life. This research uses the sociology of literature theory in analyzing the working-class life conditions in the novel. The method of this research belongs to qualitative research, using mimetic approach. The data of this research are words, phrases, sentences and paragraphs that indicated as the working-class life conditions as reflected in the novel. Then the result of the research shows there are seven characteristics of the working-class life condition as reflected in Dickens’ Oliver Twist such as the workhouse, fear and hopelessness, the smallest laborers, a difficult transition, an unsanitary life, crime in the city, and too much convicts; and the way Dickens reflected the working-class life conditions during the Victorian era in the novel through Oliver’s actions, dialogues, speech, thoughts, appearance and the narrations of the story.

The Effects of Canonity and the Authorial Weight in Translating Dickens’ Oliver Twist into Arabic Language

This research investigates whether ‘canonity and authorial weight’ affect the translation product of Charles dickens’ Oliver Twist, and whether the source text (English) aesthetic features are maintained in the target text (Arabic). It aims to link aesthetic features with the figurative elements that are used in the translation which may express the role the authorial weight plays in the translation process. The importance of preserving the author's intended meaning of the source text (SL) in the target language is crucial. Consequently, this research uses a comparative qualitative research analysis that compares two randomly Arabic translations (TT1 and TT2) with the source text (ST) according to canonity and authorial weight features. The features of figurative language are located in the source text (ST) then compared to their counterparts in the target text (TTs). The random sample discussed thoroughly of whether it is equivalents to ST. This study is based on Nida's (1975 & 1964) dynamic or formal equivalence backgrounds. It concludes that figurative elements in translation play a major role in the fluency of the translator taking into the translators' authorial weight in the target language. It also concludes that the translation is affected by the canonity and aesthetic features used.

Reciprocal Teaching Based Augmented Reality for Enhancing English Novel Reading Skills among Secondary Students

This research aimed to enhance secondary students’ reading comprehension and critical reading skills within the narrative text of the assigned novel. The research design was two group pre and post-test experimental design. The participants were 72 1st year secondary school students from an Egyptian public governmental school in Ismailia governorate. They were divided into two groups: Experimental group of 36 students and Control group of 36 students. Chapters five and six in Charles Dickens’ novel (Oliver Twist) assigned for the 1st grade of the secondary stage, were introduced in the second term to the experimental group via reciprocal teaching based augmented reality in order to determine how far it had a positive impact on enhancing the novel reading skills of the experimental group. A novel reading test that was designed by the researcher and validated as a paper-and-pencil test for assessing the 1st year secondary students’ novel reading comprehension and critical reading skills. It was divided into two parts: part one for reading comprehension skills and part two for critical reading skills. The findings revealed that reciprocal teaching based augmented reality had a significant positive effect on the 1st year secondary school students’ target novel reading skills. Consequently, reciprocal teaching based augmented reality was proved to be successful when teaching reading within a narrative context.

Exploring the Concepts of Abuse and Neglect of Children in Victorian Novel: A Revisitation of Dickens’ Works

The long term abuse of children, physically, emotionally, sexually or through neglect can have major long-term effects on all aspects of a child's health, development and well-being. This emotional violence is likely to have a deep impact on the child's self-image and self-esteem, and on his or her future life. This article is a critical exploration of Charles Dickens’ novels, Oliver Twist and David Copperfield that has been slightly adapted from my doctoral dissertation, to pinpoint aspects of moral and physical violence Victorian children are exposed to during the Industrial Revolution in England, in order to examine its impacts on their emotional development and make suggestions for a sustained solutions to the same plights devastating African children.

Passive Voice Transformation

It is well known that the differences between the languages and the different levels of relationship between them and the use of the English passive voice in Albanian language are complex achievements of hypotheses given by language thinkers, because the language first of all is a process and processes change from time to time as a result of new language achievements and transformations and as a result of changes in people's worldview. The English and Albanian passive voice do not have a single grammatical structure and that this should be related to numerous legalities that follow the languages in their internal and external development. The studies carried out in terms of linguistic features, even of the passive voice according to the comparative method, have opened new paths to see similarities and differences even in the passive voice structure. This study is intended to give our modest contribution to notice the similarities and differences in the use of the passive voice as well as its structure in both languages. This contrastive analysis tries to facilitate the acquisition of English as a foreign language for students, pupils, to make the translation from English into Albanian and vice versa easier, to provide linguistic information to language researchers. The comparison is supported by the following English novels and their translated versions in Albanian such as: “Oliver Twist” by Charles Dickens and translated by Skënder Luarasi and “Silas Marner” by George Eliot and translated by Ramazan Hysa, where similar as well as different features have been found.

