Andrew Kay is having a Dickens of a time

It struck me as most fortuitous that in the year of the bicentenary of Charles Dickens I should be given a Kindle, ‘wery’ fortuitous indeed. Thus armed, I ventured forth into cyber world and purchased the complete works of the great man for the princely sum of nineteen shillings and tenpence halfpenny (99p or thereabouts).

As a teenager I grew to love Dickens, back then David Copperfield and Great Expectations were de rigueur in any half decent syllabus. One book I didn’t read was Oliver Twist. Well why would you when there was a good old romp of a musical to watch. How wrong I was. I first got wind of just how bleak the book was when I saw Neil Bartlet’s gruelling (forgive the pun) staging at the Theatre Royal Brighton, but even that pales in comparison to the desperate descriptions even in the first few chapters.

“Three meals of thin gruel a day, with an onion twice a week, and half a roll on Sundays”

Here he is describing the ‘good works’ undertaken by the bloated board of governors of the workhouse.
‘So, they established the rule, that all poor people should have the alternative (for they would compel nobody, not they), of being starved by a gradual process in the house, or by a quick one out of it. With this view, they contracted with the water-works to lay on an unlimited supply of water; and with a corn-factor to supply periodically small quantities of oatmeal; and issued three meals of thin gruel a day, with an onion twice a week, and half a roll on Sundays.’ Oliver Twist.

Oliver Twist was first published in 1838, 174 years ago. How life has changed – or not changed. While we in the first world deal with the problems of childhood obesity, many places in the third world are dealing with famine and childhood malnutrition. Have you spotted the parallel?

Images of emaciated children standing at water-pipes or queuing for a meagre bowl of grain now haunt me, whilst those of romping urchins in prettily coloured costumes dancing down cobbled streets, cocking their heads and giving me a jaunty wink are fading fast.

So far Oliver Twist is short on the usual Dickens’ humour but my god, this is poignant stuff, as brutally real today as it was then. I made myself a bowl of soup for dinner last night, thin soup to suit my mood on reading this.