One doesn’t really review Charles Dickens, any more than one ‘reviews’ a waterfall. Dickens has achieved a status beyond mere likes or dislikes, critique and praise. It is not a question of whether Dickens is any good, so much as it is a question of how he strikes you.

As for Oliver Twist, I would say that it strikes me less forcibly and impressively than the other Dickens works I’ve read. It’s more focused and complete than Pickwick, but just for that reason lacks the remarkable development of that work (wherein Mr. Pickwick starts off as a clown before revealing himself to be a truly admirable man) as well as the strong weighted keel of the relationship between Mr. Pickwick and Sam Weller. My other Dickensian experiences – Nicholas Nickelby, Bleak House, David Copperfield, and Great Expectations – are each sturdier and more complete than Oliver (I leave off A Christmas Carol as being so much shorter that it’s really a different sort of work. Though, yes, I also rank it higher than Oliver).

Part of it is that the titular Master Twist lacks the weight to carry the novel. He has very little agency or personality, being mostly driven along by circumstances. The only time he acts decisively is when he attacks Noah Claypole for insulting his (Oliver’s) dead mother. It’s a good moment, but Oliver never follows up on it with further acts of defiance. The parallel case in Nicholas – of Master Nickelby’s assault upon his evil employer for beating Smike – heralded a real change in young Nicholas’s character; henceforth, he takes his destiny into his own hand and no longer remains subject to his uncle’s whim. For Oliver, it is a comparatively isolated incident that facilitates the next stage of his journey – since it prompts him to run away from the good Sowerberrys – but doesn’t herald much change in his character. He’s still just as timid, naive, and dependent as he was before.

There’s also the fact that the supporting cast in Oliver isn’t as strong as that in many other Dickensian works. Oh, there are some great characters, to be sure – Nancy, Bill Sikes, Fagin, the Artful Dodger, Mr. Bumble, etc. – but there’s a higher percentage of ho-hum figures, like Charlie Bates, whose whole character up until the final chapters consists in his laughing at everything that happens, which gets old rather fast.

More importantly, the story feels ill-balanced in its characters. Oliver’s pure and righteous benefactors are mostly isolated from the more colorful menagerie, making their sections strongly distinct from the rest of the story and not to a good effect (there’s a reason most adaptations don’t think twice about cutting Rose Maylie and her entourage from the story entirely). In Nicholas, the noble and upright hero and heroine serve as the double eye of a hurricane of human curios. Oliver is a human leaf being blown about in what is, in any case, a much lesser storm.

Of course, it would be a mistake to be too critical. We have also Dickens’s rich survey of the London criminal classes, with the molding, broken-down buildings sinking into the mud, the dockyards where inconvenient objects of all kinds are dumped into the swirling tide, the complex power dynamics between the brute and the money man, and with it the hellish manner in which each is willing to sacrifice or devour each in order to survive.

We also get an astute sense of the differing ‘power’ levels among the characters. Noah Claypole, for instance, may be a thoroughly rotten character, but his essential cowardice means that he’ll never be more than the smallest of fish in the pond. He would have no moral objections to doing murder, but would never have the guts for it. Fagin, on the other hand, though physically weak, is cunning and ruthless enough to effectively rule the gang without question.

On the subject of Fagin, oddly enough, for all the references to him as ‘the Jew’ and his unrelentingly villainous character, I didn’t take much of a straight ‘antisemitic’ impression from him. That is, I never got the idea that he was meant to be a ‘reprensentative’ Jew, or that his villainy was somehow an offshoot of his Jewishness, only that he was a vile character who is also a Jew as part of his overall makeup (contrast with, say, Shylock, whose villainy is directly linked with his Jewishness, though Shylock is a much more nuanced character). This tallies with what I’ve since read of Dickens’s intentions, by the way; that he made Fagin a Jew because a large number of the ‘boy keepers’ in London at the time were Jews, but held no particular animosity toward that people himself.

