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Laughter and Oliver Twist

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 December 2020

James R. Kincaid
James R. Kincaid*
Affiliation:
Ohio State University, Columbus
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Abstract

Laughter in Oliver Twist is used as a weapon against the reader's conventional social identifications, forcing him to recognize in himself the social brutality which threatens Oliver. Repeatedly, Dickens evokes laughter at one of the novel's social outcasts and then shows that laughter to be cold and inadequate by echoing it in a demonstrably evil character. By means of this process of subversion, the reader is forced away from the bright social world of the Maylie-Brownlow group into an intense association with the orphans and the victims: Oliver, Fagin and his associates, and Mr. Bumble.

Type
Research Article
Information
PMLA , Volume 83 , Issue 1 , March 1968 , pp. 63 - 70
Copyright
Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 1968

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References

1 This point is granted by virtually all writers on the subject, though of course the emphasis which it receives varies. The issue is given full treatment in Martin Grotjahn's Beyond Laughter (New York, 1957), probably the most accessible treatment of Freud's insights on humor. My discussion of humor, however, derives not so much from Freud as from Henri Bergson's brilliant essay, “Laughter,” in Comedy (Garden City, N. Y.: Doubleday Anchor Books, 1956), pp. 59–190. Bergson's perceptions provide the fundamental criteria here for showing Dickens' deviations from the purely comic.

2 Edmund Wilson (“Dickens: The Two Scrooges,” in The Wound and the Bow, Cambridge, Mass., 1941, p. 17) calls it a “somber book.” For a fuller discussion of this aspect see A. O. J. Cockshut, The Imagination of Charles Dickens (London, 1961), pp. 31–32, and Arnold Kettle, “Oliver Twist,” in An Introduction to the English Novel, I (London, 1951), 123–138.

3 This point is developed by K. J. Fielding, Charles Dickens: A Critical Introduction, 2nd ed., rev. (Boston, 1965), pp. 33–35.

4 John Forster, The Life of Charles Dickens (London: Chapman and Hall, n.d.), p. 70. See also Edgar Johnson, Charles Dickens: His Tragedy and Triumph, I (New York, 1952), 281.

5 “The Young Dickens,” in The Lost Childhood and Other Essays (London, 1951), pp. 56–57.

6 Charles Dickens: His Tragedy and Triumph, I, 273.

7 One can test this by reading the selections in R. J. Cruikshank's The Humour of Dickens (London, 1952), pp. 81–89. Cruikshank includes the scene of Bumble's degradation in Ch. xxxvii, the trial of the Artful Dodger, and Bumble's famous pronouncement on the law, all of which are treated here.

8 All quotations from Oliver Twist are taken from the “Gadshill Edition,” ed. Andrew Lang (New York, 1897), Vol. iii. Because the novel is available in many editions with different pagination, references will be made to chapter rather than to the location in the Gadshill edition.

9 Bergson emphasizes the fact that laughter is a “social gesture” (“Laughter,” p. 73). This argument is centra] to his case and he develops it fully; see pp. 146–152, 174, 185–190.

10 The humor in this scene is treated in a different light by Jonathan Bishop (“The Hero-Villain of Oliver Twist,” VNL, No. 15, 1959, p. 14). Bishop argues that “the humor may lead us to neglect the light the scene indirectly throws on Oliver's place in the economy of the novel.” The point is well made, but I think it takes insufficient account of the subversive nature of the humor in the novel and the effect this subversion has on our reactions.

11 George H. Ford, Dickens and His Readers (Princeton, 1955), p. 38.

12 Cruikshank (The Humour of Dickens, pp. 81–85) allows the henpecked Bumble of the last part of the novel more than one-half of the space he allots to the humor in Oliver Twist.

13 The most serious and extended discussion of the origins and development of this figure in literature that I know of is presented in Leslie Fiedler's Love and Death in the American Novel (New York, 1960). See especially pp. 329–369.

14 The element of self-dramatization in Dickens' comic characters is discussed by Douglas Bush, “A Note on Dickens' Humor,” in From Jane Austen to Joseph Conrad, eds. Robert C. Rathburn and Martin Steinmann, Jr. (Minneapolis, Minn., 1958), pp. 82–91.

15 Edgar Johnson (Charles Dickens: His Tragedy and Triumph, I, 277) makes this same point and brings up topical evidence to support it.

16 Bergson says, “We laugh every time a person gives us the impression of being a thing” (“Laughter,” p. 97). He does, however, point out that this imitation of the inanimate, this automatism, must not be self-conscious (see n. 18). We can laugh here, then, only if we can overlook Bumble's motives for self-dramatization and the reaction of Mrs. Corney. Certainly such elaborate evasion of the implications contained in the situation is difficult, and it is the virtue of Dickens' art that he makes us start laughing and then recalls that laughter abruptly, making us look closely at the uncomfortable truth we were trying to avoid.

17 George Gissing said, “Mr. Dawkins before the Bench is a triumph of his [Dickens'] most characteristic humour” (The Immortal Dickens, London, 1925, p. 86). I agree that the humor is characteristically subversive, though I suspect this is not what Gissing had in mind.

18 “Laughter,” p. 71.

19 E.g., Monroe Engel (The Maturity of Dickens, Cambridge, Mass., 1959, p. 92) sees Fagin's gang as “quick, spontaneous, fun-loving, and convivial.”