ARTicles vol. 5 i.3b: Oliver with a Twist

Midway through the first scene of a staged adaptation of Oliver Twist, Charles Dickens lay down on the floor of his box and refused to rise until the curtain. Childish? Perhaps. But Dickens saw this production in 1838. The final installment of the novel, published serially in Bentley’s Miscellany, appeared in April 1839. George Almar’s Oliver Twist, a Serio-Comic Burletta was one of ten adaptations presented before Dickens’s last chapter reached the public. The Victorians could not wait to see how the story ends. Who could blame them? As the production history of Oliver Twist indicates, Dickens inspired the stage as much as the Victorian theatre influenced Dickens. Dickens savored the theatre. In school he attended the Theatre Royal at Rochester, puppet-mastered melodramas in a toy theatre, and wrote a tragedy entitled Misnar, the Sultan of India. Searching for a career, he flirted with acting, landing that impossibility of all impossibilities – an audition at Covent Garden Theatre, which he missed, citing illness. Even as his career turned to writing, Dickens stayed close to his early love. An avid theatre-goer, he garnered high esteem as an actor in amateur productions for charity, and watching the audience’s response to public readings of his novels remained one of his chief delights. These continued until the end of his life, despite orders from his doctor to cease because when he read certain passages like Sikes’ murder of Nancy in Oliver Twist, his pulse skyrocketed. Compared to other literary genres, by the nineteenth century the novel had barely reached puberty – and suffered growing pains. It struggled to balance the private experience of novel reading with the theatre’s heritage of public entertainment. In Dickens, Novel Reading, and the Victorian Popular Theatre, Deborah Vlock writes “the ‘drama’ was not supplanted by the novel in the nineteenth century, but merged with it, enabling the novel to exist.” Many novelists including Jane Austen, looked to theatrical conventions as models for their own work. Dickens was no exception. When Dickens first arrived in London, only three theatres in the city possessed charters to produce legally five act comedies or tragedies. That didn’t stop cunning entrepreneurs from founding unlicensed theatres, but the law restricted them to musical drama – especially the popular burletta, a one-act farce with a minimum of five songs. The concept of the burletta eventually expanded to include operettas, burlesque, revues, and the melodrama. All these genres relied heavily on music to set the tone, and all mixed the grotesque with the comic. The novel attempted to find a balance between the private experience of a reader and the idea of public entertainment. Like many other novelists of his day, Dickens’s works read as if meant for a group, not just as a private pastime. Reading aloud was a common pastime in Victorian London, where illiteracy ruled. Around Dickens’s study hung mirrors angled towards his face so that the writer could watch his own reactions to his work. If he laughed, a drawing room party might laugh; if a tear came to his eye, ladies might weep. In addition, many novels appeared serially in newspapers prior to their completion. This allowed an author to test the waters before completing a long work. Like an actor adapting his performance based upon audience’s reactions, the novelist had ample opportunity to change his novel based on the reception of the first parts. Dickens even changed the end of Great Expectations to please the public. The Victorian Englishman has a reputation as repressed, but his taste in entertainment was filled with emotion. Melodrama reigned as king of the Victorian Stage. Scenes of heightened tragedy alternated with low comedy, and music intensified emotions. Visual imagery and stage machinery often upstaged dialogue. When the modern audience thinks about melodrama, images of a beautiful, pale woman, swooning in the arms of a handsome – also pale – gentleman come to mind. No one envisions the following scene, in which the fat servant of the distressed woman gets his foot stuck in a pickle jar. But the absurdity of the humor throws the tragedy into sharp relief, heightening the impact of both. One sees the influence of melodrama in many of the great nineteenth century novelists from Balzac to Dostoyevsky. No one recognized melodrama’s merits more than Dickens. Although the novels he wrote immediately before and after it have actors as important characters, Oliver Twist remains remarkably devoid of references to the theatre. He only writes of it in one passage of Oliver Twist: “It is the custom on the stage, in all good murderous melodramas, to present the tragic and the comic scenes, in as regular alternation, as the layers of red and white in a side of streaky bacon. Such changes appear absurd; but they are not so unnatural as they would seem at first sight. The transitions in real life from well-spread boards to death beds, and from mourning weeds to holiday garments, are not a whit less startling; only, there, we are busy actors, instead of passive lookers-on, which makes a vast difference.” However, the stage infuses every part of the novel’s form. Dickens knew that melodrama followed the quick jumps in tone that occur in life. This was a priceless recognition for a novelist adept at both pathos and wit. Like the melodramas, Dickens always captured accurately the ebullience and exhaustion of living. Dickens also learned valuable lessons from another popular theatre of his day, the pantomime. The English pantomime inherited its theatrical tradition from the harlequinade of the Italian commedia dell’arte. Most pantomimes silently acted the same familiar story of two lovers, a fat father, an undesirable suitor, a clever servant, and plenty of clownish henchmen. The father and suitor make so much trouble for the lovers that it seems impossible for them to marry, until a good fairy enters and wins the day for love. These stock characters act predictably from scene to scene and play to play. Physical traits, and repeated tics, not psychological motives dictate actions. The external must convey all information; pantomime does not allow characters words. Dickens enjoyed the pantomime, writing: “A pantomime is to us, a mirror of life.” Dickens believed in the line “All the world’s a stage,” Shakespeare really meant: all the world’s a pantomime. Dickens learned much from pantomime characters. Several pantomime characters became stock characters for Dickens – the ingenue, the meddling father, the unwanted suitor. Even those characters that do not come directly from pantomime behave like pantomime characters. Amazingly, Dickens avoids flat characters – a dangerous pratfall of archetypes. Of course, Dickens granted his characters the gift of speech, and so, unlike the chimerical