Narrative Techniques and Realistic Details in the Representation of Victorian Society in Charles Dickens's Oliver Twis

This article examines how Charles Dickens turns the description of social conditions into social criticism in Oliver Twist (1838). The aim of the study is to show how narrative techniques (the ironic omniscient narrator, shifting focalization, contrastive characterisation and the alternation of comic and tragic scenes) work together with realistic details of an institutional, material, spatial and linguistic kind in the representation of Victorian society. The analytical, comparative-historical and text-stylistic methods are used. The results show that Dickens’s realism is selective and morally charged: details are chosen because they indict an institution, and the narrator’s voice directs how the reader evaluates them. The findings can be applied in courses on the history of foreign literature, text analysis, literary stylistics and literary translation.