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BOY-ORPHANS, MESMERIC VILLAINS, AND FILM STARS: INSCRIBING OLIVER TWIST INTO TREASURE ISLAND
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 07 December 2010
Extract
Oliver Twist, the early novel which a twenty-five-year-old Charles Dickens published serially from 1837 to 1839, revised in the 1840s, and featured in the public readings he offered from 1867 until his death in 1870, might well have inspired the thirty-two-year-old Robert Louis Stevenson before he serialized his own first novel, Treasure Island, in 1882. There are, after all, remarkable similarities between the two texts. For each dramatizes a young boy's immersion in a counter-world headed by villains who defy the norms of a dubious patriarchal order. What is more, the strong spell that thieves like Fagin and Bill Sikes and pirates like Billy Bones and Long John Silver exert over the innocents they mesmerize infects readers of each narrative as well as viewers of their many cinematic adaptations. We thus face a quandary. Despite our empathy with little Oliver and with his adolescent counterpart Jim Hawkins, we may question each boy's reintegration into an order whose fissures have been radically exposed.
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References
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