A literary analysis of oliver twist by charles dickens

Dickens was already famous inbut the sales of the recent installments of Martin Chuzzlewit were less than half of what he had received for the individual numbers of his previous novels. His publishers Chapman and Hall were so alarmed that they invoked a clause in Dickens contract which demanded that they be reimbursed for the printing cost of the Chuzzlewit installments. Dickens was alarmed too, but also hurt, offended A large mortgage payment would soon be due, and his wife had just given birth to their fifth child.

Dickens's novels combine brutality with fairy-tale fantasy; sharp, realistic, concrete detail with romance, farce, and melodrama. They range through the comic, tender, dramatic, sentimental, grotesque, melodramatic, horrible, eccentric, mysterious, violent, romantic, and morally earnest.

Though Dickens was aware of what his readers wanted and was determined to make as much money as he could with his writing, he believed novels had a moral purpose—to arouse innate moral sentiments and to encourage virtuous behavior in readers.

It was his moral purpose that led the London Times to call Dickens "the greatest instructor of the Nineteenth Century" in his obituary.

During his lifetime, Charles Dickens was the most famous writer in Europe and America. When he visited America to give a series of lectures, his admirers followed him, waited outside his hotel, peered in windows at him, and harassed him in railway cars.

In their enthusiasm, Dickens's admirers behaved very much like the fans of a superstar today. It is an exuberantly comic novel with almost no shadows, and readers expected all of his novels to follow this pattern.

His next two novels, Oliver Twist and Nicholas Nickelby, fit readers' expectations well enough, and they overlooked the social problems he exposed. As he aged, Dickens's view of his society and human nature grew increasingly somber, a fact which disturbed many readers and critics.

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A Tale of Two Cities was attacked for having little, if any humor. He deliberately addressed their discontent when he wrote Great Expectations, which he affirmed was written "in a most singular and comic manner.

You will not have to complain of the want of humour as in The Tale of Two Cities. I have made the opening, I hope, in its general effect exceedingly droll.

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I have put a child and a good-natured foolish man, in relations that seem to me very funny. Of course I have got in the pivot on which the story will turn too—and which indeed, as you will remember, was the grotesque tragi-comic conception that first encouraged me.

To be quite sure that I had fallen into no unconscious repetitions, I read David Copperfield again the other day, and was affected by it to a degree you would hardly believe.

After his death, his literary reputation waned and his novels tended not to be taken seriously. The novelist George Meredith found them intellectually lacking: Not much of Dickens will live, because it has so little correspondence to life.

He was the incarnation of cockneydom, a caricaturist who aped the moralist; he should have kept to short stories. If his novels are read at all in the future, people will wonder what we saw in them.

There was a tendency to see his novels as appropriate for children and young adults. From through the early part of the twentieth century, Russian writers came into vogue and were generally regarded as superior to Dickens.

This preference is ironic because the Russian novelists both admired Dickens and learned from him.

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Tolstoi wrote of Dickens, "All his characters are my personal friends—I am constantly comparing them with living persons, and living persons with them, and what a spirit there was in all he wrote.

Even if this story is apocryphal, Dickens' influence on Uncle's Dream and The Friend of the Familywritten while Dostoevsky was in Siberia, is unmistakable.

In yet another irony, English critics in the s were puzzled by Dostoevsky's similarities to Dickens.Literary Criticism of Oliver Twist Charles Dickens shows notable amounts of originality and morality in his novels, making him one of the most renowned novelists of the Victorian Era and immortalizing him through his great novels and short stories.

Oliver Twist study guide contains a biography of Charles Dickens, literature essays, a complete e-text, quiz questions, major themes, characters, and a full summary and analysis. Literary Devices in Oliver Twist Symbolism, Imagery, Allegory Fagin goes into "a maze of the mean dirty streets which abound in that close and densely-populated quarter" (), and Sikes and Nancy drag Oliver "into a maze of dark, narrow courts ().

A Christmas Carol has , ratings and 13, reviews. Bookdragon Sean said: I read this every year at Christmas, and I always will do. Simply because. Gerike 10 My Analysis: Oliver Twist is used by Charles Dickens to try and bring about awareness for the suffering of the poor in Victorian society.

One facet of society that Dickens was almost certainly attacking was the New Poor Law/5(3). Oliver Twist contains dozens of literary devices, but I can get you started with a couple of them. One literary device that Dickens used in this story is narrative point of view.