ABSTRACT
Everyone knows Oliver Twist as a great work of social comment. The image of Oliver ‘asking for more’, popularized through illustration and film and stage adaptation, has become part of the staple iconography of protest against the inhumanity of humankind. A recent critic sees in the depiction of Oliver’s oversize spoon rising at a forty-five degree angle from his groin towards the open mouth of the overseer in Cruikshank’s original engraving a reference to deviant sexual practice.1 Whether we accept this or not – and there is indeed no reason to think that children were less vulnerable in Victorian institutions than in our own – it is certain that the purpose of the early parts of the novel was an exposé of brutality involving physical and mental abuse. In this we are aware, of course, not only of oppression itself but of a challenge to the system that produces it. Oliver’s erect spoon may also be read as an act of thrusting self-assertion. His confrontation with the poorhouse authorities – on this occasion the middle management – mirrors Dickens’s robust indictment of a whole political philosophy and regime. Both Oliver and his creator are in their ways cocking a snook: the former desperately, bodily, in an involuntary gesture of want and defiance; the latter cerebrally, with a characteristic mix of calculated and rough deliberation.
