Mr brownlow's interest in oliver twist

Journal of Victorian Culture

Volumn 6, Issue 1, 2001, Pages 46-60

  Schattschneider, Laura ^a  

^a NONE

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EID: 61049298972     PISSN: 13555502     EISSN: 17500133     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.3366/jvc.2001.6.1.46     Document Type: Article

References (19)

1. Henriques', U.R.Q., 1967. ‘Bastardy and the New Poor Law’. Past and Present, 37 July:103–29. article, summarizes the New Poor Law's bastardy clauses and the supposed wrongs they were written to redress.
2. Dickens, Charles. 1993. “ Oliver Twist ”. In Fred Kaplan 357New York:W.W. Norton and Company, Inc. All subsequent references are to this edition and appear parenthetically in the text as OT.
3. Martineau, Harriet. 1833. “ ‘The Parish’ ”. In Poor Laws and Paupers Illustrated Vol. 1, 180–3. London:Charles Fox, 67 Paternoster Row. I am grateful to Paul Schlicke for his suggestion at the 1998 Leeds Centre for Victorian Studies ‘Radical Cultures’ conference that I look at Martineau's text, and to the Bancroft Library of the University of California, Berkeley for access to their copy of it. All subsequent references are to this edition and appear parenthetically in the text as Martineau.
4. The closest character to Oliver in ‘The Parish’ might be Ruth Brand, who is often tongue-tied by fits of weeping at the events she witnesses (a trait that exasperates her employer, Mrs Goldby). Ruth's future, however, is fully implicated in the communal closing scene. She, too, winds up in the workhouse, and in the church, whereas Oliver is rescued from the circumstances that threaten his morality. Ruth ends up working for Ashly by the end of the novel (in full accordance with his capitalist principles), not being adopted by him (as Oliver is by Brownlow). In contrast to Dickens' self-conscious use of Oliver as narrative focus, moreover, Martineau does not concentrate consistently on Ruth, and her perspective is subsumed in those of several other characters.
5. 1839. Quarterly Review, 64:83–102. From the, reprinted Oliver Twist, 407.
6. 1937-8. The Dickensian, 34:29–32. Reprinted in, and also reprinted Oliver Twist, 400.
7. Baldridge, Cates. 1993. ‘The Instabilities of Inheritance in Oliver Twist’. Studies in the Novel, 25.2:184–95., Summer):passim, and Joseph Sawicki ‘Oliver Untwisted:Narrative Structure in Oliver Twist’, Victorian Notes 73 (Spring 1988):23.
8. Crawford, Iain. 1987. ‘“Shades of the Prison-House”:Religious Romanticism in. Oliver Twist’, Dickens Quarterly, 4.2 June:78 and Michael Peled Ginsburg, ‘Truth and Persuasion:The Language of Realism and of Ideology in Oliver Twist’, Novel (Spring 1987):221.
9. Tracy, Robert. 1988. ‘“The Old Story” and Inside Stories:Modish Fiction and Fictional Modes in. Oliver Twist’, Dickens Studies Annual, 17:1–33. passim and Burton Wheeler, ‘The Text and Plan of Oliver Twist’, Dickens Studies Annual 12 (1984):41–58, passim.
10. Miller, J. Hillis. 1958. Charles Dickens, the World of His Novels Cambridge Many critics have remarked upon Oliver's disturbing passivity. Most significant on this topic are Anny Sadrin, Parentage and Inheritance in the Novels of Charles Dickens (Cambridge:Cambridge University Press, 1994), Robert Tracy, ‘“The Old Story”’, and Dennis Walder, Dickens and Religion (London:George Allen & Unwin, 1981). According to Anny Sadrin's accounting, of ‘fifty-three chapters, no fewer than twenty-one take place in his absence, many of which will none the less determine the course of his life’, Sadrin, Parentage, 35.
11. Robert, Patten's. 1971. ‘Capitalism and Compassion in. Oliver Twist’, Studies in the Novel, 69:207–21. Several critics talk about the conflict between economics and sympathy in the charity Dickens represents in Oliver Twist, as well as the two systems of evaluating Oliver's identity this conflict engenders. Walder, Dickens and Religion, and, article, provide the most rigorous readings of this subject. Walder focuses on the workings of benevolent sympathy in the novel, and Patten discusses the economics of charity in detail.
12. 1990. ‘How Oliver Twist Learned to Read, and What He Read’. Bucknell Review, 34.2:59–81. Cf. Ginsburg, ‘Truth and Persuasion’, 228, ‘… Oliver always uses language literally; the signifier always refers directly to the signified.’ Oliver's literalness thus seems the opposite of the empty oaths Martineau describes. Patrick Brantlinger also discusses the two opposing valuations of reading and textual production represented in Fagin et al's and Oliver's use of language, in his article
13. 1840. Fraser's Magazine, 21 April reprinted in Oliver Twist, 411.
