Oliver Twist (adapted freely in verse)

The boy who famously asked for more,
A morsel on his plate was all he saw,
The undying character of Oliver Twist
Whose tale of unease is hard to resist.

When Dickens wrote of his little lad
He purposed to make his readers sad;
Part of the genius of his novelist art,
To assail and break the hardest heart.

Primary misfortune, his mother dies,
Bleak future in Parish “care” now lies.
The urchin’s prospects again crumble,
Via the hands of a beadle Mr Bumble.

Off to the workhouse dragged post-haste,
Where to feed the poor was akin to waste.
On drawing lots the unlucky Oliver lost,
He gamely asked for more food but at a cost.

The overseers of this “upstart” wanted rid,
Offering five pounds to any one who bid
To take the greedy rapscallion into work;
Apprenticeship would see he did not shirk.

Almost snapped up by a creepy sweep,
A kind magistrate saw Oliver nearly weep.
He pled not to go with the”dreadful man,”
This led to an undertaker’s door rather than
A likely bout of grim and grimy servitude;
Sowerbee’s wife though had an embittered mood,
And treated Oliver so badly he just had to cry cry and cry,
Knowing that to run for life was the best thing he could try.

Hence off to London Oliver at last makes well away,
The readers can hope for an eventual brighter day;
But deftly Dickens pens his next mise en scène,
We must just read on and see what happens then.

Erelong our waif and much tormented boy
Is inveigled into crooked Fagin’s employ;
Joining his youthful gang of willing thieves
With its caring bond as naif Oliver believes.
Now he's taught the trade of a pocket picker,
The novel's plot unlike gruel gets even thicker.
He is fostered by these merry malcontents,
Quite oblivious of their true criminal intents.

Trustful Oliver turned Fagin’s artless lodger,
Is led astray by the resourceful Artful Dodger.
Another fickle twist of his fate is wrought,
A wallet was nabbed only Oliver is caught.
Then up in court: a vital change of luck,
A gent by the accused’s wan look is struck.

Kindly Mr Brownlow saw innocent Oliver in the dock
Pale and ill falling faint beset by mental shock.
Before the beak Brownlow offers his trust and wardship,
What's proposed is not opposed by a benificent His Worship.

Life in care of his gentleman ensures a better life,
Motherly housekeeper and all and nary any strife.
The young hero’s prospects propitious ever more?
Eponymously as it were what next twist is in store?

Sure enough he soon falls into other nasty hands
Once again to be a pawn in wily Fagin’s evil plans.
Off to fetch some books that took his master’s fancy,
Oliver is grabbed by Bill Sikes and this tart called Nancy.

Back to Fagin with Nancy hauled there by her lover Sikes
Went Oliver under threat again a most unfortunate of tykes;
Purloined is a five pounds note, ripped off, his brand new duds,
He runs away but his escape effort is swiftly nipped in the bud.

Bill Sikes a monster creation is as brutal as brutish thugs come,
Even for a Dickens villain he ascends to the top of scum.
Sikes threatens to punish Oliver and brandishes his stick,
Moll Nancy mollifies her man and snips his ire in the wick.

Unbeaten by Fagin and Sikes only thanks to a street girl’s heart,
Oliver’s size fits a burglary plan, she persuades him to take part;
On squeezing his frame through a window sadly poor Oliver is shot,
That son of swine Bill Sikes makes off, more dark deeds are afoot in this plot.

While Oliver starts to recover in the home that Sikes meant to rob
Fagin begins to doubt his partner's doxy and orders a following job;
The spy sees her talking to Brownlow and delivers his Caesar his dues,
Fagin tells Sikes that she has shopped him he near goes berserk at this news.

Confronting Nancy Sikes will not listen to her swear she did not betray,
Determined that he had been turned in only his madness could hold sway.
He raised and brought down with a deathly thud his stick upon her head,
Over and over this terrible man went on till gentle Nancy was stone dead.





Dickens plunged readers in the blood chilling,
Cathartic icy moment of hot blooded killing;
Nancy’s murderer we know is on the loose,
A step or two ahead of a hangman’s noose.

Sikes possessed a dog he often kicked and hit,
A cussed beast that fought him back and bit;
Bullseye bolted off and quit his brutal boss,
Nasty Bill so cruel a master may come to rue his loss.

Meanwhile Oliver’s true past is now revealed,
A crucial fact of his birth was long concealed;
The father who sired him was a gentleman
Whose other son, by his wife, has a secret plan.

A male sibling has tried to find Oliver for years,
Scared to lose his estate and fraught with fears
That he may have to share great expectation;
Pre-soap operas this rivals them in complication.

Oliver’s step-brother and Fagin were in league,
But Mr Brownlow cottoned on to their intrigue;
He got this man called Monks to spill the beans,
Brownlow resolved to save Oliver by any means.

On Nancy’s death the Law was hot on Sykes’ trail,
The populace too who thought him beyond the pale;
A crowd whipped up to a fury follow Bullseye’s tail,
And in a frenzied melee close in on the fleeing male.

