Test: Philosophical analysis of Charles Dickens's novel “The Adventures of Oliver Twist. "Oliver Twist" by Charles Dickens

"The Adventures of Oliver Twist" is Dickens's first social novel, in which the contradictions of English reality appeared incomparably clearer than in "The Pickwick Papers." “Hard truth,” Dickens wrote in the preface, “was the object of my book.”

In the preface to the novel Oliver Twist, Dickens declares himself a realist. But he immediately makes the exact opposite statement: “... It is still far from clear to me why the lesson of the purest good cannot be drawn from the most vile evil. I have always considered the contrary to be a firm and unshakable truth... I wanted to demonstrate in little Oliver how the principle of good always triumphs in the end, despite the most unfavorable circumstances and difficult obstacles.” The contradiction that is revealed in this programmatic statement of the young Dickens arises from the contradiction that characterizes the writer's worldview at the early stage of his creative activity.

The writer wants to show reality “as it is,” but at the same time excludes objective logic facts of life and processes, tries to interpret its laws idealistically. A convinced realist, Dickens could not abandon his didactic plans. For him, fighting this or that social evil always meant convincing, that is, educating. The writer considered the correct education of a person to be the best way to establish mutual understanding between people and the humane organization of human society. He sincerely believed that most people are naturally drawn to goodness and a good beginning can easily triumph in their souls.

But to prove the idealistic thesis - “good” invariably defeats “evil” - within the framework of a realistic depiction of complex contradictions modern era it was impossible. To implement the controversial creative task that the author set for himself, it was necessary creative method, combining elements of realism and romanticism.

At first, Dickens intended to create a realistic picture of criminal London only, to show the “pathetic reality” of the thieves’ dens of London’s “Eastside” (“Eastern” side), that is, the poorest quarters of the capital. But in the process of work, the original plan expanded significantly. The novel depicts various aspects of modern English life and poses important and pressing problems.

The time when Dickens collected material for his new novel was a period of fierce struggle over the Poor Law, published back in 1834, according to which a network of workhouses was created in the country for the lifelong maintenance of the poor. Drawn into the controversy surrounding the opening of workhouses, Dickens strongly condemned this terrible product of bourgeois rule.

“... These workhouses,” Engels wrote in “The Condition of the Working Class in England,” “or, as the people call them, poor-law-bastilles, are designed in such a way as to frighten away everyone who has even the slightest hope of living without this form of public charity. In order for a person to turn to the cash fund for the poor only in the most extreme cases, so that he resorts to it only after exhausting all possibilities of getting by on his own, workhouse turned into the most disgusting place that the refined imagination of a Malthusian can come up with.”

The Adventures of Olever Twist is directed against the Poor Law, workhouses and existing political economy concepts that lull public opinion with promises of happiness and prosperity for the majority.

However, it would be a mistake to consider that a novel is only the fulfillment by the writer of his social mission. Along with this, when creating his work, Dickens joins the literary struggle. “The Adventures of Oliver Twist” was also the author’s original response to the dominance of the so-called “Newgate” novel, in which the story of thieves and criminals was told exclusively in melodramatic and romantic tones, and the lawbreakers themselves represented a type of Superman that was very attractive to readers. In fact, in the Newgate novels, criminals acted as Byronic heroes who turned into a criminal environment. Dickens strongly opposed the idealization of crimes and those who commit them.

In the preface to the book, Dickens clearly stated the essence of his plan: “It seemed to me that to portray real members of a criminal gang, to draw them in all their ugliness, with all their vileness, to show their wretched, miserable life, to show them as they really are , - they always sneak, overcome with anxiety, along the dirtiest paths of life, and wherever they look, a black terrible gallows looms before them - it seemed to me that to depict this means to try to do what is necessary and what will serve to society. And I did it to the best of my ability.”

The author shows that evil penetrates into all corners of England; it is most common among those whom society has doomed to poverty, slavery, and suffering. The darkest pages in the novel are those devoted to workhouses.

Workhouses were contrary to the beliefs of Dickens the humanist, and their depiction becomes the writer's response to the controversy surrounding a deeply pressing issue. The excitement that Dickens experienced in studying what he saw as a failed attempt to alleviate the lot of the poor, the acuteness of his observations, gave the images of the novel great artistic power and persuasiveness. The writer draws a workhouse based on real facts. It depicts the inhumanity of the Poor Law in action. Although the order of the workhouse is described in only a few chapters of the novel, the book has firmly established the reputation of a work exposing one of the most dark sides English reality of the 30s. However, a few episodes, eloquent in their realism, were enough for the novel to firmly establish its reputation as a novel about workhouses.

The main characters of those chapters of the book in which the workhouse is depicted are children born in dark dungeons, their parents dying of hunger and exhaustion, eternally hungry young inmates of workhouses and hypocritical “trustees” of the poor. The author emphasizes that the workhouse, promoted as a “charitable” institution, is a prison that degrades and physically oppresses a person.

Liquid oatmeal three times a day, two onions a week and half a loaf on Sundays - this was the meager ration that supported the pitiful, always hungry workhouse boys, who had been shaking hemp since six o'clock in the morning. When Oliver, driven to despair by hunger, timidly asks the warden for more porridge, the boy is considered a rebel and locked in a cold closet.

