ABSTRACT

Critics of Oliver Twist tend to assess either its psychological or its social truthfulness. The psychological critics focus on intuitive inspiration or compulsive fantasy. John Carey sees it as a reliving of the traumatic blacking factory episode in Dickens's youth: 'To the blacking factory, in one guise or another,' he writes, 'the evil spirits of the novel naturally flock.'1 John Bayley suggests that Dickens's lack of modern selfconsciousness accounts for his failure to distinguish between the truths of realism and those of fantasy. Dickens is 'all unknowing' about the effect of his work, his symbolism being involuntary and his greatest satirical effects unbargained for.2 In arguments of this sort, the novel's strength is said to derive from direct communication between Dickens's pen and his unconscious, one consequence of which is technical crudity more deliberate writing would have avoided, along with factual uncertainties about the details of the workings of the Poor Law, and the legal penalties for receiving stolen goods. To compensate Dickens is said to generate, through a dream-like childhood fantasy of Gothic terror, that essential isolation of the individual which was the chief mark of developing industrial society (John Bayley, 'Things as They Really Are', p. 64.) or a mythical, Manichaean universe, in which the powers of good and evil are in eternal conflict (Graham Greene).3