OLIVER TWIST

-interpretation-
Name: Răcăreanu Alexandra

Age: 13

Institution: Clubul Copiilor Filiași

Coordinator’s name: Stanciu Oana

Charles Dickens was one of the most popular writers of all time, creating
some of the best-known characters in English literature. Dickens begun writing
“Oliver Twist” in 1837, shortly after becoming a father for the first time.

I read this book last summer and I liked it very much, because it is full of
unexpected developments and unlikely which were much loved by nineteenth
century. Oliver Twist is the main character of the novel with the same name.
Oliver’s young mother dies giving birth to him and the child is brought up in a
workhouse, always hungry and cruelly treated. After working for a time for an
undertaker, Oliver runs away to London, where he meets a young thief, the Artful
Dodger, and his friends. The band of pickpockets work and live with the evil
Fagin, who welcomes Oliver to his home. When Oliver realizes what the boys are
doing, he tries to escape. Fagin hires Bill Sikes, a violent criminal, to get the boy
back again, but Oliver has made new friends who want to protect him. The
struggles between these friends and the evil men who want to silence Oliver
becomes an exciting and dramatic adventure.

I chose to comment this fragment because it remained deeply printed in my

mind after I had read this book and it impressed me a lot. This fragment surprises
the best a declind world, a world full of cheartless people, everybody fighting for
his own interest, without taking care for the others.

This fragment also presents Oliver spending his ninth birthday in a coal
cellar and he is taken by Mr. Bumble again at his workhouse. Here, he is punished
and closed into a cellar after he had dared to ask for more soap. After this
occurrence, a notice was put at the gate, offering a reward of 5 pounds to anybody
who would take Oliver Twist away from the workhouse.

The author describes Mr Bumble, a workhose official: “ a fat man, full of

a sense of his own importance”, the man who comes to take Oliver from the
workhouse. Also, the author makes a portrtait to Mr. Limbkins: “the master was a
fat, healthy man, but turned very pale. He started with horror and amazement at the
small boy for some seconds…”.

From these passages, we can notice that Oliver lives in a world where he
cannot express humself: “Oliver was about to say that he would be happy to go
along with anybody”, when he observed Mrs Mann making threatening gestures at
him. He is forced to ask Mr Bumble if Mrs Mann will go with him and he is also
forced to pretend to be unhappy at going to Mr Bumble. He had to listen his
“protectors” or if he did not, he should have supported the conseqences. The only
reason for that he could naturally cry is hungry: “Oliver cried very naturally
indeed”, not because he had to go away with the official, as Mrs Mann would have
liked.

Further on, there is described the life in the workhouse like one very sever
indeed, where the children were hungry and obeyed to work from early years. The
phrases: “The bowls never needed washing. The boys polished them with their
spoons till they shone again and when they had performed this operation, they
would sit staring eagerly at the huge pot, as if they could have eaten too”, can not
been passed unnoticeable. This scene is absolutely unhuman. How could the
officials have been indifferent to those poor and innocent children’s hunger ? Also,
the episode in which Oliver is punished because he had dared to ask for more food
is absolutely terrifying . How can you blame a child only because he said he was
hungry ? How could the official say he will be hanged one day ?

In conclusion, this fragment from “Oliver Twist” made me understand better

that we have to be satisfied by the material and spiritual conditions in which we are
living and to think that there are still and existed in the world a lot of children and
people who are hungry , suffer from violence and bad treatment and that we should
make something to help them surpass those problems !