Dickens, in the first of his social novels, also depicts the dirt, poverty, crime that reigns in the slums of London, and people who have sunk to the “bottom” of society. The slum dwellers Fagin and Sikes, Dodger and Bates, who represent thieves' London in the novel, in the perception of the young Dickens are an inevitable evil on earth, to which the author contrasts his preaching of good. The realistic depiction of the London bottom and its inhabitants in this novel is often colored with romantic and sometimes melodramatic tones. The pathos of denunciation here is not yet directed against those social conditions that give rise to vice. But whatever the writer’s subjective assessment of the phenomena, the images of the slums and their individual inhabitants (especially Nancy) objectively act as a harsh indictment against the entire social system that generates poverty and crime.

Unlike the previous novel, in this work the narrative is colored with gloomy humor, the narrator seems to have difficulty believing that the events taking place belong to a civilized England that boasts of its democracy and justice. There is a different pace of the story here: short chapters are filled with numerous events that make up the essence of the adventure genre. In the fate of little Oliver, adventures turn out to be misadventures when the ominous figure of Monks, Oliver's brother, appears on the scene, who, in order to obtain an inheritance, tries to destroy the main character by conspiring with Fagin and forcing him to make Oliver a thief. In this novel by Dickens, the features of a detective story are palpable, but the investigation of Twist’s secret is not carried out by professional servants of the law, but by enthusiasts who fell in love with the boys who wanted to restore the good name of his father and return his legally belonging inheritance. The nature of the episodes is also different. Sometimes the novel sounds melodramatic notes. This is especially clearly felt in the scene of the farewell of little Oliver and Dick, the hero’s friend doomed to death, who dreams of dying as soon as possible in order to get rid of cruel torments - hunger, punishment and overwork.

The writer introduces a significant number of characters into his work and tries to deeply reveal them inner world. Of particular importance in “The Adventures of Oliver Twist” are the social motivations for people’s behavior, which determined certain traits of their characters. True, it should be noted that the characters in the novel are grouped according to a peculiar principle arising from the unique worldview of the young Dickens. Like the romantics, Dickens divides heroes into “positive” and “negative”, the embodiment of goodness and bearers of vices. In this case, the principle underlying this division becomes a moral norm. Therefore, one group (“evil”) includes the son of wealthy parents, Oliver’s half-brother Edward Lyford (Monks), the head of the gang of thieves Fagin and his accomplice Sikes, the beadle Bumble, the workhouse matron Mrs. Corney, who is raising Mrs. Mann’s orphans, and others. It is noteworthy that critical intonations in the work are associated both with the characters called upon to protect order and legality in the state, and with their “antipodes” - criminals. Despite the fact that these characters are at different levels of the social ladder, the author of the novel endows them with similar traits and constantly emphasizes their immorality.

The writer includes Mr. Brownlow, the sister of the protagonist’s mother Rose Fleming, Harry Maley and his mother, Oliver Twist himself, to another group (“kind”). These characters are drawn in the traditions of educational literature, that is, they emphasize ineradicable natural kindness, decency, and honesty.

The defining principle of the grouping of characters, both in this and in all subsequent novels by Dickens, is not the place that one or another of the characters occupies on the social ladder, but the attitude of each of them to the people around him. Positive characters are all persons who “correctly” understand social relationships and the principles of social morality that are unshakable from his point of view, negative characters are those who proceed from ethical principles that are false for the author. All “kind” people are full of vivacity, energy, and the greatest optimism and draw these positive qualities from their performance of social tasks. Among Dickens's positive characters, some (“the poor”) are distinguished by their humility and... devotion, others (“rich”) - generosity and humanity combined with efficiency and common sense. According to the author, fulfilling social duty is the source of happiness and well-being for everyone.

The negative characters of the novel are carriers of evil, bitter with life, immoral and cynical. Predators by nature, always profiting at the expense of others, they are disgusting, too grotesque and caricatured to be believable, although they do not leave the reader in doubt that they are true. Thus, the head of a gang of thieves, Fagin, loves to enjoy the sight of stolen gold things. He can be cruel and merciless if he is disobeyed or his cause is harmed. The figure of his accomplice Sykes is drawn in more detail than the images of all the other accomplices of Fagin. Dickens combines grotesque, caricature and moralizing humor in his portrait. This is “a strongly built subject, a fellow of about thirty-five, in a black corduroy frock coat, very dirty short dark trousers, lace-up shoes and gray paper stockings that covered thick legs with bulging calves - such legs with such a suit always give the impression of something unfinished if they are not decorated with shackles.” This “cute” character keeps a “dog” named Flashlight to deal with children, and even Fagin himself is not afraid of him.

Among the “people of the bottom” depicted by the author, the most complex is the image of Nancy. Sykes's accomplice and lover is endowed by the writer with some attractive character traits. She even shows tender affection for Oliver, although she later pays cruelly for it.

Ardently fighting selfishness in the name of humanity, Dickens nevertheless put forward considerations of interest and benefit as the main argument: the writer was possessed by the ideas of the philosophy of utilitarianism, widely popular in his time. The concept of “evil” and “good” was based on the idea of ​​bourgeois humanism. To some (representatives of the ruling classes), Dickens recommended humanity and generosity as the basis of “correct” behavior, to others (toilers) - devotion and patience, while emphasizing the social expediency and usefulness of such behavior.

The narrative line of the novel has strong didactic elements, or rather, moral and moralizing ones, which in The Posthumous Papers of the Pickwick Club were only inserted episodes. In this Dickens novel they form an integral part of the story, explicit or implied, expressed in a humorous or sad tone.

