Oliver Twist and Inklings of ‘Grotesque’

Oliver Twist is a novel in which the society of pilfers and felons were reconnoitered uninvited by a young boy whose name is Oliver in the Victorian period. He as an orphan faces with dissimilar circumstances that are concealed to the eyes of the conventional people. Dickens, as the narrator of the story, has logged those absurdities and clumsiness in his novel. Dickens uses the idea of grotesque to display the conditions and the scenes to alert people in forms of comic and tragic. Dearth, poverty, lives of thieves, and whatever ensued in his time are dexterously exhibited in this novel by using grotesquery which its function is ‘mixing emotions, tragicomic, abnormality’. He uses melodramatic techniques with grotesque and humorous characterization. He exchanges tragic and comic scenes to balance one against another. Grotesque in Oliver Twist mainly can be debated in three formulas that are comprised as caricature-like characters, Gothic-like environment, and a means of satirizing situations.