Oliver as Object: Character, Genre, and Agency in the Victorian Novel

Abstract: This essay revisits the perennial question of Oliver Twist's flat and inert character. It argues that the different genres overlaid within the novel—allegory, statistical report, it-narrative—allow Dickens to make the social critique that drives the novel. The statistical report and itnarrative, particularly, demonstrate that the discourse of Benthamism, which underpinned the New Poor Law, is inadequate to narrate human subjectivity. These genres dramatize Dickens's critique of the law: that it turns people into fungible units. The flat characters and objectifying genres of Oliver Twist drive the novel's powerful argument about humanity and community. For most of the novel, Oliver can be read via a posthuman critique; he has more in common with the objects and animals of it-narrative than with Pip or David Copperfield. To bring about novelistic resolution, Dickens finally turns to a familiar and satisfying romance plot, revising Oliver into a true protagonist with agency and a unique identity. This essay challenges the convention that flat characters are authorial failures by arguing that in Victorian novels, as genre and character co-create one another, they construct particular, strategic models of human subjectivity and agency.