At the beginning of the work, the author notes that little Oliver, like his peers who find themselves at the mercy of heartless and morally unscrupulous people, awaits the fate of “a humble and hungry poor man going through his life path under a hail of blows and slaps, despised by everyone and not meeting pity anywhere.” At the same time, depicting the misadventures of Oliver Twist, the author leads the hero to happiness. At the same time, the story of a boy born in a workhouse and immediately left an orphan after birth ends happily, clearly contrary to the truth of life.

The image of Oliver is in many ways reminiscent of the characters in Hoffmann's fairy tales, who unexpectedly find themselves in the thick of the battle between good and evil. The boy grows up, despite the difficult conditions in which the children being raised by Mrs. Mann are placed, experiences a half-starved existence in the workhouse and in the family of the undertaker Sowerberry. The image of Oliver is endowed by Dickens with romantic exclusivity: despite the influence of his environment, the boy strictly strives for good, even when he is not broken by the lectures and beatings of the workhouse trustees, and has not learned obedience in the house of his “educator,” the undertaker, and ends up in Fagin’s gang of thieves. Having gone through the life school of Fagin, who taught him the art of thieves, Oliver remains virtuous and pure child. He feels unsuited to the craft for which he is an old swindler, but he feels easily and freely in Mr. Brownlow’s cozy bedroom, where he immediately pays attention to the port of a young woman, who later turned out to be his mother. As a moralist and Christian, Dickens does not allow the moral fall of the boy, who is saved by a happy accident - a meeting with Mr. Brownlow, who snatches him from the kingdom of evil and transports him to the circle of honest, respectable and wealthy people. At the end of the work, it turns out that the hero is the illegitimate, but long-awaited son of Edwin Lyford, to whom his father bequeathed a fairly significant inheritance. A boy adopted by Mr. Brownlow finds a new family.

In this case, we can speak not of Dickens’s strict adherence to the logic of the life process, but of the romantic mood of the writer, confident that the purity of Oliver’s soul, his perseverance in the face of life’s difficulties need to be rewarded. Together with him, others also find prosperity and a peaceful existence. positive characters novel: Mr. Grimwig, Mr. Brownlow, Mrs. Mailey. Rose Fleming finds her happiness in marriage with Harry Maley, who, in order to marry his beloved girl of low birth, chose a career as a parish priest.

Thus, a happy ending crowns the development of intrigue, the positive heroes are rewarded by the humanist writer for their virtues with a comfortable and cloudless existence. Equally natural for the author is the idea that evil must be punished. All the villains leave the stage - their machinations have been unraveled, and therefore their role has been played. In the New World, Monks dies in prison, having received part of his father’s inheritance with Oliver’s consent, but still wanting to become a respectable person. Fagin is executed, Claypole, in order to avoid punishment, becomes an informant, Sykes dies, saving him from pursuit. Beadle Bumble and the workhouse matron, Mrs. Corney, who became his wife, lost their positions. Dickens reports with satisfaction that, as a result, they “gradually reached an extremely miserable and wretched state, and finally settled as despicable paupers in the very workhouse where they had once ruled over others.”

Striving for maximum completeness and convincingness of a realistic drawing, the writer uses various artistic means. He describes in detail and carefully the setting in which the action takes place: for the first time he resorts to subtle psychological analysis (the last night of Fagin, sentenced to death, or the murder of Nancy by her lover Sikes).

It is obvious that the initial contradiction of Dickens's worldview appears especially clearly in Oliver Twist, primarily in the unique composition of the novel. Against a realistic background, a moralizing plot deviates from the strict truth is built. We can say that the novel has two parallel narrative lines: the fate of Oliver and his fight against evil, embodied in the figure of Monks, and a picture of reality, striking in its truthfulness, based on a truthful depiction of the dark sides of the writer’s contemporary life. These lines are not always convincingly connected; a realistic depiction of life could not fit within the framework of the given thesis - “good conquers evil.”

However, no matter how important the ideological thesis is for the writer, which he is trying to prove through a moralizing story about the struggle and final triumph of little Oliver, Dickens, as a critical realist, reveals the power of his skill and talent in depicting the broad social background against which the hero’s difficult childhood passes. In other words, Dickens's strength as a realist appears not in the depiction of the main character and his story, but in the depiction of the social background against which the story of the orphan boy unfolds and ends successfully.

The skill of the realist artist appeared where he was not bound by the need to prove the unprovable, where he depicted living people and real circumstances over which, according to the author’s plan, the virtuous hero was supposed to triumph.

The advantages of the novel “The Adventures of Oliver Twist,” according to V.G. Belinsky, lie in “fidelity to reality,” but the disadvantage is in the denouement “in the manner of sensitive novels of the past.”

In “Oliver Twist,” Dickens’s style as a realist artist was finally defined, and the complex complex of his style matured. Dickens's style is built on the interweaving and contradictory interpenetration of humor and didactics, documentary transmission of typical phenomena and elevated moralizing.

Considering this novel as one of the works created at an early stage of the writer’s work, it should be emphasized once again that “The Adventures of Oliver Twist” fully reflects the originality of the early Dickens’ worldview. During this period, he creates works in which positive heroes not only part with evil, but also find allies and patrons. In Dickens's early novels, humor supports positive characters in their struggle with the hardships of life, and it also helps the writer to believe in what is happening, no matter how gloomy the reality may be painted. The writer’s desire to penetrate deeply into the life of his characters, into its dark and light corners, is also obvious. At the same time, inexhaustible optimism and love of life make the works of the early stage of Dickens’s work generally joyful and bright.