Child Abandonment in England, 1741–1834: The Case of the London Foundling Hospital

The prevailing view of abandoned children in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries comes from Dickens’ Oliver Twist. Twist was born and raised in a workhouse in nineteenth-century London. However, the workhouse was not the only, or even, the main place to which children were abandoned. The London Foundling Hospital opened in 1741 and, although admission rules were often strict, between the years 1756 and 1760, any child presented to the Hospital was admitted. This article examines the ways in which children were abandoned to the Foundling Hospital and how these children were cared for in the period 1741–1834. It charts the children’s journeys through the Hospital, from their initial abandonment and admission to their eventual discharge—either through death, apprenticeship, or marriage—or their continued residence at the institution. This article provides insights into the multiple experiences of childhood abandonment and details the utility of the Hospital’s surviving records. It argues that children admitted to the London Foundling Hospital received life chances they would otherwise not have received. The Hospital provided nursing, clothing, medical care, both an academic and vocational education, and a living space for those unable to survive alone in adulthood.

Crimes in the 19th Century London in Charles Dickens’ Oliver Twist

The world of literature is the result of human’s culture, where it can be the expression of one’s life experience which is influenced by a certain society of certain period. Practically, literature can sometimes help readers in understanding the condition of the society. Charles Dickens’ Oliver Twist as one of literary works that contains culture and life of Victorian era has described clearly about all the things that is going on in the 19th century of London. The novel satirizes the poor living condition, unemployment, poverty, and social class at that time. It also attacts the Poor Law Amendment Act of 1834 and the workhouse system that causes suffer to the poor and increases crime. Using sociological approach as one of the study that learns about the social condition of certain culture, Crimes in the 19th Century London in Charles Dickens’ Oliver Twist is chosen as the title of the study is to find out the kinds of crimes exist in London and the causing factors that increase the number of crimes. The result of the study shows that the kind of crime exists in the 19th century of London as shown in Oliver Twist is pick-pocketing, thievery, robbery, burglary, house-breaking, and murder. While the causing factors that increase crime are unemployment and poverty, Poor Law Amendment Act of 1834 and the workhouse, and social class and social gap.

Austen and Dickens’s Different Views on Their Female Characters and on Women in Nineteenth Century

By looking at how authors characterize their characters in novels, by analyzing how authors make their characters talk, behave, think, we can catch a glimpse of how they think of their characters, as well as a specific social group those characters represent. In this paper, we will focus on Jane Austen and Charles Dickens’s different views on their female characters’ nature and on nineteenth century women’s nature in general by extension, based on their different female characterizations and their usages of language to do so in Northanger Abbey and Oliver Twist . Generally, this paper reaches the conclusion that Austen rejects female conformity in nineteenth century, while Dickens reinforces it.

Heir Conditioning: Dickens Planning Ahead

Heir Conditioning:Dickens Planning Ahead Robert Tracy (bio) The "purposive" man is always trying to secure a spurious delusive immortality for his acts by pushing his interest in them forward into time: […] by pushing always forward into the future, he strives to secure an immortality. John Maynard Keynes, "Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren." "Everything is some kind of plot, man." Thomas Pyncheon, Gravity's Rainbow. How to end The Pickwick Papers after serial publication in 20 monthly installments (Apr. 1836 – Nov. 1837) "was as little known to [Dickens] as to any of his readers" (Forster 88).1Not until Dombey and Son (1846–48) did he begin preparing careful working plans for each new novel. Before Dombey, how did Dickens end earlier novels without an exit strategy? How would he finally clarify mysterious events that readers had been speculating about for 19 months? His solution was to invent a will, imposing eccentric conditions an heir must meet to inherit, explaining retroactively a story's many mysteries in its final installments. Reporting disputed will cases at Doctors' Commons made him familiar with eccentric bequests: his "POSTSCRIPT in lieu of Preface" for Our Mutual Friend in 1865 tells readers that "[T]here are hundreds of Will Cases […] far more remarkable than that fancied in this book," in the archives at Doctors' [End Page 44] Commons. An eccentric will, invented after serial publication began, provides an exit strategy for Oliver Twist, Nicholas Nickleby and The Old Curiosity Shop. Dickens's imagined testators think like novelists. They write wills that control heirs as novelists control fictional characters. He prepared working plans for every novel after Dombey, but continued introducing wills to explain the mysteries he had invented. Dickens's 1837 preface to Pickwick explains what he learned about serial publication. A novel's "general design" should be "simple enough" to survive "this detached and desultory form of publication." Each number should be "complete in itself," but "form one tolerably harmonious whole." While Pickwick had not been "artfully interwoven or ingeniously complicated," prefaces to later novels emphasize their woven design or pattern – terms Dickens preferred to plot (Little Dorrit, 1857 Preface). Forster met Dickens at Christmas 1836; he soon began urging him to decide how a novel would end before beginning publication. "I was responsible for [the] tragic ending" of The Old Curiosity Shop, he declares, and quotes Dickens's thanks for "your most valued suggestion, to keep my thoughts upon the ending of the tale." Dickens "had not thought of killing [Little Nell], when, about half-way through [publication], I asked him to consider whether it did not necessarily belong even to his own conception, after taking so mere a child through such a tragedy of sorrow, to lift her also out of the commonplace of ordinary happy endings, […] All that I meant he seized at once, and never turned aside from it again" (Forster 150–51). Oliver Twist (Bentley's Miscellany, Feb. 1837–Apr. 1839) begins with Oliver's birth in a workhouse, "badged and ticketed, […] a parish child […] humble half-starved drudge." His mother's death, immediately after giving birth, leaves him without identity and caste: "[I]t would have been hard for the haughtiest stranger to have fixed his station in society" (Oliver Twist I: ch. 1, Feb. 1837, italics mine). Dickens's reference to "station in society" hints that Oliver may not be a typical workhouse child. His language, moral instincts and Cruikshank's illustrations emphasize his difference from Fagin's boys: their "'looks convict 'em when they get into trouble, and I lose 'em all. With this boy, properly managed, […] I could do what I couldn't with twenty of them'" (Twist IX: ch. 19, Dec. 1837). Bentley's readers were well into Oliver Twist before Dickens decided that a will, imposing specific conditions on an heir, could be revealed to explain "More Mysteries Than One" in the final installment: Monks's identity and Fagin's attempts to make Oliver a criminal. Not until the twelfth installment (Bk. II, chap. 26, Mar. 1838), when "a mysterious character," enters, would readers encounter Monks and learn he has already been conspiring with Fagin to involve Oliver in a robbery. Writing to...

