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This chapter is a case study of the transformation of Oliver Twist into a cultural myth via the screen. It assumes that the text and its mass cultural dissemination are both typical and exceptional in the history of Dickens on screen: like other Dickens's ‘culture‐texts’, Oliver Twist has been popular with large numbers of people, but Oliver Twist is unlike other Dickens texts in the extent to which it has caused political controversy. In particular, the chapter highlights the controversy about anti‐Semitism surrounding David Lean's post‐war adaptation of the novel, which generated an ‘anxiety of influence’ among subsequent directors. It charts the ways in which the cultural myth that is Oliver Twist has metamorphosed in response to trauma in a process of cultural evolution which tells us much about the complex dynamics of mass culture, neither wholly imperialist nor blandly politically correct. The mass cultural repetition of Dickens's moving images, together with the segmentation of the modern cultural marketplace, have made it harder to produce adaptations of his work that achieve the combination of phenomenal mass appeal and the radical political impact which was associated with Dickens—despite accusations of anti‐Semitism ‐ when Oliver Twist first appeared. The chapter maintains that though Dickens's ongoing ability to command extra‐literary attention is arguably radical in itself, many modern adapters of Dickens seem to feel the need to choose between commercial and political Dickens.

This chapter examines a central moment in the development of moral narrative practices—one that is, at the same time, a moment in the coming into being of “the Victorian novel.” Looking at Charles Dickens's Oliver Twist and the “Newgate novel” controversy of the 1830s, it offers an example of one way in which the experience of diachronic reading could be interpreted in an explicitly moral fashion. Oliver Twist was to be distinguished from other similar novels, and particularly from William Harrison Ainsworth's Jack Sheppard, because of the ways in which it appealed to the moral sensibilities of its reader: “natural sentiment,” “moral sense.” The general implications seem clear enough: Oliver Twist is more appealing to its readers' moral feelings because it has other, “healthier,” focuses than crime alone. According to the novel's reviewers, Oliver Twist might feature crime, but unlike Jack Sheppard, crime is not the novel's subject. Ultimately, what a survey of the discourse surrounding Newgate novels makes clear is how debated this question of subject matter actually was.

This chapter tracks multiple ways in which Oliver Twist and London’s cityscape were adapted for the stage in the late 1830s. It argues that London was a flexible frame through which the audience’s reception of Dickens’s work was mediated in early dramatisations, but also that the novel was imaginatively mapped on to the built environment. For example, Sadler’s Wells emphasise the proximity of the criminal scenes by staging their adaptation as a local drama, while the Surrey Theatre presents their play as an opportunity for armchair tourism. In staging alternative versions of the city, theatres presented differently nuanced portrayals of its inhabitants and perceived social problems. The dynamic re-presentation of Oliver Twist in early theatrical adaptations is thereby indicative of the malleability of Dickensian afterlives in nineteenth-century improvement debates, and these plays were likewise supposed to have an effect on contemporary city-life. Playscripts, stagecraft, actors’ performances, music, and the perceived identities of theatres and their audiences each played a role in curating these representations, and so this chapter adopts an intertheatrical methodology.

This chapter traces the evolution of the figure of the neighbor-disguised-as-stranger and its narrative role across the oeuvre of Charles Dickens, locating the precursor for the queer narrative shift of Joyce and Proust in the criminal or ad hoc antifamilies that cluster in the underworld of Dickens's London. In Oliver Twist, Bleak House, and Great Expectations, the plot is animated by a competition between rival versions of the family, genealogical and queer, for control of the protagonists' destinies and the form of the plot. The outcome of this competition shifts over the course of Dickens's career; in Great Expectations, the various genealogical plots that try and fail to control the novel's form are eventually overwhelmed by the force of a random encounter with a criminal stranger that no family denouement can untie.

