Name Dhruvi Chavda
Roll no:6
Assignment: Oliver Twist as the macabre of childhood:

Oliver Twist as the macabre of childhood:

About Charles Dickens:-

·      Charles John Huffam Dickens is the full name of Dickens.

·      He was born on 7 February 1812 and died on 9 June 1870.

·      He was an English writer and social critic.

·     He created some of the world's most well-known fictional characters and is generally regarded as the greatest novelist of the Victorian period.

^·        During his period, his works enjoyed unprecedented popularity, and by the twentieth century he was widely seen as a literary genius by critics and scholars.

^·        His novels and short stories continue to be widely popular.

^·        Charles Dickens wrote many works during his period.

His major works are as under:

Sketches by Boz (1836) 

The Pickwick Papers (1837) 

Oliver Twist (1839) 

Nicholas Nickleby (1839) 

The Old Curiosity Shop (1841) 

Barnaby Rudge (1841)

 
A Christmas Carol (1843) 

The Life and Adventures of Martin Chuzzlewit (1844)

 
Dombey and Son (1848) 

David Copperfield (1850) Bleak House (1853) 

Hard Times (1854) 

Little Dorrit (1857) 

A Tale of Two Cities (1859) 

Great Expectations (1861)

 
Our Mutual Friend (1865) 

The Mystery of Edwin Drood (1870)     

About “Oliver Twist”:-     

Oliver Twist is one of his best works. It is the    story of a young orphan boy, Oliver, and his attempts to stay good in a society that refuses to help. Oliver Twist shows perfectly how children were abused in Victorian era. Oliver is born in a workhouse, to a mother not known to anyone in the town. She dies right after giving birth to him, and Oliver is sent to the parochial orphanage, where he and the other orphans are treated terribly and fed very little. They were suffering from slow starvation. When he turns nine, he is sent to the workhouse, where again he and the others are treated badly and practically starved.

 

The other boys, unable to stand their hunger any longer, decide to draw straws to choose who will have to go up and ask for more food. Oliver loses. On the appointed day, after finishing his first serving of gruel, he goes up and asks for more. Mr. Bumble, the beadle, and the board are outraged, and decide they must get rid of Oliver, apprenticing him to the parochial undertaker, Mr. Sowerberry. It is not great there either, and after an attack on his mother’s memory, Oliver runs away. Oliver walks towards London. When he is close, he is so weak he can barely continue, and he meets another boy named Jack Dawkins, or the artful Dodger. The Dodger tells Oliver he can come with him to a place where a gentleman will give him a place to sleep and food, for no rent. Oliver follows, and the Dodger takes him to an apartment in London where he meets Fagin, the aforementioned gentleman, and Oliver is offered a place to stay. Oliver eventually learns that Fagin’s boys are all pickpockets and thieves, but not until he is wrongfully accused of their crime of stealing an old gentleman’s handkerchief. He is arrested, but the bookseller comes just in time to the court and says that he saw that Oliver did not do it. The gentleman whose handkerchief was taken, Mr. Brownlow, feels bad for Oliver, and takes him in. Oliver is very happy with Mr. Brownlow, but Fagin and his co-conspirators are not happy to have lost Oliver, who may give away their hiding place. So one day, when Mr. Brownlow entrusts Oliver to return some books to the bookseller for him, Nancy spots Oliver, and kidnaps him, taking him back to Fagin.  Charles Dickens shows The Victorian England the time of “Oliver Twist”.

What is Macabre?

• Having death as a subject.

• Things that involve the horror of death or violence.

 • A story involves lots of blood and gore.

The word macabre comes from the Middle French phrase Danse Macabré, "the Dance of Death," which was a popularsubject of art and literature in the late Middle Ages. The original meaning of Macabré in the French termDanse Macabré is not known with any certainty, but it may be an alteration of Old French Macabe, "a Maccabee." The Maccabees were Jewish martyrs honored by a feast day in the Western Church.

We also can say that these are the adjective of macabre: gruesome, grim, ghastly, frightening, ghostly, weird, dreadful, unearthly, hideous, eerie, grisly, horrid, morbid,frightful, ghoulish.

