The Oliver Twist Idealism

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Recommended: Childhood in the modern day

The novel Oliver Twist follows an orphan on his journey to find out his true identity. During Oliver’s journey, he is forced into the harsh side of reality, ultimately challenging his innocence. His mother dies giving birth to him and he is raised in an orphanage that treats the kids as workers and barely feeds them anything. Oliver eventually runs away from the orphanage and goes to London where he encounters a gang of criminals. Dickens uses his book to criticize the cruelty that the poor experienced in nineteenth century society. Dickens tells the story through the eyes of a poor boy named Oliver Twist who is portrayed as being innocent and pure while everyone else in the book is, on the contrast, evil. Dickens uses Oliver as a symbol of a truly good person who can overcome his experiences and always prevail over evil. Dickens shows that after all of the malevolent things that Oliver goes through, he is still a genuinely good person. In Charles Dickens’s Oliver Twist Dickens portrays a boy that can defeat all odds and overcome evil because Oliver Twist is idealistic, ignorant, naïve, and overall inherently good. Dickens shows through Oliver’s ability to not be corrupted an example of idealism in what was his modern Victorian society.
Dickens is attempting to show through Oliver Twist that Oliver is idealistic in thinking that everyone is good. Dickens portrays Victorian Society as a whole as being idealistic and in denial of some of the things that were happening during their time period. Having lived in the Victorian Era, Dickens had firsthand experience with the people who lived in this time period. There was poverty, illness, and violence that the high class citizens during this era essentially attempted to ignore. ...

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...and enclosed themselves off from the delinquent side of their society so much that it gave them a false naivety to their situation. If they did not see then they did not have to know. However, this is similar to how many cultures function in modern times. People cannot simply think about how the least fortunate of society live all the time and go on with everyday tasks. Surely the weight of others misfortunes on their shoulders would debilitate a person mentally. However, the fact that upper-class people cannot always think of these issues is part of the reason the walls that divide us exist in the first place. Dickens brings to our attention that we cannot be so divided and narrow-minded if we want live as a community as a whole. Oliver is the bridge that combines the working, hard-life lower class and the richer upper class into one people, who are inherently good.

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