Dies irae!

The only thing which compensates for a truly awful night of suffocation and mucus was the fact that I had finished ‘Oliver Twist’ and could spend my forced waking hours thinking about the novel.

To my mind the reactions of Sikes and Fagin are the most spectacular in their uncomfortable observation; the first when he has killed Nancy and is responding by living in a sort of pathetic fallacy where everything seems to remind him of his crime; the second in his reactions when in court and listening and observing everything around him. The complete destruction of his sanity also has within its degradation a terrible logic in the way in which he views the world.

The view that the novel gives of the family is a very interesting one. There is no real example of the nuclear family with husband, wife and 2.3 children. There are plenty of grotesque caricatures of the family characteristics: from Mrs Mann the uncaring keeper of the branch-workhouse, he name emphasising the denial of the female, motherly, caring aspects of her character to the Bumbles whose cavalier disregard for the welfare of their charges eventually ends in their sharing their fate: becoming paupers in their own workhouse.

The surrogate families abound: Fagin with his ‘boys’ provides a grotesque parental figure dedicated to his charges degradation yet at the same time providing a sort of stability. Mr Brownlow significantly, is reading at the time of his first meeting with Oliver – not engaged in the world but in an intellectual version, a sanitised version, of it. His household comprises the comfortable Mrs Bedwin (a widow); the irascible Mr Grimwig and himself as confirmed bachelors. The partnership between Grimwig and Brownlow is more on the basis of a marriage than a conventional friendship – the one complementing the other. The Maylies also present a picture of unfulfilment: two women in a household with widowed servants; no stability or normality. Secrets, shames and obstacles to normality abound, and it is significant that the only eventual normality is found in the last chapter of the book when all the loose ends are neatly (!) tied up in a description of a sort of family life which includes virtually all the positive characters in the novel who survive living together or within easy reach of each other. The collection of incomplete figures finds completion in an extended family where all their eccentricities are able to be accommodated literally and figuratively!

There is even a sort of reference of Milton’s version of The Fall in the way that Harry Maylie accepts a low station in life (as a country clergyman) so that the advantages which he could have had are laid at the feet of Rose as part of his renunciation of his future as the price for his love and his attempt to ensure that they stay together: the man choosing to stay with the female even at the price of his prospects.

It is again significant that this chapter does not form part of the action of the novel, but is more of a tidying up process so that a sort of equilibrium is restored and the name of Oliver’s mother is the last item to be mentioned so that the whole of the novel could be seen as a sort of regeneration of the reputation of a woman who, wronged and wronging is able to find salvation through the fortuitous concourse of Dickensian coincidence.

Carmen has come back from shopping with a collection of medicaments which I have been enthusiastically trying.

After moping around in the house for most of the day we finally went out for a promenade on the Ramblas in Terrassa. The full Christmas thing: traditional roast chestnuts; a fair in full luminosity; the Christmas decorations being decorous; people milling around buying things for The Kings; bands playing - and me coughing my way along like an ailing Scrooge. As long as I'm well enough to get on the plane I will delay the full Christmas and New Year spirit until I am back in Blighty.

No doubt in the rain (a climatic condition which has been singularly absent during my time in Catalonia) will do its best in Wales to make me feel instantly at home!