What a Coincidence! Thoughts on Dickens' Oliver Twist

I just had the pleasure of rereading the first Dickens' novels I ever read, back when I was a young teenager, Oliver Twist, or The Parish Boy's Progress, by Charles Dickens.  First published serially in 1837-1839, Oliver Twist is a wonderful story, full of memorable characters and highly readable.

There's lots to talk about with regards to the novel, but what I'm thinking about mostly on just finishing it is the role of coincidence in the story.  In other words, could the plot work if Oliver didn't happen to run into all the right people who could engineer his rescue and restoration?

SPOILERS AHEAD...

Here we go:

In Oliver's first venture outside of Fagin's lair with the Artful Dodger and Charley Bates, he is nabbed as one of the boys who attempts to pick Mr. Brownlow's pocket.  Mr. Brownlow believes that Oliver is an innocent and lets the boy live at his house where he notices a striking resemblance between Oliver and a portrait of his best friend's daughter, Agnes Fleming who disappeared after becoming pregnant by Brownlow's friend, Edwin Leeford.  Once Oliver disappears, Mr. Brownlow sets out to find out Monks, the wayward son of Leeford, who died estranged from Monks' mother.  If Mr. Brownlow hadn't noticed the resemblance, he never would have set out to find Monks.

After Oliver is snatched from Mr. Brownlow's care and returned to Fagin's lair (love that word!), he doesn't set foot outside again until he is sent to help nasty Bill Sikes break into a house in the country. The burglary goes wildly bad and Oliver ends up being taken in and cared for by the family whose home he was helping Sikes to break into.  It just so happens that the owner of the house is Mrs. Maylie, and her adopted daughter Rose is the orphaned sister of Oliver's mother.  Small world!  Rose bonds with Oliver, believes he is goodness itself, and is instrumental in convincing Nancy, Sikes' girlfriend, to save Oliver when Nancy overhears that Fagin and Monks want to kill him.

The coincidences really are eye-rolling but without them would the plot still work?

I think the answer is no.  Mr. Brownlow seeing a resemblance between Oliver and Agnes Fleming and setting out to find Monks didn't really advance the plot.  Monks was actively looking for Oliver in order to get rid of him completely.  However, once Oliver and Mr. Brownlow find each other again, only Mr. Brownlow could understand the interest Monks had in Oliver and could insist that Monks relinquish his fortune to Oliver.  All other parties who know of what happened were dead.  Somehow, Oliver had to encounter the one person left on the planet who knew what Monks had done.  The problem is that Oliver encountered him entirely by chance.

The second coincidence is less problematic.  It's lovely and sweet that Oliver and Rose found each other and loved each other before learning of their family relationship, but it wasn't that relationship that spurred the Maylies and their circle to work to protect Oliver.  I don't see how Rose and Oliver being related affected the main storyline other than to underscore the Victorian sentimentality.

One final note, though.  The subtitle of the book is The Parish Boy's Progress, which echoes and alludes to John Bunyan's The Pilgrim's Progress.  I have to wonder if whether it was grace, in the form of coincidence, that led Oliver into Mr. Brownlow's world and thereby put himself into a position in which he could be rescued by Mr. Brownlow.  I'm no theologian and I could be grasping at straws to make a favorite novel "work," but perhaps the use of coincidence reflects a belief in the guiding hand of providence.  Without the subtitle, I wouldn't have thought that the coincidences weren't more than a young novelist taking shortcuts, but now with the subtitle, I'm not so sure.

Mr. Brownlow, the one character who can restore Oliver to his family.

This counts as my 19th century classic in the Back to the Classics challenge.

The Pilgrim's Progress

It didn't occur to me to want to read John Bunyan's The Pilgrim's Progress until last year when I finally read Little Women. The March sisters play-act Christian's pilgrimage from the City of Destruction to the Celestial City, and they attempt to shoulder the burdens life deals them with Christian as their model. Only whilst reading Little Women did I fully realize what an impact The Pilgrim's Progress has had on western literature.

Apart from The Bible, until the twentieth century it seems that this book was the most widely owned and repeatedly read books, particularly in America, which was originally settled by the Puritans whose influence on thought and culture is still felt today.

So, with an extra credit from Audible.com, I downloaded an audio version and last month listened to it. Once I got through the rather long convoluted introduction, I found it fairly easy to listen to and follow despite being originally published is 1678. At its heart it is an adventure story peopled by characters whose names give away their role in the story--for example, Christian travels for awhile with someone called Faithful, he fights Giant Despair, and is tempted by Mr. Worldy-Wiseman. Nothing subtle here!

So here's what struck me. Not long into the book, I got a strong feeling of deja vu. It took me until Christian was battling the monster Apollyon, but then the penny dropped and I realized that the tone, style, and especially allegorical/adventure narrative style sounded exactly like that of C.S. Lewis in the Chronicles of Narnia. After I finished The Pilgrim's Progess, I did some Googling and discovered that Lewis's first published allegorical fiction was The Pilgrim's Regress, Lewis's personal revision of John Bunyan's novel. I wasn't able to find any scholarly evidence (not that I honestly looked that hard) suggesting that Lewis knowingly modeled his Narnia books on The Pilgrim's Progress, but to me it's clear that he did.

The other surprise was that there was a second part to the story, in which Christian's wife, Christiana, and children, whom he left when he set forth on his pilgrimage, followed him. I couldn't help but remember the training I received early in my career on making presentations: tell the audience what you're going to tell them, tell them, and then tell them what you told them. It seems that Bunyan, as a preacher, employed this methodology in his fiction, as Christiana and the sons visit all the landmarks that Christian did and either battle with the same obstacles to salvation that they did or are told how valiantly he fought and overcame them. No one reading The Pilgrim's Progress has any chance of missing the point.

After finishing the book, I enjoyed reading the introduction to the Penguin Classics version that I got as a reference should I want to look something up in the future. I particularly liked this passage:

The achievement of Bunyan in The Pilgrim's Progess which gives the work its continuing vitality is the creation, not of allegory, but of myth.

Hearing it read did make me feel as if I was witness to the origin of a myth and not just reading an allegorical sermon. Christian's pilgrimage has transcended story in our culture and become myth.

I'm looking for a reproduction of this map of Christian's pilgrimage, which I think is actually a pretty interesting historical illustration.