Field Lane was envisioned as a nexus of crime, overcrowding, foreignness, social unrest and insanitary conditions in representations of the district in multiple media and contexts in the mid-nineteenth century. In London more widely, these anxieties helped to shape how improvements were conceived, and which places were targeted for demolition. This chapter presents evidence that the improvements promised by advocates of Field Lane’s redevelopment were repeatedly articulated and conceptualised through references to Oliver Twist. For example, by emphasising its association with Fagin and Bill Sikes to draw attention to the slum as a dangerous locale. Focusing on appropriations of Dickens’s works in newspapers, periodicals and parliamentary debates, the chapter traces a proliferation of Dickensian afterlives in commentaries on Field Lane’s improvement before, during and after its demolition. Of course, as is the case with all the afterlives analysed in this book, the novel was variously appropriated, even when users commented on the same site or descriptive passage. However, it is in this instability that we can see how Dickensian afterlives were put to work in arguments for Field Lane’s demolition. His fiction provided a mobile and rhetorically effective vocabulary, which was easily manipulated to serve numerous interests.

This chapter argues that we can track Dickensian afterlives in both the cultural processes by which cultural memories of Jacob’s Island have been constructed, and the processes that drove its material destruction earlier in the nineteenth century. Linked to outbreaks of cholera in the 1830s and 1840s, the slum was widely treated as a symbol which could help to galvanize metropolitan sanitary reform. Dickens’s representation of the site in Oliver Twist was repeatedly brought into these debates. The author was deeply invested in efforts to improve London’s sanitation, and like other commentators he returned to his early novel to support his campaigns. Both Dickens and other commentators presented Oliver Twist as an urgent call for contemporary reform; however, the novel’s afterlives soon changed in tone. As early as the 1870s, press commentators responded to the area’s physical alteration and evoked Oliver Twist as a record of a bygone city. By the 1880s, artists and writers nostalgically reimagined Dickens’s account of the site in an urban picturesque aesthetic. Today, Dickens is part of a heritage trail in the district, even though his representation also played a part in the demolition of Jacob’s Island.

This chapter discusses popular culture, pleasure, and the politics of genre. The term ‘Newgate’ refers to the famous prison destroyed by fire in 1780 and to The Newgate Calendar; or, The Malefactors' Bloody Register, a popular collection of criminal biographies published in 1773. The ‘Newgate’ tag was used insultingly by commentators about a series of novels published between 1830 and 1847 which had ‘criminals as prominent characters’. As Oliver Twist was published in serial form between 1837 and 1839 in Bentley's Miscellany, it was inevitable that it would be labelled a Newgate novel. The fact that Dickens chose to write Oliver Twist, with its rogues' gallery, despite critical antipathy to books about criminals, shows a typical Dickensian blend of courage and opportunism. The objections to Oliver Twist are out of step with other reviews of the novel, which were largely favourable when the first edition was published in book form.

These final chapters discuss how two vastly different reworkings of Dickens’s Oliver Twist serve as distinct examples of the problems of adaptation as a method of resistance. Viewing Oliver’s marginalized status within the context of postcolonial theory highlights parallels between domestic orphans and populations colonized by the British imperial project. Turning to Tim Greene’s independently financed, internationally distributed adaptation Boy Called Twist (2004), I highlight the director’s use of orphanhood to address both the poverty and AIDS epidemic that erupted in the wake of Britain’s imperial control of the region as well as the contemporary cooption of the “global orphan” by foreign governments and non-governmental aid organizations (NGOs) that frames transnational aid discourse. Applying Dickens’s social concerns to the orphans of post-Apartheid South Africa and appropriating Dickens’ racial depictions of characters such as Fagin to represent South Africa’s black and Muslim communities, Greene’s film exposes ties between Victorian England’s domestic and imperial policies, making parallels to the contemporary dynamic occurring between industrialized countries and developing nations.

