Oliver Twist draft shows Dickens moderated its domestic violence
DOMESTIC violence in Oliver Twist was toned down in later drafts to leave “more to the imagination”, experts have revealed, as the original manuscript is published for the first time.
Charles Dickens’s classic novel ex- amining crime and poverty in Victorian Britain was self-censored to make it less brutal about the relationship between Bill Sikes and Nancy, with offending words like “damn” also removed from the text.
The author’s alterations have been revealed with the first publication of his original Oliver Twist manuscripts, released to mark 150 years since the writer’s death in 1870.
Simon Callow, the actor and die-hard Dickens enthusiast, has penned an introduction to the text – which is littered with corrections and name changes – and writes that the version finally published in serial form toned down the brutality of Sikes.
It was noted that the 25-year-old Dickens “moderated Bill’s brutality to Nancy” and cut “violent expressions of emotion” towards the gangster’s moll.
The young author, publishing in monthly instalments in the magazine Bentley’s Miscellany between 1837 and 1839, also expurgated “damn”, “God”, “cursed”, and “blast” to mellow his more explicit first draft.
Callow writes that the more calm prose of the final version left “more to the imagination”, and also ironed out “inconsistencies in the plot” after Dickens decided to make Nancy a more sympathetic character.
“Nancy would be the new, tragic heroine of the work,” Callow writes in the introduction to the book, published by SP Books.
“The working out of her destiny in its pages would transform a mere serial into a genuine novel.”
He added that returning to edit his first drafts, Dickens: “Wrote with new vigour and focus and a much tighter grip on the book, building towards the terrible and inevitable climax in which Bill Sikes kills Nancy.”
The manuscript bears the marks of Dickens’s corrections, with inked out paragraphs and extensive annotations.
The edition also contains illustrations by George Cruikshank, a caricaturist who collaborated with Dickens on the novel.