Semi-Detached: The Aesthetics of Virtual Experience since Dickens by John Plotz

Reviewed by: Semi-Detached: The Aesthetics of Virtual Experience since Dickens by John Plotz Jonathan Buckmaster John Plotz. Semi-Detached: The Aesthetics of Virtual Experience since Dickens. Princeton and Oxford: Princeton UP, 2018. Pp. xiii + 329. $35.00. ISBN 9781400887850 In this enjoyable and expansive study John Plotz traces the artistic heritage of "semi-detachedness," a condition he characterizes as the "dual experience" (2) of inhabiting both the world of an artwork and the world in which the artwork exists. In his introduction, he offers two illustrative motifs: first, the moment in The Mill on the Floss when the narrator interrupts our observation of Maggie Tulliver to complain about their numb arms leaning on both Dolcote bridge (in the story) and the arms of a chair (from where they narrate the story). Second, we have Ford Madox Ford's description of Impressionism as "real life […] seen through bright glass" (3), whereby one apprehends the world of the painting as if it were real but simultaneously retains an awareness of the distance between [End Page 179] that world and our immediate surroundings. Plotz's primary focus is the novel, and how novelists use the state of semi-detachedness "to make sense of how consciousness, in life as in fiction, can be located in more than one place simultaneously" (13). Drawing on Franco Moretti's description of the "episodic" nature of fiction and Catherine Gallagher's notion of novels as "believable stories that do not solicit belief," Plotz feels that novels not only encourage escapism and "a release into the pleasures of an invented world," but also solicit from their readers "experiential attentiveness to the way the world is" (12). In chapter 1, Plotz reappraises the disregarded form of the mid-Victorian short story as one which "represents and reflects on readerly semi-detachment" (20). He traces short fiction through early experiments in the late Romantic period (such as those of James Hogg and John Galt) and demonstrates how such works were particularly amenable to articulating an experience of semi-detachedness, concerned as they are with "polydoxy" and "shifting frames of believability" (24). Dickens's early sketches build on this "inbetweenness," and counterpoise "detached empirical knowledge of city life" with "the shadowy spaces of individual feeling" (35): for example "Our Next-Door Neighbour" (1836) "toggl[es] between scientific and sentimental forms of knowledge" (36) in a narrative that develops from a comic taxonomy of door knockers and their owners through a world where such facile classifications are exposed as naïve, to end with a narrative of untimely bereavement. For Plotz, the Jamesian "loose, baggy monster" of the novel then began to digest the short story/sketch, first as an interpolated tale (which is digressive, disruptive and disjointed) and later fully integrated as the "pseudo interpolated" tale (which is unifying and complementary). Thus after Pickwick's standalone inset tales Plotz feels that all subsequent tales became absorbed into their "host" novel: Oliver Twist contains stories which initially appear to describe somewhere else, but ultimately "appertain" to the characters of the novel. Monks's narrative of Oliver's genealogy begins as the tale of an unnamed child in a remote place and time, but by the end, his auditor Rose has identified herself as one of its protagonists and Monks's place in the main narrative has been explained. However, Nicholas Nickleby contains both forms of interpolated tale, and one wonders how it might fit Plotz's theory–do they work as unrelated experiences, complement each other, or work against each other? And does the reader's awareness of the difference precipitate a different experience? Post Oliver, tales of family lineage become a popular variant of the pseudo interpolated tale for Dickens; Tulkinghorn relates to Lady Dedlock a thinly-veiled version of her own life story, and Pip becomes the audience for several similar familial narratives. Moreover, Pip himself uses such framing stories [End Page 180] to make (erroneous) sense of the events that shape his life, constructing fantasies around Miss Havisham's plans for him. Dickens reappears in Plotz's first "visual interlude," courtesy of his impassioned polemic against Millais's visual realism, which Plotz calls "a revealing moment" (75) and a...

