Oliver Twist is by far
my favourite Dickens novel. It’s not considered his best book and the musical Oliver! is more popular than the book. Seeing the movie version of the musical on TV is how I came to read the book myself when I was maybe twelve. The musical is very romantic, the tunes are catchy and the
boy who played Oliver was very pretty. I had to read the book.
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| Oliver Twist by Charles Dickens |
I wasn’t terribly
surprised that the book was quite different from the musical. Bad things happen
to Oliver and no one bursts to a song to make everything better. It didn’t
matter, because the book ended as it ought to. Good people got their happy
ending and bad people came to their just deserts.
Despite the harsher tone, I didn’t find it a particularly difficult book. Compared with The Black Brothers I had read earlier, a story of little chimney sweeps that is much grimmer
at times, Oliver Twist was an easy story to digest. I was much older before I understood
the wider picture of Victorian London and its poor, and the book got another
dimension.
I had another reason
to like the book too. Around the same time that I read it, our local theatre
produced the musical. There was an open cast call for the child actors and
quite a few from my class attended, me and my best friend among them. Alas, we
weren’t cast – we were too young – but that didn’t diminish our enthusiasm. A
girl we knew, a couple of years older, got the role of Oliver and she was
brilliant. We saw the play many times and enjoyed it every time.
Most importantly,
however, Oliver Twist remains my favourite Dickens because it’s pretty much
the only one of his books that I have managed to complete reading, and not just
once but twice. I find I much prefer his books in visual form. Luckily, there
have been brilliant TV productions of many of his books for me to enjoy. Who
knows, maybe one of them inspires me to take up the book too.
Here's a scene from a stage version of Oliver! that is both grim and overly romantic, Nancy's song As Long as He Needs Me.