The plot of the novel “The Adventures of Oliver Twist” is structured in such a way that the reader’s focus is on a boy who is faced with an ungrateful reality. He is an orphan from the first minutes of his life. Oliver was not only deprived of all the benefits of a normal existence, but also grew up very lonely, defenseless in the face of an unfair fate.

Since Dickens is an enlightenment writer, he never focused on the inhuman conditions in which the poor people of that time lived. The writer believed that poverty itself is not as terrible as the indifferent attitude of other people towards this category of people. It was because of this misperception by society that the poor suffered, as they were doomed to eternal humiliation, deprivation and wandering. After all, workhouses, the creation of which was intended to provide ordinary people shelter, food, work, were more like prisons. The poor were separated from their families and imprisoned there by force, fed very poorly, and forced to do backbreaking and useless labor. As a result, they simply slowly died of starvation.

After the workhouse, Oliver becomes an undertaker's apprentice and a victim of bullying by the orphanage boy Noe Claypole. The latter, taking advantage of his advantage in age and strength, constantly humiliates the protagonist. Oliver escapes and ends up in London. As you know, such street children, whose fate no one cared about, for the most part became the dregs of society - vagabonds and criminals. They were forced to engage in crime in order to somehow survive. And cruel laws reigned there. Young men turned into beggars and thieves, and girls made a living with their bodies. Most often, they did not die a natural death, but ended their lives on the gallows. IN best case scenario they faced imprisonment.

They even want to drag Oliver into the criminal world. An ordinary boy from the street, whom everyone calls the Artful Rogue, promises the main character protection and overnight accommodation in London, and takes him to a buyer of stolen goods. This is the godfather of local scammers and thieves, Fagin.

In this crime novel, Charles Dickens portrayed London's criminal society in a simple way. He considered it integral part metropolitan life of that time. But the writer tried to convey to the reader main idea that the soul of a child is not initially prone to crime. After all, in his mind, a child personifies unlawful suffering and spiritual purity. He is simply a victim of that time. The main part of the novel “The Adventures of Oliver Twist” is devoted to this idea.

But at the same time, the writer was worried about the question: what influences the formation of a person’s character, the formation of his personality? Natural inclinations and abilities, origin (ancestors, parents) or social environment? Why does someone become noble and decent, while others become vile and dishonest criminals? Can he not be soulless, cruel and vile? In order to answer this question, Dickens introduces storyline the novel's image of Nancy. This is a girl who got into the criminal world back in early age. But this did not stop her from remaining kind and sympathetic, capable of showing empathy. She is the one who tries to prevent Oliver from going down the wrong path.

Charles Dickens's social novel "The Adventures of Oliver Twist" is a true reflection of the most pressing and pressing problems of our time. That is why this work is very popular among readers and since its publication has managed to become popular.

In the novel The Adventures of Oliver Twist, Dickens builds a plot centered on a boy's encounter with an ungrateful reality. Main character novel - a little boy named Oliver Twist. Having been born in a workhouse, from the first minutes of his life he was left an orphan, and this meant in his situation not only a future full of hardships and deprivations, but also loneliness, defenselessness in the face of the insults and injustice that he would have to endure. The baby was frail, the doctor said that he would not survive.

Dickens, as an educational writer, never reproached his unfortunate characters with either poverty or ignorance, but he reproached a society that refuses help and support to those who were born poor and are therefore doomed from the cradle to deprivation and humiliation. And the conditions for the poor (and especially for the children of the poor) in that world were truly inhuman.

Workhouses, which were supposed to provide ordinary people with work, food, and shelter, were in fact similar to prisons: the poor were forcibly imprisoned there, separated from their families, forced to do useless and hard work and practically not fed, doomed to a slow death of starvation. It was not for nothing that the workers themselves called workhouses “bastilles for the poor.”

From the workhouse, Oliver is apprenticed to an undertaker; there he encounters the orphanage boy Noe Claypole, who, being older and stronger, constantly subjects Oliver to humiliation. Oliver soon escapes to London.

Boys and girls who were of no use to anyone, who by chance found themselves on the streets of the city, often became completely lost to society, as they ended up in the criminal world with its cruel laws. They became thieves, beggars, girls began to sell their own bodies, and after that many of them ended their short and unhappy lives in prisons or on the gallows.

This novel is a crime novel. Dickens portrays the society of London criminals simply. This is a legitimate part of the existence of capitals. A boy from the street, nicknamed the Artful Rogue, promises Oliver an overnight stay and protection in London and leads him to a buyer of stolen goods, godfather London thieves and swindlers to the Jew Fagin. They want to put Oliver on a criminal path.

For Dickens, it is important to give the reader the idea that the soul of a child is not inclined to crime. Children are the personification of spiritual purity and unlawful suffering. A considerable part of the novel is devoted to this. Dickens, like many writers of that time, was concerned with the question: what is most important in the formation of a person’s character, his personality - the social environment, origin (parents and ancestors) or his inclinations and abilities? What makes a person what he is: decent and noble or vile, dishonest and criminal? And does criminal always mean vile, cruel, soulless? Answering this question, Dickens creates in the novel the image of Nancy - a girl who fell into the criminal world at an early age, but retained a kind, sympathetic heart and the ability to sympathize, because it is not in vain that she is trying to protect little Oliver from the vicious path.

