Oliver Twist

Use these questions or activities to help to gauge students’ familiarity with and spark their interest in the context of the work, giving them an entry point into the text itself.

Short Answer

1. Are you familiar with any other 19th century or Victorian novels? Can you think of any novels from this time period that are also titled after the main character?

Teaching Suggestion: Novels bearing the main character’s name were common in Victorian England and throughout the 19th-century broadly: Famous examples include Jane Eyre, David Copperfield, Frankenstein, Emma, Anna Karenina, and Madame Bovary. This reflects the era’s societal trends—growing individualism, an expanding middle-class—and relates to the importance of identity in Oliver Twist.

• This article from Victorian Web discusses Dickens’s famously idiosyncratic (and idiosyncratically named) characters and the role they play in his novels.

Short Activity

Like most of Dickens’s novels, Oliver Twist takes place primarily in London, England. Imagine you’ve traveled back in time and are standing in the middle of a street in Victorian London. What do you see, hear, smell, feel, and taste? Jot down the first five or six stimuli (images, noises, etc.) that occur to you, and then compare your impressions of the city with those of your classmates.

Teaching Suggestions: London itself is a major player in Dickens’s novels, which mirror city life in their crowdedness, activity, and abundant—even overwhelming—detail. Pool students’ responses to evoke a sense of this bustling energy, drawing on the resources below to further flesh out a portrait of the city.

• Although it postdates Dickens’s novels by a few decades, this archival footage of London gives some sense of what the city might have looked like in the 1800s.
• This NPR interview (available in both text and audio) discusses the soot, sewage, and dung that made 19th-century London “infamously filthy.”
• Charles Booth’s survey maps and notebooks allow students to view contemporaneous descriptions of Victorian neighborhoods, see the distribution of wealthier and poorer regions, and compare the 19th-century and modern-day cities. This Guardian article provides further commentary on how London’s history resembles its present.