Sunday, May 18, 2014
Similar Childhoods
I was doing a bit of research on Charles Dickens and found some similarities in his and Oliver's childhoods. When Dickens was twelve, his father was imprisoned due to debt, forcing Dickens to work at a blacking warehouse. He worked there, living in poverty, until his father was realized from jail. Oliver has similar experiences. He's been working for nearly all of his life and is living without his parents. Dickens seemed to be a bit better off, his parents weren't dead. From what I can gather, his mother was still with him while his father was imprisoned. It also seems doubtful that the owners of the blacking warehouse were as abuse as the adults in Oliver's life. The owners were relatives of his mother, so they probably treated his a better. It seems Dickens drew a lot of inspiration for Oliver Twist from his own life.
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I found this super interesting so I went and looked up a little about Dickens too. I feel like the fact that Oliver's life is so similar to Dicken's relates well to the sympathy that we discussed feeling towards Oliver because these issues discussed in the novel are close to Dicken's heart, so he is able to write about them very well so we feel for Oliver. I learned that Dickens didn't necessarily enjoy talking about these dark days in his childhood, so I feel as if this book was a way from him to not only tell Oliver's story, but to talk about his own troubled past.
ReplyDeleteAnother thing I found interesting was the character of Fagin. I was reading that Dickens may have based this character off of a man named Henry Murphy, who committed similar acts back when Dickens was writing this, which just ties the story even more to Dicken's life. But even more interesting was the fact that Dickens actually knew a man named Bob Fagin while he was working in the blacking warehouse, but unlike the creepy and gross fictional Fagin, the real man was quite kind to Dickens, so it's pretty weird that he would name a villain after a guy who helped him out. I'm wondering why?
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