Thus we see that social novel Charles Dickens's "The Adventures of Oliver Twist" is a lively response to the most pressing and pressing problems of our time. And judging by the popularity and appreciation of readers, this novel can rightfully be considered a folk novel.

Ministry of Education and Science of the Russian Federation

State Educational Institution of Higher Professional Education “Russian Economic University named after. G.V. Plekhanov"

Department of Philosophy

Philosophical analysis of the novel

Charles Dickens

"The Adventures of Oliver Twist"

Performed:

3rd year student

groups 2306

full-time education

Faculty of Finance

Tutaeva Zalina Musaevna

Scientific adviser:

Associate Professor of the Department of Philosophy

Ponizovkina Irina Fedorovna

Moscow, 2011

Philosophical analysis of Charles Dickens's novel "The Adventures of Oliver Twist"

"The Adventures of Oliver Twist" is Charles Dickens's most famous novel, the first in English literature in which the main character was a child. The novel was written in England, in 1937-1939. It began to be published in Russia in 1841, when an excerpt from the novel (Chapter XXIII) appeared in the February issue of Literary Gazette (No. 14). The chapter was entitled “On the influence of teaspoons on love and morality.” ».

In the novel The Adventures of Oliver Twist, Dickens builds a plot centered on a boy's encounter with an ungrateful reality.

The main character of the novel is a little boy named Oliver Twist, whose mother died during childbirth in a workhouse.

He grows up in an orphanage at a local parish, whose funds are extremely meager.

Starving peers force him to ask for more for lunch. For this obstinacy, his superiors sell him to the undertaker's office, where Oliver is bullied by the senior apprentice.

After a fight with an apprentice, Oliver flees to London, where he falls into the gang of a young pickpocket nicknamed the Artful Dodger. The den of criminals is ruled by the cunning and treacherous Jew Fagin. The cold-blooded killer and robber Bill Sikes also visits there. His 17-year-old girlfriend Nancy sees a kindred spirit in Oliver and shows him kindness.

The plans of the criminals include training Oliver to be a pickpocket, but after a robbery goes wrong, the boy ends up in the house of a virtuous gentleman - Mr. Brownlow, who over time begins to suspect that Oliver is the son of his friend. Sykes and Nancy bring Oliver back into the underworld to take part in a heist.

As it turns out, behind Fagin is Monks, Oliver's half-brother, who is trying to deprive him of his inheritance. After another failure of the criminals, Oliver first ends up in the house of Miss Meili, who at the end of the book turns out to be the hero’s aunt. Nancy comes to them with the news that Monks and Fagin are not giving up the hope of kidnapping or killing Oliver. And with this news, Rose Meili goes to Mr. Brownlow’s house to resolve this situation with his help. Oliver then returns to Mr. Brownlow.

Sikes becomes aware of Nancy's visits to Mr. Brownlow. In a fit of anger, the villain kills the unfortunate girl, but soon dies himself. Monks has to open his dirty secrets, come to terms with the loss of his inheritance and go to America, where he will die in prison. Fagin goes to the gallows. Oliver lives happily in the house of his savior Mr. Brownlow.

This is the plot of this novel.

This novel fully reflected Dickens's deeply critical attitude towards bourgeois reality. "Oliver Twist" was written under the influence of the famous Poor Law of 1834, which doomed the unemployed and homeless poor to complete savagery and extinction in the so-called workhouses. Dickens artistically embodies his indignation at this law and the situation created for the people in the story of a boy born in a charity home.

Oliver's life path is a series of terrible pictures of hunger, want and beatings. By depicting the ordeal that befalls the young hero of the novel, Dickens develops a broad picture of English life of his time.

Charles Dickens, as an educational writer, never reproached his unfortunate characters with either poverty or ignorance, but he reproached a society that refuses help and support to those who were born poor and are therefore doomed from the cradle to deprivation and humiliation. And the conditions for the poor (and especially for the children of the poor) in that world were truly inhuman.

Workhouses, which were supposed to provide ordinary people with work, food, and shelter, were in fact similar to prisons: the poor were forcibly imprisoned there, separated from their families, forced to do useless and hard work and practically not fed, doomed to a slow death of starvation. It was not for nothing that the workers themselves called workhouses “Bastilles for the poor.”

And boys and girls who were of no use to anyone, who by chance found themselves on the streets of the city, often became completely lost to society, as they ended up in the criminal world with its cruel laws. They became thieves, beggars, girls began to sell their own bodies, and after that many of them ended their short and unhappy lives in prisons or on the gallows. From the above, we can conclude that the plot of this work is permeated with the problem of that time, as well as the present, a problem that concerns the moral education of a person. The writer believes that the problem of human upbringing is a matter for the whole society. One of the tasks of the novel “The Adventures of Oliver Twist” is to show the harsh truth in order to force society to be fairer and more merciful.

The idea of ​​this novel, I believe, can be attributed to one of the ethical problems studied in philosophy, to the problem of morality, morality.

The importance of moral education was emphasized by outstanding thinkers of different eras, from antiquity to our time. Speaking about philosophers who studied ethical issues, it is worth highlighting Pythagoras, Democritus, Epicurus, Bruno - the harbinger of classical bourgeois philosophy and ethics, Descartes, Spinoza, Hobbes, Rousseau, Kant, Hegel, Feuerbach, Aristotle, etc. Each of them had their own special point of view on this problem, their own views.

In order to understand the essence of the problem that permeates the work, I would like to turn to the period in which this work was written.

