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Oliver Twist book and a movie
I don’t like Charles Dickens. My kids know this, but I also recognize his books are formative to much of modern culture, we reference ideas and images in it in our conversation. So, I decided to grit my teeth and assign an Oliver Twist book club to my kids for our book and a movie as we reached roughly that same time period in modern history. I thought, “This will be a great way to look at worker’s rights and the problems that came about after industrialization.” I did not take into account my absolute loathing for Dickens’ writing style. Thankfully we have an Aunt Tara to help me endure this Oliver Twist book and a movie.
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Oliver Twist plot
Side point, there are about a million copies of Oliver Twist, especially since it seems Charles Dickens updated the book, so there’s even an annotated edition with comments on that. Honestly, I went to our library and picked up the paper copies they had, but here is a solid unabridged Oliver Twist copy.
Oliver Twist is an orphan, he grows up in a poor house that doesn’t feed him enough food, “Please sir, can I have some more?” He leaves the poorhouse/workhouse and ends up with a group of boys including the Artful Dodger working for Fagin, who trains them to rob people. Hijinks ensue and he ends up with a nice old lady and somehow he finds out he is the missing child of someone and is actually rich.
It may have been a few years since I read it, and I know that summary is not doing justice to the book.
But the phrases in red are ideas that have just entered the mindset, and there is an entire storyline of the orphan who is secretly the missing heir of some rich person or is adopted by said rich person.
And Charles Dickens did some amazing things with this book and his other books. He helped fix the many problems in the English world.
I just don’t like his writing style, despite assigning my kids to read three of his books. I will admit by the time we got to Oliver Twist, I was not as good at keeping my comments in line.
Our Oliver Twist book club
I have Oliver Twist on my 12th-grade books made-into-movies list, for no other reason than I was trying to spread out Charles Dickens books across high school. We however read it during 10th grade when we covered that particular time period, and it was the last year I really had all of my kids solely doing ELA with me.
Sadly 7Sisters does not have a literature guide for Oliver Twist, so I relied a fair amount on Tara, and we had weekly calls with her, and I did some looks to see what all Oliver Twist discussion questions I could find.
- Oliver Twist book guide– a decent set of questions for the book overall
- Oliver Twist chapter questions
- That’s all I could find without joining sites, more and more is moving behind a paywall (I am not blaming these sites, just observing)
Oliver Twist book and a movie
For years I have heard people rave about Oliver, a 1970s musical covering Oliver Twist. I thought, “Perfect! This is a fun way to watch the book.” Instead, it was so slow, and the filming was so very very 1970s. After 10-20 minutes we were all done. So we switched over to Oliver and Company, one of the final movies of the Disney Dark Ages, right before the Renaissance with Little Mermaid. I was spectacularly happy because I remember watching Oliver and Company in my childhood, but it also greatly changed the story.
Greatly changed the story, but it was fun.
Let’s talk snacks.
- cartwheel- there is a scene or two where this comes up and my kids jumped at the excuse to have random round cookie with yummy toppings on it, I’m linking to some coconut deliciousness, even though the pictured version is just fudge and shortbread
- medicine- random bits of small candies, in the picture are peanut M&Ms and Skittles, but it can be any small candy
- stolen books- I punted and these should have been Hershey nuggets made into books, but I got lazy
- Mr. Bumble- since Mr. Bumble sounds like bumblebee, we went with the honey treat of stroopwafel, primarily because I like stroopwafel
- sausages- mentioned in the book
- country living- once Oliver gets out to the country, we decided that is represented by fruit
- Oliver Twist- a jar of olives to eat, Jeff was happy…
- handkerchief- I made some crepes, and they look delicious
- gruel- oatmeal
And that was our Oliver Twist book club. Aside from my ridiculous over the top whining about reading Dickens, there was very little of note.
More good senior year ideas
Honestly, when my kids were seniors, I did very little in the way of stuff because they were primarily taking community college classes, so most of this is more what others might do their senior year.
Oh wait, I did lots of geography during that time, but here are some vaguely 12th grade ideas.
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