LV and Dickens

[deborahhbbrd]

No: HPFGUIDX 148233

I really think that the two genres are so far apart - the real worlds
of the two authors and their two fictional worlds as well - that it's
a mistake to go that route. As I understand Caro, she thinks that an
orphanage child would naturally become more Tom Riddle than Oliver
Twist. Not really. But from a fictional point of view, it's simply
more dramatic to have a hero/antihero at one or other extreme. Look at
Anne of Green Gables!

Anyway, Oliver is seen by most people as a peg on which to hang
several stories: the street children of London; organised child crime;
corrupt orphanage staff; benevolent rich people; the power of
coincidence, with Oliver being (re)united with the family he never
knew; greed leading to criminality; I won't go on! The child himself
is pretty lacking in personality ... which one can't say for LV. And
we should also consider how Oliver is always depicted, bizarrely, as
not just speaking in educated middle-class English but actually
thinking and behaving like a child from a respectable family. In other
words, he aspires to the condition in which he will best fit. Tom
Riddle was intent upon creating a world in which only he fitted, and
compelling everyone else to do things his way or take the
consequences. Dramatic, but not necessarily more true to life than
Oliver's aspirations.

Though, as writers of big, sprawling stories, Dickens and JKR would
probably have a lot to say to each other, behind the veil ...

Deborah, going back to the Peter Ackroyd biography soon to check
things out