The conclusion looks forward from the Victorian illustrated book to the “graphic classics,” a form of modern popular culture that is arguably the heir of the Victorian illustrated book. Canonical texts adapted into graphic novel format are inheritors of the aesthetic conventions of caricature and realism, reshaped in a hyper-modern form to appeal to twenty-first-century readers. The chapter explores parallels between the serial and the comic book. It surveys graphic novel adaptations of nineteenth-century novels by Jane Austen, Charlotte and Emily Brontë, Charles Dickens, and Anthony Trollope as well as Neo-Victorian graphic novels (e.g. League of Extraordinary Gentlemen) and original Victorian-themed graphic novels (e.g. Batman Noël). The conclusion focuses on two important Victorian illustrated books—Dickens’s Oliver Twist (1838) and Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland (1865)—to demonstrate how graphic novel adaptation is reviving a genre that a century before recognized pictures play a central role in plot and character development. This chapter foregrounds author-illustrator Will Eisner, the father of the graphic novel and author-illustrator of Fagin the Jew (2003), for his direct challenge to a religious and ethnic stereotype that Dickens and Cruikshank develop in Oliver Twist and Du Maurier carries into Trilby.

This chapter provides context for the emergence of Oliver! by analyzing the musical’s development in the framework of various cultural and theatrical movements. Oliver!’s popularity is rooted in the enduring power of Dickens’s Oliver Twist, which had already become ingrained in Western culture from myriad theatrical and cinematic adaptations, including the all-important David Lean film. Bart’s adaptation built off this Dickensian tradition, though it was simultaneously shaped by the development of the postwar English theater through the efforts of the “angry young men” such as John Osborne and Arnold Wesker. Much as Osborne and Wesker moved the English drama away from the upper-middle-class drawing-room comedy, Lionel Bart moved the English musical away from comic opera and operetta and toward a cockney working-class musical tradition. The chapter concludes by tracing Bart’s early career and his work on music-hall style musicals at Unity Theatre and Theatre Workshop.

How do scholars historicize bodies of literary writing? This chapter uses Lin Shu and Wei Yi’s versions of Charles Dickens to reconsider late-Qing “exposure fiction” (qianze xiaoshuo) and the novel as a transnational mode for critique and promotion of social reform. In works such as A History of Thieves (Zei shi, 1908), a rendition of Oliver Twist, Lin Shu reworked Dickens’s rhetoric of reform both to correct the excesses of popular exposure fiction and to draw parallels between the social dislocation resulting from industrial modernization in nineteenth-century England and contemporary China. Ultimately, these works represent a lost link in understanding how the full-length novel came to be presented in China as a self-consciously international form that could grasp the global reach of capital and attendant social change.

This chapter examines the influence of Charles Dickens and G. W. M. Reynolds on the changes in the Gothic fiction landscape in England during the mid-Victorian period. It suggests that the works of these two authors mapped out and located terrors and mysteries in criminalized districts in the heart of London. It argues that such works as Oliver Twist, The Mysteries of London, and Bleak House were adapted to serve new emphases and needs that were shaping the perception of London and its problems at this time.

This chapter presents a reading of Oliver!, focusing primarily on the four “love stories” that define the narrative: (1) Oliver’s search for love, (2) Nancy and Sykes’s tragic relationship, (3) Fagin’s relationship with the boys in his gang, (4) the courtship between Mr. Bumble and Mrs. Corney. Bart connected all four narrative threads back to the central question of “Where Is Love?”, as posed in Oliver’s key song. Though Bart’s adaptation presents a more uplifting and less brutal narrative than Dickens’s novel, Oliver! nevertheless poses several complicated questions regarding the fragile nature of love and community. The chapter assesses Oliver’s complex relationship with Fagin and the thieves and draws attention to how the songs and orchestral underscoring frequently convey the subversive notion that Oliver would be better off in the working-class, music-hall community of Fagin and his gang than in the middle-class, respectable community of Mr. Brownlow’s house.