The story of Oliver Twist a mix of grief and pleasure,
Writ in shades light and dark in fairly equal measure;
Novels like minds have memories to bury or treasure,
Heightened for dramatic effect, lightened to reassure.

This story dear reader in short has nearly reached a peak,
Please read on if conclusion or closure you should seek;
So far Agnes his mother died and Nancy is no more,
Oliver is still at risk of Fagin should he beset his door.

A local bull terrier known as Bullseye face deep in a leather boot,
Bill Sikes, shaking the stricken leg, crying : “Off you bloody brute!”
On a London street below if privy to a high town pigeon’s eye,
Clattering pell-mell over cobbles a rabid mob mid hue and cry.

The locals have followed the lead to the quarry right up to his lair,
Fatefully the dumb creature summoned the impromptu posse there.
Up up went the collective growl: “There he is, it’s Nancy’s killer!"
A backwards scowl and Sikes was gone. It’s de rigueur in a thriller.

Now a hullabaloo, where’s he gone? Who knew? Has he got away?
But Sikes emerged, the large throng surged, above all saw the prey.
On a warehouse roof, none needed proof, a guilty man was perched,
A cowardly cur, all might aver, they each would have gladly birched.

Then the fiend leaned, towards a hoist careened, an overreaching grope,
With a desperate lunge, Sikes took the plunge and fouled upon a rope;
His neck was strung up by chord normally hung up for baskets of fruit,
Just dessert folks said, with this villain dead, hanging did certainly suit.

Characters exist in a fictional world. They twist and maybe tumble,
Some subject to natural reparation as is a certain Beedle Bumble
Who ends up in Court, and a lesson is taught, of legal rough justice
That he must pay for the acts of his wife - yet feels it's all injustice.

“The law is a ass” (sic) says this great horse’s arse as he bumbled away,
Without further delay, on that very same day, to where he must stay
Him and his wife till they fully paid what was due for wrongs done;
Bumble was cross, as he faced up to loss, his job as a Beedle just one.

Though the Bumbles would grouse they ended up in that workhouse
The same no place to shirk house where orphans treated like a louse
Like Oliver picked oakum. It served'em right to learn to be a grafter;
We read this story with due laughter, they lived unhappily ever after.

Now that ducker and diver that smart and Artful Dodger gets to feature
A japester by his nature, his life a caper, he carries on as Fagin’s creature
Stealing a fancy snuff box though is a failure, Art gets transported to Australia
Deported to the land peopled by convicts and ... a bounding strange mammalia.

He may have changed his name to Murdoch, founded a dynasty who knows
Just a naughty thought and all complete cock but nothing in our novel shows.
Who couldn’t prefer being sent to tropical climes for their crimes? Not "little i."
Fog, disease, city snakes - sun, sea, snakes!? Where did a better future lie?

FAGIN In parenthesis as it were I wanted to include my defence in the narrative against certain, accusations made against the novel. In my opinion CD painted a picture of a singular bad Jew who fitted the stereotype of a miserly lover of money (such a person could have existed at that time and place) much as Sikes is an evident evil bastard of a white anglo-saxon origin, no one could infer from the particular to the general. I would argue that CD did not mean all Jews have Fagin's complex of negative qualities.

(on the character of Fagin & his doings in Oliver Twist)

Dickens' characterisation of a Jew was not meant to be antisemitic,
The creation of an impious not pious Jew by an author not a critic.
His false friendly demeanor seemed charming and disarming,
As if this chief of errant youths was not really so bad or harming.

Fagin's seeming affection for Oliver was not what it appeared,
He won his confidence with an engratiating: “Oliver, my dear.”
And Fagin slyly recruited him to their brotherhood of thieves,
Gulling him as if in game to pick pockets and nick posh kerchiefs.

Oliver, despite abuse at his hands, when Fagin is apprehended
Sees in his cell true colours he had simply not comprehended.
The jailed fellon faces up to the boy perhaps for old time’s sake,
Also his future fate: to be put to sleep, and never more to wake.

Accessory to Nancy’s muder facing hanging with not long to last
Fagin out of his head with fear now blabs a secret of Oliver's past.
He gives Oliver a wedding ring which as a fence he had been sold
Which will prove its worth to the boy more than its weight in gold.

A ring known to Mr Brownlow, none other than his late daughter’s
Very own. By this revelation is shown Oliver’s relation and alters
His status from unloved orphan to new found favoured grandson;
Ensures him family, a lot in the lottery of life Oliver has finally won.

Fagin’s gang has been broken up and all sent to distant tracts,
For convenience of Empire - unwanted - dumped to stop its acts.
A motley cast of assorted types have inhabited a novelist’s scene,
Like the popular liquorice allsorts a pick’n mix of type and mien.

A boy who once asked for more had a lion’s share of vicissitudes,
In his tale for each step nearer haven a hellish stair tread intrudes.
Oliver’s twists and tricks of fate have played like a game of whist,
Dealt by Mr Charles Dickens in his peerless history of Oliver Twist.