So, let's delve into the history of England. 1832, the adoption of parliamentary reform, which entailed, I would say, largely negative consequences for the lower class of society in England at that time.

The reform of 1832 meant a political compromise between the landed aristocracy and the big bourgeoisie. As a result of this compromise, as Marx wrote, the bourgeoisie was “recognized as the ruling class also in political terms.” (K. Marx, The British Constitution, K. Marx and F. Engels, Works, vol. 11, ed. 2, p. 100.) However, its dominance did not become complete even after this reform: the landed aristocracy retained significant influence on the general government of the country and legislative bodies.

Soon after the reform, the bourgeoisie, having gained access to power, passed a law in parliament that worsened the already difficult situation of the working class: in 1832, the tax for the benefit of the poor was abolished and workhouses were established.

For 300 years in England there was a law according to which the poor were given "relief" by the parishes in which they lived. Funds for this were obtained by taxing the agricultural population. The bourgeoisie was especially dissatisfied with this tax, although it did not fall on them. The issuance of cash benefits to the poor prevented the greedy bourgeois from receiving cheap labor, since the poor refused to work for low wages, at least lower than the cash benefits they received from the parish. Therefore, the bourgeoisie has now replaced the issuance of cash benefits by keeping the poor in workhouses with a hard labor and humiliating regime.

In Engels’s book “The Condition of the Working Class in England” we can read about these workhouses: “These workhouses, or, as the people call them, Poor Law Bastilles, are such that they should scare away anyone who has even the slightest hope of getting through. without this benefit of society. In order for the poor man to seek help only in the most extreme cases, so that before he decides to do so, he exhausts all possibilities of doing without it, such a scarecrow was made from the workhouse, which only the refined imagination of a Malthusian can come up with (Malthus (1776 - 1834) - an English bourgeois economist, covering up the real causes of poverty and misery underlying the capitalist system, tried to prove that the source of poverty is a faster growth of population in comparison with the growth of means for its subsistence. Based on this completely false explanation, Malthus recommended to workers abstinence from early marriage and childbearing, abstinence in food, etc.)

The food in them is worse than that of the poorest workers, and the work is harder: otherwise the latter would prefer staying in the workhouse to their miserable existence outside it... Even in prisons, the food is on average better, so that the inmates of the workhouse often deliberately commit some kind of crime. some offense to go to prison... In a workhouse in Greenwich in the summer of 1843, a five-year-old boy, as punishment for some offense, was locked in the dead room for three nights, where he had to sleep on the lids of coffins. At the Hearn workhouse the same thing was done to a little girl... The details of the treatment of the poor in this institution are shocking... George Robson had a wound on his shoulder, the treatment of which was completely neglected. They put him at the pump and forced him to move it with his good hand, fed him the usual workhouse food, but, exhausted by his neglected wound, he could not digest it. As a result, he became more and more weak; but the more he complained, the worse he was treated... He fell ill, but even then his treatment did not improve. Finally, at his request, he was released with his wife and left the workhouse, parted with the most insulting expressions. Two days later he died in Leicester, and the doctor who witnessed his death certified that death occurred from a neglected wound and from food, which, due to his condition, was completely indigestible for him” (Engels, The Condition of the Working Class in England). The facts presented here were not isolated; they characterize the regime of all workhouses.

“Can one be surprised,” continues Engels, “that the poor refuse to resort to public assistance that they prefer starvation to these Bastilles?..."

Thus, we can conclude that new law about the poor, deprived the unemployed and the poor of the right to public assistance; from now on, receiving such help was conditioned by staying in a “workhouse”, where the inhabitants were exhausted by backbreaking and unproductive work, prison discipline, and starvation. Everything was done to force the unemployed to be hired for pennies.

The legislation of the early 30s exposed the class essence of English bourgeois liberalism. The working class, which took an active part in the struggle for parliamentary reform, became convinced that the bourgeoisie had deceived it and appropriated for itself all the fruits of the victory won over the landed aristocracy.

From the above, we can say that the Great French Revolution was truly great in the depth of socio-economic and political changes that it caused in its homeland and throughout Europe. But its moral results turned out to be truly insignificant.

Bourgeois political republics, if they improved morals in one respect, then worsened them in many other respects. The commodity economy, freed from the restraining shackles of feudal power and traditional - family, religious, national and other “prejudice”, stimulated the unlimited rampant of private interests, left the stamp of moral decay on all areas of life, but these countless private vices could not be summarized into one common virtue . The bourgeoisie, according to the vivid characterization of K. Marx and F. Engels, “left no other connection between people than bare interest, heartless “purity.” In the icy water of selfish calculation, it drowned the sacred thrill of religious ecstasy, knightly enthusiasm, and petty-bourgeois sentimentality. turned a person's personal dignity into exchange value..."

In a word, the real course of the historical process has revealed that capitalism, suitable for many large and small matters, is absolutely incapable of providing such a synthesis of the individual and the race, happiness and duty, private interests and public duties, which was theoretically substantiated, although in different ways, by philosophers New time. This, in my opinion, is the main philosophical idea of ​​the work.

Description

"The Adventures of Oliver Twist" is Charles Dickens's most famous novel, the first in English literature in which the main character was a child. The novel was written in England, in 1937-1939. It began to be published in Russia in 1841, when an excerpt from the novel (Chapter XXIII) appeared in the February issue of Literary Gazette (No. 14). The chapter was entitled "On the influence of teaspoons on love and morality."

