Dennis Walder
The ‘Overall mode of Oliver Twist’ is ‘like one long, oppressive nightmare’
Richard Ford (Dickens’ most vehement critic)
“The abuses which he ridicules are not only exaggerated but in nineteen cases out of twenty do not at all exist.” This can be disagreed upon because Dickens himself has suffered from extreme poverty and harsh working conditions. Thus, the visceral imagery and torment of Twist sheds light on the severity of the matter.
Shiho Hashimoto
"Rose and Nancy represent two girls who hold the same purity and goodness"
Deniela Dumovska
"Nancy is a dissenting woman that falls outside the patriarchal borders and her character subverts the domestic ideologies"
TH Lister - Edinburgh Review (October 1838)
Praised Dicken’s ability to “excite our sympathy in behalf of the aggrieved and suffering in all classes; and especially in those who are most removed from observation…the orphan pauper - the parish apprentice - the juvenile criminal.”
The Literary Gazette
Praised Dickens for “the exposure of evils - the workhouse, the starving school, the factory system, and many other things, at which blessed nature shudder and recoiled.”
Susan Meyer
Dickens “emphasises aspects of Fagin’s character familiar from the Anti-Semitic tradition, namely his miserliness, his greed, his exotic and strange appearance, his effeminacy, his obsequiousness, his cowardliness - and the size of his nose.”