City and Country Theme Analysis

The novel takes place in two separate, morally distinct locations: the Country and the City. The Country is everything outside London and its outlying villages; London is the primary City. To Dickens, the country is a place of peace, quiet, hard work, and strong family structures that ensure people continue to work hard and avoid criminality. The city, however, is a place of difficult working conditions, where the poor are crowded together, ground down by all the difficulties of "modern" industrial life.

Oliver, tellingly, comes from the "country," from a town environment relatively far from London. He makes his way to London to avoid Sowerberry, the coffin-maker, and a live of terrible poverty in the workhouses, but what he finds in the city is not a means of escape, but rather, a more difficult life: one of forced criminality. Only when Oliver stumbles, half-dead, upon the Maylies' house far outside the city, does he begin to recuperate, to think longingly for Brownlow, and to begin to find a stable family life. Oliver ends up near a country parsonage at the novel's end, with the Maylies and those who care about him; he is adopted as Brownlow's legal son, allowing him to be educated in peace and quiet.

Dickens wrote during the English Industrial Revolution's most robust stage—when cities were becoming "the" location for all those hoping to make their fortunes, and to rise up out of poverty. But cities were also repositories for vice and poverty, and seemed to provide ammunition for those who sought to equate the "social diseases" of poverty and criminality. Thus Dickens has a complicated relationship to the city and the country as he describes them. He believes that Oliver's virtue is best suited to the country, but that country is rapidly disappearing as England becomes more connected by rail and roads, and more economically dependent on the factories of the city. Dickens does not advocate that the country should remain wholly separate from the city, or that the city should cease to exist. Rather, he seems to argue that the country provides a kind of serenity and family structure that should be brought back to the city.