City of Turbulence: How Dickens Represents London in Oliver Twist Sophia Simon-Bashall College

In his novel Oliver Twist, Charles Dicken presents the city – more specifically, London – as a place which entraps the people who exist within it, both physically and socially. This is particularly noticeable when compared to the text’s depiction of the country, and this contrast proves useful in observing the stifling atmosphere of London that Dickens conveys. In the essay Country and City, theorist Raymond Williams writes that ‘powerful feelings have gathered and have been generalised’ about both the city and the country, each having positive and negative associations. Whilst in Williams’ essay, the city is partially a place of ‘learning, communication, [and] light’, the novel displays more of the ‘hostile associations’ that Williams writes of – that it is a ‘place of noise’, and of ‘ambition’ that isolates people from one another. It is, in Dickens, a ‘labyrinth of dark’ – a metaphor which suggests that London is a trap by design. Contrastingly, the country as presented in Oliver Twist seems to possess only the idealised beliefs that Williams’ essay sets out – the ‘peace, innocence, and simple virtue’. This accentuates the depiction of the closed-off and dangerous London.

Throughout the novel, there are references to how...