Domestic Criticism In Dickens's 'Oliver Twist'

details . Elizabeth Gaskell , for example , turns in Wives and Daughters to middle class experience in a small country town . Her novel thus moves to a kind of domestic realism depicting everyday middle class life . Dickens , however , has retained his dark vision of the English society right up to Oliver Twist , his second novel .

Historically speaking , the Victorian Compromise that aims at synthesizing and reconciling , fades away by the 1870's . A sense of disillusionment has been growing . The Victorian have lived through change but they have realized that ' change ' does not mean ' progress ' , an aspect which Dickens has anticipated as early as Dombey and Son .

Again , in a historical sense , the apparent peace of the fifties has …show more content…
The novel's central action is Oliver Twist's attempt as an individual to explore his true instinctive tendencies and to discover himself despite the mass of corrupt society and the problems of social conventions . The novel , however , disturbs the Victorian autobiographical fiction . Instead of the development of the protagonist from childhood through rebellion to maturity through experience which leads to reconciliation , Oliver ends in rejecting the values of his society and still pure . As a child Oliver is too weak to change his world but he tries hard to adjust himself to it