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  • The De-Orphaned Orphan: Oliver Twist and Deep Time
  • Leslie S. Simon (bio)

Men can do nothing without the make-believe of a beginning. Even Science, the strict measurer, is obliged to start with a make-believe unit, and must fix on a point in the stars’ unceasing journey when his sidereal clock shall pretend that time is at Nought. His less accurate grandmother Poetry has always been understood to start in the middle; but on reflection it appears that her proceeding is not very different from his; since Science, too, reckons backwards as well as forwards, divides his unit into billions, and with his clock-finger at Nought really sets off in medias res. No retrospect will take us to the true beginning; and whether our prologue be in heaven or on earth, it is but a fraction of that all-presupposing fact with which our story sets out.

George Eliot, Daniel Deronda (7)

I

Oliver Twist (1837–39) appears to be a story of social mobility – but is not. The ultimate resolve of the book is to undermine what at first glance seems to be a narrative of sheer potentiality, an allegory of modern individualism that hinges on the unknown origins of the orphan protagonist. Oliver is a child who enters the world with nothing, as nothing, un-weighted by contextual data that would otherwise reckon his fate ineluctably (paternal name and occupation, for example). Throughout much of the novel, the boy – specifically because he is an orphan, a cipher marked by no past, by no beginning, rather existing very powerfully in the self-authenticating present – embodies the concept of meritocratic opportunity so ardently celebrated by Victorian culture. As scholars have suggested, orphan stories from the era might be understood to express a cultural zeitgeist, as early and mid-Victorians felt themselves cut off – or orphaned – from the agricultural past by the incessant movement of the industrial present, ever in motion, ever unknowable.1 Still others have [End Page 306] shown how, if orphan figures in nineteenth-century media did indeed help articulate a mood of historical isolation pervasive throughout the period, it is exactly their isolation, their rootlessness, that positioned characters like Oliver to also act as metaphors for mobility and change. According to independent studies by Lydia Murdoch, Eileen Simpson, and Jacqueline Banerjee, individuals living outside mainstream structures of family and community symbolized raw potential, providing the occasion for narratives of personal achievement and social uplift.2 The outcast child, specifically, Laura Berry argues, helped negotiate “the rapidly changing demands of […] Victorian social arrangements, imagining the possibility of an ‘equal’ who crosses” increasingly fluid class boundaries (Berry 7).

But the plot of Oliver Twist ultimately de-orphans Oliver, determining in its last breath to uncover the truth of his birth and thus nullifying his metamorphic potential: the child comes from, and returns to, bourgeois stock. What had seemed a journey into the unknown – a story of upward mobility despite all the odds – is really a decided movement homeward, into a well-charted history, a modest inheritance, and the domestic comforts of biological family and related friends. Indeed, Oliver is most assuredly not un-weighted by contextual data; rather, the child is exhaustively connected to his environment, his tale of individual endeavor turning out to be [End Page 307] complicated by social networks, active all along but visible only in retrospect. In making its final revelation, this orphan narrative – what some might call the orphan narrative of the nineteenth century, which would set the pace for future Victorian inquiries into child vagrancy – returns its orphan to the past. History reclaims Oliver, a figure of rootlessness no longer, and reconciles him to his surroundings. The plot twist that brings closure to the novel also anesthetizes the mystique of the child – the power of his very presence, in the very present – that had charmed the characters he meets in the first decade (and first few hundred pages) of his life. In the end, his personal merit is attributed almost entirely to traits inherited from parents Oliver never knew.

The trouble with Oliver Twist is that while the novel appears to be committed thematically to representing a vertical rise through...

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