ABSTRACT
There are many examples from Charles Dickens's novels which one could choose to demonstrate the Gothic element in his work. Oliver Twist has been chosen less because it is a particularly blatant instance of fictional terror than because of the extraordinary hold which it still retains over the popular imagination. For Oliver Twist is a hideously violent book, more disturbing than even G. W. M. Reynolds's stories. Dickens was conscious, as was Lytton, that the Newgate novel was only the descendant of the diabolical in earlier romance, a particular contemporary modification of the tradition of terror. John Bayley writes that his main feat, in Oliver Twist in particular, is in combining the genre of Gothic nightmare with that of social denunciation. For Oliver Twist is a hideously violent book, more disturbing than even Reynolds's stories. Part of Dickens's great originality, of course, lies in his location of the scenes of persecution and corruption in a richly recognisable contemporary London.
