Characters disguise their identities when it will benefit them. A good example of this is when Nancy pretends to Oliver’s middle-class sister so that she can take him back to Fagin. Clothing also shows us important parts of some characters personalities. When Dickens wants the reader to see a different part to a character and their personality he changes their clothing. When Oliver returns to Fagin, Fagin takes his new clothes from Mr. Brownlow off him.
Before we know that Oliver is related to Mr. Brownlow, we already know how close they are. Mr. Brownlow is already treating him as if were family. This shows the novels rejection of realism in favour of fantasy. At first, Oliver is a lonely orphan, but by the end it’s revealed that he has just as many relatives as any one else in the novel. The bond between Oliver and Mr. Brownlow is suggested before it actually happens. We already knew that Mr. Brownlow was like an uncle to him when he takes him in. Oliver is taken from lower-class to high-class. Whereas in real life in 19th Century England the fact that Oliver started as an orphan would have meant that he was almost certain to end in ruin.
Bill Sykes is the main character in this chapter. He appears weak and needs to rest. Bill hasn’t slept for three days and cannot stand up properly. He wants to know all that has been going on and what has happened to Nancy’s body. Bill gets frustrated when he doesn’t get the information he needs. He asks a lot of questions showing fear and panic. Bill is quite shocked when Charley says he’s not frightened of him. He gets very aggressive and fights with Charley when Charley tries to attack him. Bill is threatened by the police and locks Charley away in a cupboard: “He flung him in, bolted it and turned the key.” When he tries to escape, Bill threatens Kags, Chitling and Crackit with murder if they do not follow his orders. He realises that he can’t escape and tries to make take one more chance at it. Then he sees Nancy’s ghost which puts him in shock, and he staggers and accidentally kills himself.
Bill is always nasty with Nancy and bosses her about and tells her what to do. He is extremely violent. This shows when he kills Nancy for telling Mr. Brownlow about Oliver. He uses violence to get what he wants, especially with Fagin and Nancy. Dickens makes the reader feel scared of Bill, as we know he’s dangerous.
Dickens confronts the question of whether the poor environments he writes about have the power to “Blacken the soul and change its hue forever.” By looking at the characters’ fates we can assume that the answer is they do not. Especially characters like Fagin and Sykes seem to have permanent damage to their moral sensibilities. Even Sykes has a conscience which appears when Bill sees Nancy’s eyes that haunts him after the murder. Oliver is above the corruption though the novel takes him away from poor and nasty environments quite early in his life. Nancy, who considers herself, “lost almost beyond redemption”, ends up sacrificing everything for a child she barely knows. Dickens doesn’t believe an environment can affect your personality; a bad place can’t affect your good personality. He shows this by using Oliver as an example.
The chapter is set on the banks of the River Thames, the black river. The buildings surrounding the river are dirty and close built to one another. There are a lot of dirty, muddy streets. Shops sell a lot of cheap goods. They have their junk hanging outside to entice people in. Everything looks the same, like a maze. There is no air. The whole place is rotting and full of garbage. The windows in the houses have no glass and the doors are falling off: “Rooms so small, so filthy, so confined, that the air would seem too tainted, even for the dirt...” Dickens tells us it’s the, “dirtiest, blackest, filthiest and the strangest.” It tells us that nowhere in London is as filthy as this environment. It’s an environment of degradation. We know this because of Dickens’ use of superlatives. The only things that “ornament” the banks are bad things. Dickens uses the word ‘ornament’ because he is being sarcastic, ornaments are meant to decorate and enhance a place to make it seem better.
Most of London is described in the same way. The houses are dirty, unhygienic and smelly. Fagin’s den is completely falling apart and so are many of the other houses too. However, Mr. Brownlow has a very high-class, clean house because he has a lot of money and can afford it. Fagin can’t afford to live in the higher-class area because he only makes money from stealing. Even if he could afford it he would definitely not fit in. He lives in the poor part of London because looks after and accommodates many children who, in return, steal and pickpocket. Therefore we know that there are two parts to London, the poor part and the posh part. Dickens has a love-hate relationship with London and makes London separate into two parts to show the unfairness and to show that nobody should be living like this.
The majority of the first part of the novel takes on the organisations of charity, which in this time, were run by the church and the government in Dickens’ time. Dickens describes the system that was put into place by the Poor Law of 1834, which stated that the poor could only receive government assistance if they lived in the government workhouses. Dickens felt a duty to report things that were going on around him. People who lived in the workhouses were inmates whose rights were a host of curtailed onerous regulations. Work was required, families were always split up and there was very little food and clothing. The workhouses were run on the principle that poverty was the result and punishment of being lazy and the dreadful conditions in the workhouse would inspire the poor, so they would get jobs and better their lives and the circumstances they live in. However, the economic dislocation of the Industrial Revolution made them unable to do so and there was no socialising in the workhouses. Also, as Dickens points out, the officials who ran the workhouses took advantage of their power. Their greed, laziness and arrogance is described of the charitable workers like Mrs. Mann and Mr. Bumble. Overall, the charitable institutions only let the terrible conditions reoccur because the poor would live like that in anyway. The poor chose between, “being starved by a gradual process in the house, or by a quick one out of it.”
The language in this chapter is very descriptive and detailed. It’s detailed when the setting is being described. The three men use dialect. When Sykes asks a lot of questions we can see his fear and shows us that he’s thinking about what will happen to him. Charley is desperate when he is talking to Sykes so his language is desperate. He speaks in short sentences and uses a lot of exclamations, which shows us he’s afraid: “Murder! Help! Down with him!” It also shows that he’s not in control and increases the tension. There’s a lot of emotional language when Sykes tries to escape. As we read this language, we experience what he is going through, his state of mind. The old language tells us the novel was written a long time ago. The violent language tells us what Sykes was capable of and shocks us as a reader. We feel involved in what is happening.
The young boys in Fagin’s gang always use dialect. This is the way the people in the poorer part of London spoke. Sykes always uses violent language especially when he’s talking to Fagin and Nancy. This is how he gets what he wants. Nancy uses very emotional language and speaks with feeling. When she talks to Mr. Brownlow she uses desperate language because she knows that she could get caught and is afraid of what Bill will do to her, as she knows that he will harm her.
When reading this chapter I think that the reader feels a range of mixed feelings. We feel disgust when we hear of people living in these terrible conditions. We are tense when Bill arrives at the house as we don’t know what he will do and we know what he is capable of. We feel relief when the police arrive but are tense when Bill is on the roof. We are afraid when Bill sees Nancy’s ghost and we have mixed feelings when Bill dies.
We are appalled when Bill hits Nancy because he shouldn’t harm her just because she upsets him. When Bill kidnaps Oliver we feel panic because Oliver was happy with Mr. Brownlow and, again, we don’t know what Bill will do. When Nancy agrees to meet Mr. Brownlow on the bridge because we know that Bill will catch them. We panic when Bill finds out that Nancy spoke to Mr. Brownlow and we know just how dangerous he is.
Chapter 50 is like the rest of the novel because the things that have happened in this chapter are the same as the others. We have the same characters and the same place, both described in the same way. We also go through the same emotions as a reader, and the language used in this chapter, can be found in the rest of the novel.