Social Classes in Oliver Twist and Down and out in Paris and London

Every single human being is born into a cultural and social label that defines who they are as a person in society. This label includes family, religion, language, social class, and community as well as numberless other factors. Throughout history many people live and die in the very same social class they were born into, no matter how unfortunate it may be. The two novels, Down and Out in Paris and London by George Orwell and Oliver Twist by Charles Dickens are focused on the plights and undue hardships those born into the lower end of the social class spectrum are forced to endure with no help from those above. The protagonists of both Oliver Twist as well as Down and Out in Paris and London are both working class, and this strongly affects the portrayal of the story and protagonists themselves. These protagonists are portrayed as working class in a way that aligns the reader’s sympathies with them. In Oliver Twist, the working-class Oliver is forced to make a life for himself among a society of liars and thieves, ultimately finding out that it is his destiny to live among those who are of a higher class of society. In contrast, Down and Out in Paris and London is a memoir, but the perspective used, especially in the latter city, is that of the person who is impoverished and who is forced to rely on benevolence and camaraderie among the working class. Although the ultimate message of Oliver Twist is one of class uplift, meaning that the person whose perspective is offered receives absolution only because he is ultimately positioned as a rightful member of the aristocracy, the ultimate message of Down and Out in Paris and London is more complex. In this work, the reader views the protagonist through the eyes of the upper social classes and their perspective of the lower classes and as a result any sympathy felt is through the eyes of the upper class. Ultimately, both works offer a view of the protagonists in which the reader’s sympathy is contingent upon representation that occurs through the view of the upper class.

​In Oliver Twist, the titular character is a lovable waif. He is an innocent who, against the odds, tries to promote a positive approach to the world and to his attitude. The book itself tries to promote a view in which the working-class hero becomes worthy of his ultimate fate because of his very acceptance of that fate. For example, the narrator implores the reader that he or she has the power to think positively and therefore change his or her own circumstances. “Such is the influence which the condition of our own thoughts, exercises, even over the appearance of external objects. Men who look on nature, and their fellow-men, and cry that all is dark and gloomy, are in the right; but the sombre colours are reflections from their own jaundiced eyes and hearts. The real hues are delicate, and need a clearer vision” (Dickens, 367). This passage may not be pivotal to the entire story of Oliver Twist, but it nonetheless offers an angle into which one can begin to understand a Marxist approach to this book. The idea that the individual is superior to the community seems to overcome the fundamental dynamics of the story.

Instead of relying on the group to band together and fight for its own betterment, as the Marxist philosophy would presume, the passage indicates that everything boils down to the individual’s superior ability to reframe their circumstances. The ideology of the book is reinforced with this passage, which focuses on the individual. The passage shows that the story is promoting a view in which the individuals who are innately gifted with a certain perspective are uniquely able to see the positive and good things in the world, whereas those who lack this gift are destined to see the world in the “sombre colors” that are mentioned in the passage. The notion that the individual has the power to change the colors of the world around them is inherently opposed to the communitarianism that is central to a Marxist ideology.

​Oliver Twist is a novel that seems superficially sympathetic to poverty. However, its ultimate message is one that reinforces the idea of all events and moral choices are predetermined by previously existing causes; the theory of determinism. The idea that society is inherently unequal and that it ought to be so. The novel establishes clear differences between the band of thieves who form their own community, and the rest of society. This difference occurs along the lines of an “us versus them” dichotomy in which, ultimately, Oliver is revealed to be positive and innately superior to the same thieves who gave him so much.

The story concludes with Oliver’s benefactor elevating the few worthy souls from the story to an appropriate social class. “Mr. Brownlow adopted Oliver as his son. Removing with him and the old housekeeper to within a mile of the parsonage-house, where his dear friends resided, he gratified the only remaining wish of Oliver's warm and earnest heart, and thus linked together a little society, whose condition approached as nearly to one of perfect happiness as can ever be known in this changing world” (Dickens, 587). The story, therefore, concludes with a reorientation of society in which the communal society of thieves is replaced with one of the bourgeois class. Thus, the community is lost and presumably, the people who have been part of it are now uplifted to something better: A stuffy and sufficiently bourgeois class in which everyone makes an honest living by selling their labor on the free and open market. Clearly, the story’s ideology is deeply at odds with a Marxist view of the book and of society.

​In contrast, Down and Out in Paris and London offers a more complex engagement with the working class. Although George Orwell himself is clearly not a member of the working class, this story takes on the perspective