This chapter examines Charles Dickens's most famous characters, Oliver Twist in The Adventures of Oliver Twist; or, The Parish Boy's Progress (1837–39), David Copperfield in The Personal History of David Copperfield (1849–50), and Pip in Great Expectations (1861). Dickens used Oliver Twist, an unchanging saintly victim that represents the principle of Good, as an icon who could reform the criminally negligent society by arousing sympathy in others. On the other hand, Dickens used David Copperfield, a self-liberating artist, to construct an exemplary case of child development, of hard-worn personal and professional self-creation. But in Great Expectations, Dickens diverts from the common coming-of-age story, and shows not a triumphant progress, but a decline into stoic moral realism. Dickens portrays Pip as a sterile disillusioned exile destroyed by his fairytale fantasies, reflecting the then impoverished British culture and society.

This chapter begins by investigating Dickens's creation of narrative plots around the functions of the associative memory in Sketches by Boz and Nicholas Nickleby. Focusing in turn on Oliver Twist, The Old Curiosity Shop, and Little Dorrit, the chapter shows how these serials extend the associative powers of memory beyond the narrative itself, working out a technique to pattern the reader's own associations with the novel, or pleasures of memory, by creating memories of reading that become analogous to everyday experience through repeated and collective re-reading. Each of these techniques also involves framing the facsimile experience generated by serial reading as “epitaphic,” or as working through prosopopoeia, by invoking a character, a memory, or the figure of the author as its personification. In this way, reading becomes a means of connecting with absent others and thus a form of cultural memory. By analogy, readers' shared memories of reading Dickens's serial novels leverage participation in a reading audience that could also function as a social activist constituency for solving the problem of poverty.

This book has investigated the antisemitism at work in English texts, showing that such texts contain offensive fantasies about a supposed “Jewish” menace that stand in tension with counternarratives about an English Christian reliance on, desire for, and similitude to the “Jewish” materialisms Christianity claims to reject. Representations of the accommodated Jew thus reveal both an offensive politics of rejection and an ideological embrace of the Jew as a tool for accommodating the English to their messy urban materialisms. This coda discusses the implications of the book's findings for later English images of the Jew as they appear in Charles Dickens's novel Oliver Twist. It argues that Oliver Twist complicates received notions of the Jewish house through the juxtaposition of scenes of locking, containment, and enclosure with the portrayal of unwieldy and transgressive flows, circulations, and currents. It also considers how interaction with Jews prompts a reform in Dickens, leading him to offer an account that radically departs from the antisemitic images of Oliver Twist.

This concluding chapter discusses Danny Boyle’s Oscar-winning Slumdog Millionaire as both an adaptation of Oliver Twistand—along with Anthony Minghella’s adaptation of The English Patient (1996)—the most famous example of a postcolonial novel reabsorbed into a global imperial context. Excising Vikas Swarup’s subversive rewriting of Oliver Twist in his source text, Q&A, Boyle’s film streamlines the narrative into Hollywood genres accented with Bollywood conventions while presenting India as a nation of others, far removed from the ramifications of British imperialism and benefiting from the structures of the globalized world such as the transnational quiz show that fuels its lead’s rise from the slums. Through examinations of Swarup’s novel and Boyle’s film, this chapter demonstrates the importance of interfidelity to the adaptation process, especially as Hollywood and other national film industries operate under an ever evolving globalized business model that controls representations of postcolonial nations.

This chapter is divided into discussions of Dickens’s Oliver Twist and Hardy’s The Mayor of Casterbridge. For both novels it considers the framing of class identity and realist uniqueness as simultaneously grounded in the real and as products of fantasy, especially in the mapping of class onto family articulated by Freud’s idea of the family romance. Both novels use the fantasmatic device of coincidence to shore up the reality of familial connections. The chapter also discusses the structuring of realist character in the blankness and fungibility of Dickens’s Oliver and Hardy’s Elizabeth-Jane, as well as the idea of secondariness in the latter, continuing a discussion of the tension between realist subjectivity and uniqueness, on the one hand, and a sensational emphasis on position on the other that began in chapter 1 and continues throughout the book.