“The Incident of the Feeding Cup”: Care Dynamics and the Victorian Sickroom Scene

“The Incident of the Feeding Cup”: Care Dynamics and the Victorian Sickroom Scene Maria Frawley (bio) Sugar nips, snail forks, and marrow scoops—anyone who has ever stumbled on Victorian-era tableware in an antique store or browsed a copy of an etiquette guide such as the 1879 Manners and Tone of Good Society is bound to be amused and befuddled by the period’s proliferation of food-service implements. It is no surprise to find among this dizzying catalogue of [End Page 181] objects devices specially designed to facilitate feeding a sick person, among them special feeding straws and spoons, tumblers, and feeding cups or “pap boats” (intended to serve a diluted milk-and-flour mixture to infants as well as the infirm). The gruel that Oliver Twist so famously asks for would have been served up in a lowly and unremarkable basin, but at least some of the more fortunate sick and suffering had their beef tea, gruel, or toast and water served to them in or with a special feeding device (fig. 1). Click for larger view View full resolution Fig. 1. “Invalid feeder, manufactured from 1800 to 1820. Approximately 3.5 by 2.75 inches.” Courtesy of the Edward Hand Medical Museum in Lancaster, Pennsylvania. These devices are powerful tokens of ministration, making visible the actual provision of care that happened within the sickroom. They are tangible reminders of just how much medical care happened within the home in the nineteenth century, and they signal the dynamics of that care, including the fact that someone other than the sick person was responsible for special food preparation, service, and, in many cases, direct help with feeding. In advising her readers to attend to the way food is presented to the sick person, Florence Nightingale, in Notes on Nursing (1859), identified some of the issues at play in food service to the sick. “Keep your patient’s cup dry underneath,” she emphasized, explaining: One very minute caution,—take care not to spill into your patient’s saucer, in other words, take care that the outside bottom rim of his cup shall be quite dry and clear; if every time he lifts his cup to his lips, he has to carry the saucer with it, or else to drop the liquid upon and soil his sheet, or his bed-gown, or pillow, or if he is sitting up, his dress, you have no idea what a difference this minute want of care on your part [End Page 182] makes to his comfort and even to his willingness for food. (52; emphasis Nightingale’s) The thinking behind the design of “invalid feeders” comes into view via Nightingale’s instructions—that is, their built-in “shield” covering half of the vessel’s opening would minimize the chances of spillage and hence the soiling of bed linens. Yet Nightingale’s remarks also betray a power dynamic at play in the demands made of the caretaker, who is assessed by the success of her food service. Isabella Beeton tellingly uses the passage from Nightingale’s work in her Book of Household Management to anchor her chapter on “Invalid Cookery.” The chapter, “A Few Rules to Be Observed in Cooking for Invalids,” like Nightingale’s work, evidences the range of ways that caretakers were admonished to be solicitous in the extreme when caring for the sick. “Never serve beef tea or broth with the smallest particle of fat or grease on the surface,” Beeton cautions at one point (357). “In boiling eggs for invalids, let the white be just set; if boiled hard, they will be likely to disagree with the patient,” she writes at another (357). Whatever the medicinal value of such instructions, it is clear not only that the sick person is imagined as overly sensitive and temperamental (part of the patient’s “sick role”) but that the caretaker, too, has a script, one fraught with expectations for highly attentive service and expert management of a volatile situation. The dynamic informs nearly every cookbook devoted to the care of the sick in the period, as in The Invalid’s Tea Tray, which refers to the “capricious appetite of the invalid” and...

“Our Delectable Works”: Characterological Novelty in Penny “Plagiarisms” of Oliver Twist

“Our Delectable Works”: Characterological Novelty in Penny “Plagiarisms” of Oliver Twist