Philosophical analysis of the novel
Charles Dickens
"The Adventures of Oliver Twist"

Performed:
3rd year student
groups 2306
full-time education
Faculty of Finance
Tutaeva Zalina Musaevna

Scientific adviser:
Associate Professor of the Department of Philosophy
Ponizovkina Irina Fedorovna

Moscow, 2011
Philosophical analysis of Charles Dickens's novel "The Adventures of Oliver Twist"

"The Adventures of Oliver Twist" is Charles Dickens's most famous novel, the first in English literature in which the main character was a child. The novel was written in England, in 1937-1939. It began to be published in Russia in 1841, when an excerpt from the novel (Chapter XXIII) appeared in the February issue of Literary Gazette (No. 14). The chapter was entitled “On the influence of teaspoons on love and morality.” ».
In the novel The Adventures of Oliver Twist, Dickens builds a plot centered on a boy's encounter with an ungrateful reality.
The main character of the novel is a little boy named Oliver Twist, whose mother died during childbirth in a workhouse.
He grows up in an orphanage at a local parish, whose funds are extremely meager.

Starving peers force him to ask for more for lunch. For this obstinacy, his superiors sell him to the undertaker's office, where Oliver is bullied by the senior apprentice.

After a fight with an apprentice, Oliver flees to London, where he falls into the gang of a young pickpocket nicknamed the Artful Dodger. The den of criminals is ruled by the cunning and treacherous Jew Fagin. The cold-blooded killer and robber Bill Sikes also visits there. His 17-year-old girlfriend Nancy sees a kindred spirit in Oliver and shows him kindness.

The plans of the criminals include training Oliver to be a pickpocket, but after a robbery goes wrong, the boy ends up in the house of a virtuous gentleman - Mr. Brownlow, who over time begins to suspect that Oliver is the son of his friend. Sykes and Nancy bring Oliver back into the underworld to take part in a heist.

As it turns out, behind Fagin is Monks, Oliver's half-brother, who is trying to deprive him of his inheritance. After another failure of the criminals, Oliver first ends up in the house of Miss Meili, who at the end of the book turns out to be the hero’s aunt. Nancy comes to them with the news that Monks and Fagin are not giving up the hope of kidnapping or killing Oliver. And with this news, Rose Meili goes to Mr. Brownlow’s house to resolve this situation with his help. Oliver then returns to Mr. Brownlow.
Sikes becomes aware of Nancy's visits to Mr. Brownlow. In a fit of anger, the villain kills the unfortunate girl, but soon dies himself. Monks is forced to reveal his dirty secrets, come to terms with the loss of his inheritance and go to America, where he will die in prison. Fagin goes to the gallows. Oliver lives happily in the house of his savior Mr. Brownlow.
This is the plot of this novel.
This novel fully reflected Dickens's deeply critical attitude towards bourgeois reality. "Oliver Twist" was written under the influence of the famous Poor Law of 1834, which doomed the unemployed and homeless poor to complete savagery and extinction in the so-called workhouses. Dickens artistically embodies his indignation at this law and the situation created for the people in the story of a boy born in a charity home.
Oliver's life path is a series of terrible pictures of hunger, want and beatings. By depicting the ordeal that befalls the young hero of the novel, Dickens develops a broad picture of English life of his time.
Charles Dickens, as an educational writer, never reproached his unfortunate characters with either poverty or ignorance, but he reproached a society that refuses help and support to those who were born poor and are therefore doomed from the cradle to deprivation and humiliation. And the conditions for the poor (and especially for the children of the poor) in that world were truly inhuman.
Workhouses, which were supposed to provide ordinary people with work, food, and shelter, were in fact similar to prisons: the poor were forcibly imprisoned there, separated from their families, forced to do useless and hard work and practically not fed, doomed to a slow death of starvation. It was not for nothing that the workers themselves called workhouses “Bastilles for the poor.”
And boys and girls who were of no use to anyone, who by chance found themselves on the streets of the city, often became completely lost to society, as they ended up in the criminal world with its cruel laws. They became thieves, beggars, girls began to sell their own bodies, and after that many of them ended their short and unhappy lives in prisons or on the gallows. From the above, we can conclude that the plot of this work is permeated with the problem of that time, as well as the present, a problem that concerns the moral education of a person. The writer believes that the problem of human upbringing is a matter for the whole society. One of the tasks of the novel “The Adventures of Oliver Twist” is to show the harsh truth in order to force society to be fairer and more merciful.
The idea of ​​this novel, I believe, can be attributed to one of the ethical problems studied in philosophy, to the problem of morality, morality.
The importance of moral education was emphasized by outstanding thinkers of different eras, from antiquity to our time. Speaking about philosophers who studied ethical issues, it is worth highlighting Pythagoras, Democritus, Epicurus, Bruno - the harbinger of classical bourgeois philosophy and ethics, Descartes, Spinoza, Hobbes, Rousseau, Kant, Hegel, Feuerbach, Aristotle, etc. Each of them had their own special point of view on this problem, their own views.
In order to understand the essence of the problem that permeates the work, I would like to turn to the period in which this work was written.
So, let's delve into the history of England. 1832, the adoption of parliamentary reform, which entailed, I would say, largely negative consequences for the lower class of society in England at that time.
The reform of 1832 meant a political compromise between the landed aristocracy and the big bourgeoisie. As a result of this compromise, as Marx wrote, the bourgeoisie was “recognized as the ruling class also in political terms.” (K. Marx, The British Constitution, K. Marx and F. Engels, Works, vol. 11, ed. 2, p. 100.) However, its dominance did not become complete even after this reform: the landed aristocracy retained significant influence on the general government of the country and legislative bodies.
Soon after the reform, the bourgeoisie, having gained access to power, passed a law in parliament that worsened the already difficult situation of the working class: in 1832, the tax for the benefit of the poor was abolished and workhouses were established.
For 300 years in England there was a law according to which the poor were given “relief” by the parishes in which they lived. Funds for this were obtained by taxing the agricultural population. The bourgeoisie was especially dissatisfied with this tax, although it did not fall on them. The issuance of cash benefits to the poor prevented the greedy bourgeois from obtaining cheap labor, since the poor refused to work for low wages, at least lower than the cash benefits they received from the parish. Therefore, the bourgeoisie has now replaced the issuance of cash benefits by keeping the poor in workhouses with a hard labor and humiliating regime.
In Engels’s book “The Condition of the Working Class in England” we can read about these workhouses: “These workhouses, or, as the people call them, Poor Law Bastilles, are such that they should scare away anyone who has even the slightest hope of getting through. without this benefit of society. In order for the poor man to seek help only in the most extreme cases, so that before he decides to do so, he exhausts all possibilities of doing without it, such a scarecrow was made from the workhouse, which only the refined imagination of a Malthusian can come up with (Malthus (1776 - 1834) - an English bourgeois economist, covering up the real causes of poverty and misery underlying the capitalist system, tried to prove that the source of poverty is a faster growth of population in comparison with the growth of means for its subsistence. Based on this completely false explanation, Malthus recommended to workers abstinence from early marriage and childbearing, abstinence in food, etc.)
The food in them is worse than that of the poorest workers, and the work is harder: otherwise the latter would prefer staying in the workhouse to their miserable existence outside it... Even in prisons, the food is on average better, so that the inmates of the workhouse often deliberately commit some kind of crime. some offense to go to prison... In a workhouse in Greenwich in the summer of 1843, a five-year-old boy, as punishment for some offense, was locked in the dead room for three nights, where he had to sleep on the lids of coffins. At the Hearn workhouse the same thing was done to a little girl... The details of the treatment of the poor in this institution are shocking... George Robson had a wound on his shoulder, the treatment of which was completely neglected. They put him at the pump and forced him to move it with his good hand, fed him the usual workhouse food, but, exhausted by his neglected wound, he could not digest it. As a result, he became more and more weak; but the more he complained, the worse he was treated... He fell ill, but even then his treatment did not improve. Finally, at his request, he was released with his wife and left the workhouse, parted with the most insulting expressions. Two days later he died in Leicester, and the doctor who witnessed his death certified that death occurred from a neglected wound and from food, which, due to his condition, was completely indigestible for him” (Engels, The Condition of the Working Class in England). The facts presented here were not isolated; they characterize the regime of all workhouses.
“Can one be surprised,” continues Engels, “that the poor refuse to resort to public assistance under such conditions, that they prefer starvation to these Basstilles?...”

