When reading Dickens’s “Oliver Twist” and “Great Expectations” the reader cannot avoid meeting crimes and the criminal world in those literary works. The author wants to show how different the world is – how society is divided in the social layers – there are rich, poor but to be in the middle is very difficult. There is a parallel world to the normal people’s world– the world of the outlaws. In the “Oliver Twist” crime and criminal world goes throughout the whole work. People are robbed, killed, threatened as well as pick pocketed.
As Dickens involved many autobiographical facts in his writings the reader may understand that the author has experienced a great presence of the underworld influences during his lifetime. The scenes where criminals are mentioned seem to be rather realistic and the reader via the book can feel the presence of criminals who are ugly and their appearance imbues fear. Kind of that feeling experiences also Oliver when reading the book at the Jew’s place. “It was a history of lives and trials of great criminals; and the pages were soiled and thumbed with use. Here he read of dreadful crimes that made the blood run cold; of secret murders that had been committed by the lonely wayside; of bodies hidden from the eye of a man in deep pits and wells (..) and at last, after many years, and so maddened the murderers with the sight, that in their horror they had confessed their guilt.”…
