Given that one of the strings to my bow that I’m known for is my love of Charles Dickens Christmas stories, it would be easy to make the assumption that I am an all round fan and expert on the Dickens works as a whole. In actual fact this is not the case as I have never read any of the great man’s none-Christmassy books. My bookshelves do contain Bleak House and David Copperfield (the only thing I know about the latter is that he made the Statue of Liberty disappear – I am hilarious), but they were bought with good intentions and have subsequently gathered dust while I carried on reading autobiographies of comedians and musicians. I have promised myself that I’ll get round to them one day, although I simply don’t have the time to devote to reading at the moment.

With this in mind, I have never read Oliver Twist nor seen any of the film adaptations. Of course anyone with the name Oliver will have had his or her schooldays blighted with the oh-so-fucking-hilarious classroom nicknaming system so perhaps I’d subconsciously avoided it in adult life. Although I’m not a big fan of watching a film based on a book I haven’t read, today we watched Oliver! This is the musical version with songs by Lionel Bart and starring Harry Secombe and Oliver Reed (I wonder if he had Oliver Twist references to contend with, although he could have had it in later life with ‘Oliver Twist’ being rhyming slang for ‘pissed’). If there’s one thing worse than watching a film without having read the book, it’s watching a musical without having read the book. As much as I love a good musical, I wondered how much singing and dancing could be squeezed into what Charles Dickens intended to be a satirical swipe at the Poor Law in Victorian society. I appreciate that A Christmas Carol isn’t exactly a comedy cavalcade but there is a happy story buried beneath the lesson, so a few musical numbers don’t feel misplaced, especially when being performed by The Muppets.

Oliver Twist is the dark story of an orphan (Oliver) in the care of the workhouse system. Dickens himself had grown up with this system having seen his father sent to a debtor’s prison so was writing this with a certain amount of knowledge. What we see in this story is a depiction of the huge chasm that existed between the ‘haves’ and the ‘have nots’ in Victorian London (and indeed all major towns and cities), with Oliver running away from his charges after being sold by Mr. Bumble who ran the workhouse. Oliver ends up among the thieves and prostitutes of the slums and falls into a bad crowd, a crowd of pickpockets controlled by the anti-Semitic caricature that is Fagin. After being accused of stealing from a well-to-do gentleman he is cleared in court due to the intervention of a witness. To make amends the well-to-do gentleman takes Oliver to live with him. Fagin organises his kidnapping back into the criminal underworld but it works out alright as Fagin’s henchman is shot dead in the street and Oliver goes back to live in the rich part of London in a beautiful Victorian house, (in those days it was simply called a house) and of course live happily ever after. It appears that the adoption process was a little more casual back then, of course the happy coincidence that Oliver is distantly related to the rich household might have made things a little easier.

I’m going to have to read the book now, as I’m still none the wiser. They are bound to have fiddled with it a bit to get all the songs in, and stage school children did not make convincing starving orphans, they wouldn’t have had the energy for the dance steps on a diet of gruel.

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