Macabre of childhood in ‘Oliver Twist’:-

Dickens presents a portrait of the macabre childhood of a considerable number of Victorian orphans. The character of Oliver Twist represents the situation of Child labor. Fagin, a devil figure, corrupts all the children he meets, making them work as thieves in exchange for a macabre sense of 'the home' and 'the family'. G. K. Chesterton: “ A modern realist describing the dreary  workhouse would have made all the children utterly crushed, not daring to speak at all, not expecting anything, not hoping anything, past all possibility of affording even an ironical contrast or a protest of despair. A modern, in short, would have made all the boys in the workhouse pathetic because he is pessimists. But Oliver Twist is not pathetic because  he is pessimist. Oliver Twist is pathetic because he is an optimist. The whole tragedy of that incident is in fact that he does expect the universe to be kind to him, that he does believe that he is living in a just world. He comes before the Guardians …… with gloomy experiences, but he comes with a happy philosophy. Dickens knows that there are wrongs of man to be cursed; but he believes also that there are rights of man to be demanded.

Oliver Twist plunges into a confined world of darkness, and oppressive, lurid intensity from the workhouse to the criminal slum and the jail. In its heart lurks the smoky and fetid thieves’ kitchen where the Artful Dodger leers and Fagin grins in mirth through the greasy air. Almost all its interiors are bleak and gloomy: the workhouse where half-starved boys whimper with hunger in the bare stone hall and scrawny hags hang over the beds of the dying, the peephole back room of the Three Cripples, the ruined warehouse where Monks terrifies Bumble by night. Eve when Oliver rests asleep at Mrs. Maylie’s just beyond the window loom Fagin ad Monks, darkening the sunlight like two monstrous demons. The very outdoors huddle under a heavy sky of evil. Nancy lurks in black shadow on the slimy steps of London Bridge; Sikes wanders in horror-haunted flight away from and back to the city, the waving torches glimmer on the mud of Folly Ditch while the murderer clambers over the titles of the barricaded house. And the end narrows in relentlessly with Fagin cowered in the condemned cell, gnawing his nails and glaring at the close wall.”

Child abasement: -

Boys treated as a labor and they starving for needy stomach. When we read the story we can feel humiliations and helpless condition of orphan children. In workhouse all the children are treated terribly and fed very little. He observes and describes many categories of child abasement. Oliver's mother dies in childbirth. She is attended by a drunken “midwife” and an uncaring doctor. The infant is turned over to a baby farm and later the workhouse itself. The children here are neglected, barely fed or clothed. Oliver Twist's ninth birthday found him

“a pale thin child, somewhat diminutive in stature, and decidedly small in circumference”.

 They were also adult love or affection and constantly criticized. Up to his ninth birthday, Oliver was said to have come

 “from the wretched home where one kind word or look had never lighted the gloom of his infant years”.

 “a naughty orphan which nobody can't love”.

 “Tortures of slow starvation”:-

Nine-year-old Oliver is a resident in the parish workhouse where the Oliver, boys are "issued three meals of thin gruel a day, with an onion twice a volte week, and half a roll on Sundays." The workhouse is run by Bumble the Beadle; Limbkins is Chairman of the Board of Guardians for the workhouse. The room, in which the boys were fed.  The bowls never wanted washing. The boys polished them with their spoons till they shone again; and when they had performed this operation. Oliver Twist and his companions suffered the tortures of slow starvation for three months: at last they got so voracious and wild with hunger, that one boy, who was tall for his age, and hadn't been used to that sort of thing (for his father had kept a small cook-shop), hinted darkly to his companions, that unless he had another basin of gruel per diem, he was afraid he might some night happen to eat the boy who slept next him, who happened to be a weakly youth of tender age. Child as he was, he was desperate with hunger, and reckless with misery. He rose from the table; and advancing to the master, basin and spoon in hand, said: somewhat alarmed at his own temerity:

 'Please, sir, I want some more.'

The master was a fat, healthy man; but he turned very pale. 'What!' said the master at length, in a faint voice?

Oliver replied 'Please, sir, I want some more.'

The master aimed a blow at Oliver's head with the ladle.

Conclusion: - Charles Dickens’ portray of character and a situation of Orphan child in the Victorian era is highlighted very properly. In which orphan child, a deadly way to go every misery comes in their way. “It’s an already a 230 macabre of childhood”.