An Education on Sympathy: The Sentimental Narrators of Middlemarch and Oliver Twist Anonymous College

This essay would consider the modes of sentimental realism as presented in George Eliot’s Middlemarch and Charles Dickens Oliver Twist. In Dickens’ Oliver Twist, the narrator’s use of sentimentalism enables the readers to sympathise with the characters’ suffering, to confront the reader with the realism of poverty. In Eliot’s Middlemarch, the narrator’s subversion of sentimentalism and moralising on sympathy, enables the readers to question our attitudes on sympathy. Hence, sentimentalism is used to either heighten or question sympathy, to constitute a form of social or domestic realism.

In the late nineteenth-century, the artistic movement of Realism emerged in France, as a reaction against Romanticism, which privileged the aesthetic expression of emotions over objective reality (Finocchio). Realism was characterised by its verisimilitude to ordinary life, usually of the middle or lower class society, without its exaggerated emotionalism and aestheticisation. Realism sought to portray real-life common people in their everyday struggles with truth and accuracy, thus refusing to portray heroic individuals with idealised sentimentality.

Categorically, Dickens’ Oliver Twist fits within the genre of the social problem novel, which...