As I said before, Fagin is really a much better character in the adaptations, where he’s often played as being more likeable and sympathetic, while still being a selfish thief. This follows from Ron Moody’s definitive performance in the role from the musical, where he very deliberately took hold of the character with both hands and made him something else, and, honestly, something much more interesting. It’s a relatively rare instance of a character – and with him the story – being drastically improved by a major change in the adaptation, especially when adapting the work of a certified genius.

(Oliver!, by the way, is really one of the best adaptations I think I’ve seen, as an adaptation, in that it hits the essential points of the story while streamlining it and gracefully minimizing or eliminating most of its flaws. Okay, Oliver himself is still sort of a non-entity, but he’s at least more involved – being part of Sikes’s final panicked flight, for instance. Having his singing voice be that of an adult woman is one of the film’s few missteps).

There is also an interesting commentary on unhappy relationships, where just about every relationship (except Rose and her even-less-developed love interest) is unhealthy in one way or another. There’s Bumble’s mercenary wooing of the widow Mrs. Corney, who quickly seizes power and reduces him to a henpecked shadow. Something similar happens with Noah and the besotted Charlotte, where he mercilessly bullies her and essentially comes to dominate her will entirely (though both are such light and despicable characters that it’s more played for laughs than anything). Mr. Sowerberry the Undertaker has his moderately-merciful inclinations overruled by his harridan of a wife. And, of course, there’s Nancy’s tragic devotion to the brutal Bill Sikes, whom she gives up her chance of escape to protect and who ends up murdering her in a fit of rage.

Nancy, as I’ve said, is really the best character in the book for her starkly realistic image of a woman corrupted, but still with shreds of decency, who in another story might have been able to leave the criminal life behind, but here chooses to stay for the sake of her abusive brute of a boyfriend, as well as from sheer familiarity and fear. She partakes in several wicked acts, but is also instrumental in bringing about Oliver’s happy ending at the cost of her own life.

Bill Sikes is another stand-out: this glowering, unpredictably violent brute of a man who seems constantly one bad moment away from murdering whoever is nearest to hand. The fact that little Oliver is obliged to spend more than a whole day with this man is genuinely unnerving, since we never doubt he’ll kill the boy without a second thought if the mood strikes him (another tribute to the film; I don’t know that you could find a more fitting actor for the role than Oliver Reed). But then, when he does kill Nancy, the deed is so monstrous that even he is disturbed by it, sending him into a haunted flight during which he can’t get the sight of her dead body out of his mind.

On another note, the plot and Oliver’s backstory is rather too convoluted, with a half-brother, a burned will, a long-lost aunt who he decides he’d rather call a sister, and so on. Again, the adaptations that streamline this down to just ‘Oliver is the son of Mr. Brownlow’s niece / daughter’ simplify it to very good effect. This isn’t a story that really wants all of that; Oliver is too young to be worrying about inheritance or to play any role in the discovery, and in any case, all he really needs or wants is an actual home with decent people who will care for him. The rest is pure icing.

On that note, that’s another reason why Rose isn’t necessary; Oliver already has a wealthy and kind benefactor in Mr. Brownlow and co.; he doesn’t need a whole other set of them.

(All that being said, it irritates me that Oliver and Company didn’t even bother to the name the little girl who adopts Oliver ‘Rose’ or some variation, or name her butler ‘Giles’. That’s the sort of thing in adaptations – where carrying over a detail from the original would have cost absolutely nothing – that irks me disproportionately. They also should have named one of the evil dobermans ‘Bullseye’)

Of course, all of this is leavened with that glorious Dickensian prose that makes the book a feast even when nothing much is happening. I also enjoyed the soot-black humor of the chimney sweep in early chapters explaining that the best way to free a boy trapped in a chimney is to light a good fire and roast his feet (“Smoke makes boys go to sleep, which is what they likes”). This disturbs even the workhouse governors so much that they…reduce their offer by a few pounds.

So, in summary, it’s still Dickens, but I’d say it’s my least favorite of the Dickensian world I’ve sampled thus far.