Thus, it can be concluded that the new poor law deprived the unemployed and the poor of the right to public assistance; from now on, receiving such help was conditioned by staying in a “workhouse”, where the inhabitants were exhausted by backbreaking and unproductive work, prison discipline, and starvation. Everything was done to force the unemployed to be hired for pennies.
The legislation of the early 30s exposed the class essence of English bourgeois liberalism. The working class, which took an active part in the struggle for parliamentary reform, became convinced that the bourgeoisie had deceived it and appropriated for itself all the fruits of the victory won over the landed aristocracy.
From the above, we can say that the Great French Revolution was truly great in the depth of socio-economic and political changes that it caused in its homeland and throughout Europe. But its moral results turned out to be truly insignificant.
Bourgeois political republics, if they improved morals in one respect, then worsened them in many other respects. The commodity economy, freed from the restraining shackles of feudal power and traditional - family, religious, national and other “prejudice”, stimulated the unlimited rampant of private interests, left the stamp of moral decay on all areas of life, but these countless private vices could not be summarized into one common virtue . The bourgeoisie, according to the vivid characterization of K. Marx and F. Engels, “left no other connection between people than bare interest, heartless “purity.” In the icy water of selfish calculation, it drowned the sacred thrill of religious ecstasy, knightly enthusiasm, and petty-bourgeois sentimentality. turned a person's personal dignity into exchange value..."
In a word, the real course of the historical process has revealed that capitalism, suitable for many large and small matters, is absolutely incapable of providing such a synthesis of the individual and the race, happiness and duty, private interests and public duties, which was theoretically substantiated, although in different ways, by philosophers New time. This, in my opinion, is the main philosophical idea of ​​the work.
Also, from the above, one can see that the ideas of the novel were close to many philosophers and in more detail the development of ethical and philosophical thought relevant to that period of time can be traced in the ideas of I. Kant, I.G. Fichte, F.V.I. Schelling, G.V.F. Hegel, Feuerbach, Engels, etc.
Kant in his ethical writings constantly refers to the relationship between morality and law. It is precisely when analyzing this problem that the philosopher’s critical attitude towards bourgeois society is especially acutely revealed. Kant reveals the very specificity of morality to a large extent by distinguishing it from law. He distinguishes between external, positive, and internal, subjective, driving principles of social behavior.
etc.................