I think I enjoyed the first half of Oliver Twist more than the second. This is a long 400 pages that felt like it kept getting longer. Dickens’ flowery language was expected, but it didn’t make it easier to read. By the end, I was pretty over the dramatics – everyone in the 1800s was apparently a ball of emotion, ready to explode at a moment’s notice. There were too many characters – way more than necessary – and some sentences take up whole pages. Even some of the chapter titles could be considered paragraphs… did Dickens have an editor?

I’m not entirely certain that Fagin’s Jewishness needed to be mentioned quite so many times when no one else’s religion was brought to our attention… I guess that Dickens’s ability to sympathise with the impoverished fails to include needy Jewish people. Many of these characters deserve empathy, unfortunately, I started to lose patience with most of them in the end. Overdramatic and unnecessarily complicated, I went on a journey from loving to suffering from beginning to end, leaving the entire experience feeling fairly average, if not worse. Honourable mention to the gentleman in the white waistcoat from the beginning, who I wish made more appearances throughout.