Use these questions or activities to help to gauge students’ familiarity with and spark their interest in the context of the work, giving them an entry point into the text itself.

Short Answer

1. Are you familiar with any other 19th century or Victorian novels? Can you think of any novels from this time period that are also titled after the main character?

Teaching Suggestion and Helpful Links: Novels bearing the main character’s name were common in Victorian England and throughout the 19th-century broadly: Famous examples include Jane Eyre, David Copperfield, Frankenstein, Emma, Anna Karenina, and Madame Bovary. This reflects the era’s societal trends—growing individualism, an expanding middle-class—and relates to the importance of identity in Oliver Twist.

• This article from the British Library discusses the development of the novel throughout the 18th century and its relationship to “ordinary” people’s stories.
• This article from Victorian Web discusses Dickens’s famously idiosyncratic (and idiosyncratically named) characters and the role they play in his novels.

Short Activity

Like most of Dickens’s novels, Oliver Twist takes place primarily in London, England. Imagine you’ve traveled back in time and are standing in the middle of a street in Victorian London. What do you see, hear, smell, feel, and taste? Jot down the first five or six stimuli (images, noises, etc.