14. Twist, Oliver, and Copperfield, David. 1993. ‘Our Mutual Friend’. Dickens Studies Annual, 22:35–66. Kenneth Sroka also discusses this scene as Dickens' ideal of reading, as a conduit to the operations of ‘Fancy’, in his article ‘Dickens’ Metafiction:Readers and Writers in However, he goes on to discuss the immediate ridiculous effects of the scene (Brownlow's abstraction also results in the fact that he is still holding the book he was looking through at the booksellers, but has not yet paid for it) without reference to its later outcome—Oliver's rescue (39–41).
15. 1967. “ Oliver Twist ”. In The Fortunate Foundling' in Fiction with a Purpose 105–37. Bloomington:IN:Indiana University Press. The real John Brownlow wrote a novel in 1831 about a fictional foundling from the London Foundling Hospital, entitled Hans Sloane, from which both Robert Colby (in the chapter, especially 124–6) and David Paroissen (The Companion to Oliver Twist [Edinburgh:Edinburgh University Press, 1992], 225) assert Dickens may have borrowed elements of the inheritance plot of Oliver Twist.
16. McClure, Ruth. 1981. Coram's Children New Haven:Yale University Press. For this summary of the history of the London Foundling Hospital I am drawing upon the following histories of that institution:, R.H. Nichols and F.A. Wray, The History of the Foundling Hospital (London:Oxford University Press, 1935), and John Brownlow, The History and Objects of the Foundling Hospital (London:C. Jacques, 1865).
17. Robbins, Ruth, and Wolfreys, Julian, eds. 1996. Victorian Identities:Social and Cultural Formations in Nineteenth-Century Literature 134–6. New York:St Martin's Press, Inc. Although Dickens' ending is commonly considered ‘patriarchal’, it is patriarchal in ways that revise rather than perpetuate older forms of patriarchy, such as aristocratic local government. By ‘forms of patriarchy’ I refer less to real social circumstances than to their imagined counterparts in written representation. Patriarchy, although it took real forms in public and private life, was also imagined in historically specific ways by authors of fictions. This article discusses two differently imagined representations of fatherhood that drew upon and sought to influence, without being rigorously ‘true to’, a shared social context. Discussions of Oliver Twist's ‘patriarchal’ or ‘paternal’ ending appear in Jenny Bourne Taylor's article ‘Representing Illegitimacy in Victorian Culture’, in, and Elaine Hadley's Melodramatic Tactics:Theatricalized Dissent in the English Marketplace, 1800–1885 (Stanford:Stanford University Press, 1995), 123–4. Hadley's analysis of the melodramatic mode in Oliver Twist comes closest to my argument that the novel renovates older forms of patriarchy rather than reauthorizing them. See especially the argument at pages 127–8, a key point of which I cite in note 19.
18. 2000. “ ‘Betokening Reception’, of my dissertation ”. In ‘“Received into the Arms of Civil Society”:Foundling Narratives in England, France, and Germany 1740–1840’ Berkeley:University of California. The Hospital linked children to their mothers in ways evocative of the rhetoric of the bastardy clauses, yet posed a very different solution to the moral problem such a connection produced, by absolving mothers rather than fining them. Jenny Bourne Taylor discusses the rhetoric and imagery of illegitimacy that developed out of public discussion of the Bastardy Clauses (‘Representing Illegitimacy’, 130–3). I discuss the Foundling Hospital's rhetoric, wherein the tokens worn by foundling infants (and the infants themselves) become tokens of both their institutional reception and of their mother's identity, in Chapter One, (PhD diss.
19. Thus, the discovery of the natural connections between Oliver and the Maylies might also be a kind of financial insurance for Oliver's future, given that Oliver's full adoption by Brownlow (as Brownlow's heir) might be quasi-legal (full legal adoption was impossible in England until 1926, except by Act of Parliament). Elaine Hadley interprets this discovery a bit differently when defining the melodramatic mode in Oliver Twist. ‘Ethical families reunite…along ethical lines that nonetheless seem dependent on the ideological coherence of the principle of blood lineage…melodrama privileges an ethical lineage while still superimposing it on an existing bloodline so that…Oliver is not so much his father's son as the recipient of Mr. Brownlow's patronage. Oliver's inheritance affirms his patriarchal/ethical identity, which is a melodramatic conflation that contrasts with both a revisionist class affiliation and an unreconstructed blood tie’ (Melodramatic Tactics, 127–8). Thus, for Hadley, ‘ethical lineage’, as a kind of bloodline of sentiment, still refers to blood lineage for its authority, at least in the melodramatic mode.