Dickens' presentation of Good and evil in oliver twist

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Charles Dickens used “Oliver Twist” as a way to attack many aspects of society. To exaggerate this fact he makes the heroes look like angels, and the villains in the story are made out to be the devils of the world. The obvious person to first look at is Oliver. Oliver had one of the worst possible starts to life, born into the workhouse, an orphan from birth, made to slave through life, hard labour everyday and fed very poorly. This would surely fill a normal child with hatred and jealousy towards any other human being that wasn’t at the same level as him. As Dickens wanted his hero to be the model person, he completely ignored what he should have been, and made him: polite, respectful, brave, handsome, clever and loving. His hero has a huge fight within the first chapter, the fight for life. This shows that Oliver was a strong willed person, because he had no family he was left to struggle for himself straight away. Dickens points out the irony that if Oliver had been born “surrounded by carful grandmothers, anxious aunts…he would have inevitably and indubitably have killed in no time”, leaving the reader already sympathetic towards him. However Dickens left Oliver with one fault, his inability to judge people’s characters. He will trust anyone at first meeting, he knew Dodger for no more than a minute or so, and he went off with this stranger that could have been leading him into being mugged. Although this choice ends up being the right one, I’m sure if he had done this in reality the book would be a lot smaller. This lack of judgement means he is often exploited by the characters he meets, and exploitation ends up being a recurring theme in the book. Fagin is a person who is very hard to put into a particular category. On one hand he is forcing these children into become young criminals, exploiting them to make it so he didn’t take any risks but still

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