Item of Mortality: Lives Led and Unled in Oliver Twist

Abstract

This essay engages with recent scholarly debates in Victorian studies focused, first, on narrative’s relationship to the optative mood, and, second, on the status of minor characters in fiction. Its reading of Oliver Twist both extends and challenges prior work by Andrew Miller and Alex Woloch, among others. With particular emphasis on the protagonist’s minor alter-ego, Dick, the essay considers what difference fictional mode makes to the possibility of anything else’s happening to a character than what we read about him or her.