pantomime lovers, Oliver Twist, Nancy Sikes and the other dramatis personae hover between realism and fantasy. Fagin exemplifies the pantomime traits of Dickens’s characters. An archetype of the seedy underbelly of Victorian England, Fagin also represents another stereotype – the greedy, amoral Jew. Dickens was hardly the first to take advantage of this stereotype for his villains. He descended from a long line of Englishmen – including Marlowe and Shakespeare – who drew upon cultural stereotypes to create monstrous Jews who leered at innocent children. In 1863, a woman named Eliza Davies, the wife of a Jewish banker, read Oliver Twist, and liked it very much,except for Fagin. She wrote a letter objecting to the characterization. Dickens’s reply suggests he never considered that Fagin might be taken as a representation for a whole group of people and got defensive: “I must take leave to say that if there be any general feeling on the part of the intelligent Jewish people that I have done to them what you describe as a great wrong, they are a far less sensible, a far less just and a far less good tempered people than I have alwayssupposed them to be.” Later in the letter, he invites Mrs. Davies to see what he has made of her criticism in his next novel, Our Mutual Friend. Perhaps as way of apology, Dickens endowed the Jew in this novel, Riah, with an almost superhuman goodness, the exact opposite of Fagin. Though most of his characters were archetypes, Dickens did not want people to mistakehis characters for generalizations of ethnicity. His characters are archetypes, not stereotypes. In the nineteenth century, the novel soared to new heights while the theatre foundered. The stage could not ignore the emergence of the novel, nor should it, given such a valuable source of new material. The novel influenced the theatre at a time when the theatre needed it, and Dickens’s keen understanding of dramatic form allowed him to make a major contribution. Edmund Wilson heralded Dickens as “the greatest dramatic writer the English had since Shakespeare.” At a time when dramatic writers in London had hit a dry spell, Dickens breathed new life into a dying genre. Adapting novels for the stage was inevitable but fraught with difficulties, both artistic and commercial. Dickens might have overreacted to Almar’s burletta, but it was the only action he could take. He had no legal recourse to protect his work. As his career evolved, so did the idea of the professional writer. When he wrote Oliver Twist, the rights of the novelist to own his work were shaky. Adaptations at this time spurred an examination of intellectual property and copyright. A bad adaptation could end the career of a fledgling writer, effectively curtailing his changes of rising in society. In a culture in which everyone attended the theatre, a good adaptation launched a writer successfully towards respectability. Dickens feared bad adaptations for more reasons than his social status. In a letter about an adaptation of Nicholas Nickleby, he lists his concerns: “My general objection to the adaptation of any unfinished work of mine simply is, that being badly done and worse acted it tends to vulgarize the characters, to destroy or weaken in the minds of those who see them the impressions I have endeavored to create, and consequently lessen the after-interest in their progress.” Artistically Dickens worried that audiences, content with the ending offered by the adaptor, would not read the ending he wrote. Because Dickens often ended his novels after seeing several adaptations, he might well have altered his endings based on what he saw, complicating his process enormously. Furthermore, he grew concerned that adaptors would cheapen his novels, sacrificing artistic merit for the crass success of star actor-managers. Despite his reservations about losing control of his work, Dickens’s enthusiasm for the theatre never diminished. This ardor embraced good adaptations of his novels. In the same letter, he writes that “no objection can exist for a moment where the [adaptation] is so admirably done in every respect.” At one point, he even suggested that he might undertake the task himself. This idea never panned out, but Dickens relished the audience’s public reaction to his text. He claimed that his novels had more power read aloud, though he liked his own readings best. Actors found the roles in Oliver Twist irresistible. Actresses playing young, orphaned boys could pack a theatre faster than anything else in Victorian London. Many actresses made a career of it because the impoverished boy outlasted an actresses’s looks. Likewise, the role of Bill Sikes enticed countless actors, hoping to find fame as great villains including Sir Henry Irving. Though only Dickens’s second novel, Oliver Twist remained the most frequently dramatized throughout his life, despite the fact that no less of an authority than William Charles Macready – Covent Garden’s leading man – felt the material unsuitable for dramatization. Macready cited the breadth of scope in the novel as an insurmountable obstacle. The Victorians clearly disagreed. By 1870 at least 100 different Olivers had met nine dozen Artful Dodgers. Most adaptations took the form of a burletta including the requisite number of songs – a tradition of staging the novel that led directly to Lionel Bart’s Oliver! However, the burletta was not the only theatrical genre to use the story of the orphan boy. Oliver and his comrades were popular characters in the toy theatre – in which the characters were made from mass produced sheets of paper and sold with paper proscenium, sets, and props. In the early twentieth century, burlesques were made satirizing both the material and the production history including “Oliver Twist; or Dickens up a Tree” and “Oliver Twisted.” Throughout its long production history, Oliver Twist endured many shifts in theatrical taste. Initially, productions slavishly recreated tableau based upon original illustrations from the novel, commissioning sets from men who staked their reputations on exact replicas. These all but disappeared until the rise of film. The role of Oliver passed from the hands of women to young men and boys. Oliver Twist weathered method acting, radio, film, and the musical, all of which took to the material as fast as the Victorians. If in 1838, Dickens had been granted the foresight to see what would happen to his novel, he might have refused to get up from the floor of the box. However, being but mortal, Dickens did rise, and wrote some of the most beloved novels in English. Dickens owes not a little of his success to theatre. Without the example of the stage and without its help in spreading his popularity, he would never have stood so high. Sarah Ollove is a first-year dramaturgy student at the A.R.T./MXAT Institute.

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