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Well before the terrifying murder of Nancy, Oliver Twist's story is accompanied by a haunting repertoire of dead people and images of death. His first encounter with a dead body occurs during his apprenticeship with the undertaker, Mr. Sowerberry, when they go to the poorest district of the city to carry away the corpse of a woman who has starved to death.
There were some ragged children [. . .] and in a small recess, opposite the door, there lay upon the ground, something covered with an old blanket. Oliver shuddered as he cast his eyes towards the place: and crept involuntarily closer to his master; for though it was covered up, the boy felt that it was a corpse. (47)
When Sowerberry, Oliver, and Bumble return the following day for the burial, Dickens describes the village boys, who "played a noisy game at hide-and-seek among the tombstones: or varied their amusement byjumping backwards and forwards over the coffin" (49). The body is then put into an overflowing pauper's grave, and the grotesque intermentis summed up: "The grave-digger shovelled in the earth; stamped it loosely down with his feet; shouldered his spade; and walked off: followed by the boys: who murmured very loud complaints at the fun being over so soon" (49) . Dickens's outrage at the inhuman conditions under which poverty-stricken men and women live and die is compressed, but heavy hitting. The scene bluntly contrasts the accoutrements of a woman's death - the blanketed corpse, the coffin, the grave, and the mourners - with the indifference of the living, represented by the careless children, the detached grave-digger. It is a familiar and effective style: understatement and juxtaposition advance serious social protest and moral judgment.
Oliver Twist (1839) is Dickens's first avowal of the unavoidable necessity of looking at a world of suffering and injustice where human beings are opposed and estranged: a world of dark motives and death, cruelty and sanguinary acts. Significantiy, this novel also includes Dickens's first public articulation of a deliberate aesthetic strategy, the so-called "streaky bacon" theory of melodramatic effect:
It is the custom on the stage, in all good murderous melodramas, to present the tragic and the comic scenes, in as regular alternation [...]. Such changes appear absurd;...