Not Sweating the Small Stuff

'Oliver Twist' (1838) - Exaggeration and Melodrama as Approaches in Literature

'Please sir, can I have some more?'

I was watching the new-ish Roman Polanski 'Oliver Twist' (2005) with Ben Kinsley as Fagin ... and a friend declared that the approach taken by the director was one that involved inappropriate exaggeration and melodrama.

But this was Dickens' choice of mode, as the original accompanying etchings by George Cruikshank well show.

'The Last Chance' (Bill Sikes's Final Moments)

'Fagin in the Condemned Cell'

'The Robbery' (Bill Sikes Shoots Oliver during the Robbery of Mr Brownlow's House)

As a social reformer with an agenda of exposing the real root causes of the social and economic ills of working class C19 Industrial Britain, the author used a non-naturalistic mode as it suited his method of literary work - a didactic novel in a serial in weekly installments for a wide audience. Like a comic strip in words - weekly high drama with a cliff hanger hook has mass appeal.

Melodrama and exaggeration as approaches have negative connotations - this is because we live in the final backwash of the C19. But fashions change so we can now re-examine work in such a unrealistic mode in an entirely completely positive way. As we differently but similarly enjoy and appreciate the surrealities in 'One Hundred Years of Solitude' by Gabriel Garcia Marquez.

Fagin's eye-rolling horror at his own impending death is chilling and powerful. As is the look on villainous Bill Sikes' face as he viciously and without qualms shoots Oliver Twist during the robbery of Mr Brownlow's house. We are now not embarrassed to response morally to these extreme (and effective) constructions - we are simply left to decide whether or not they work. And in much of Dickens they most certainly do!