Oliver Twist (1999): The One that is mostly about Monks
Oliver Twist is one of the most filmed novels of all time, bringing up 187 title matches in IMDb and so filmic that the great Russian director Sergei Eisenstein posited it as the greatest precursor of the silent epics of D.W. Griffiths. Among the many adaptations is the 1999 ITV series, written by Alan Bleasdale, perhaps best known for the 1980s slice of social realism, Boys from the Blackstuff. With 4 episodes of 90+ minutes, it clocked in at 386 minutes running time, much longer than the best known precursors, David Lean’s 1948 film and Carol Reed’s 1968 musical. It had plenty of scope, then, to expand on the storyline, and it did so in an interesting way.
The first episode is given over almost entirely to backstory, one which renders the convoluted storyline of the novel more comprehensible. It focuses on Agnes, Oliver’s mother, and on Monks, Oliver’s half-brother who schemes to gain the inheritance due to Oliver. In the novel, the opening pages recount that Agnes (we do not know her name at this point) gives birth to Oliver and dies.
“Lor bless her dear heart, when she has lived as long as I have, sir, and had thirteen children of her own, and all on ’em dead except two, and them in the wurkus with me, she’ll know better than to take on in that way, bless her dear heart! Think what it is to be a mother, there’s a dear young lamb do.”
Apparently this consolatory perspective of a mother’s prospects failed in producing its due effect. The patient shook her head, and stretched out her hand towards the child.
The surgeon deposited it in her arms. She imprinted her cold white lips passionately on its forehead; passed her hands over her face; gazed wildly round; shuddered; fell back—and died. They chafed her breast, hands, and temples; but the blood had stopped forever. They talked of hope and comfort. They had been strangers too long. (Oliver Twist, Ch. I)
It is a quick and unsentimental death, by Dickens’ standards. Then the novel moves forward, as novels do and as previous adaptations, most of which began with the last moments or hours of Agnes, did.
A heavily pregnant Agnes (Josephine Smith) struggles towards the workhouse to give birth and die at the beginning of David Lean’s Oliver Twist.
The ITV series, however, does not do that. It uses a match cut, going from Agnes’ face softening into a smile as she dies to the same face, eyes closed and smiling with, perhaps, post-coital bliss while she lies talking to her lover Edwin Leeford, some months previously – probably nine. It goes backwards, in other words, and spends most of the next 90 minutes there, providing a prequel to Dickens’ novel. It tells how Agnes’ affair with Edwin fell apart because of his prior marriage to the scheming Elizabeth Leeford, how Agnes hides her pregnancy from her loving but drunken father and how Elizabeth dominates Edward, her and Edwin’s son, and tries to coax that disturbed young person into murdering Agnes. The first episode climaxes with Edward’s attempted murder of the pregnant Agnes. She escapes and runs away from home to die in the workhouse, leaving us, at the end of the episode, neatly back at the opening pages of the novel.
Sophia Myles as Agnes in the ITV serial Oliver Twist (1999), lying on the grass with Edwin.
This information is essentially as in Dickens, but in the novel it is provided in the closing pages as a resolution to the mystery surrounding Oliver’s parentage:
This child,” said Mr. Brownlow, drawing Oliver to him, and laying his hand upon his head, “is your half-brother; the illegitimate son of your father, my dear friend Edwin Leeford, by poor young Agnes Fleming, who died in giving him birth.”
“Yes,” said Monks, scowling at the trembling boy: the beating of whose heart he might have heard. “That is the bastard child.” (Oliver Twist, Ch. LI)
Bleasdale’s script does not hold this information over for the purpose of a final revelation. Instead, it is given at the beginning to set events in motion. This probably makes for a less confusing storyline and a less rushed ending, and it definitely allows the series to reorientate the central focus of the setory so that, in tandem with Oliver’s story and sometimes eclipsing it, it tells the story of Monks, who becomes a flesh and blood figure, rather than the shadowy presence in Dickens.
Monks is introduced by Dickens, halfway through the novel, as follows: “a dark figure emerged from a projecting entrance which lay in deep shadow, and, crossing the road, glided up … unperceived” (Oliver Twist, Ch. XXXIII). The language of mystery and shadow follows Monks around throughout the novel. While it may create a certain atmosphere, it also empties Monks of substance and makes him a less memorable character. Adaptations have been far more successful in creating enduring characterisations of Fagin and Sikes, the other main villains in the novel, than with regard to Monks. Monks is central to the plot, but the imaginative power behind Dickens’ depictions of Fagin and Sikes is absent. Monks appears in Lean’s film, but makes little impression compared to Alec Guinness’ Fagin and Robert Newton’s Sikes. Oliver! dispenses with the character of Monks entirely.
In the “culture-text” of Oliver Twist, then, Edward Monks is a liminal figure. It is perhaps in search of artistic priority and to bring originality to a much-adapted story that Bleasdale makes Monks a co-protagonist in the ITV series. He is introduced 40 minutes into the first episode, alighting from a carriage with his mother, an imperious and glaring lady. Monks is immediately characterised as a person of supreme interpersonal awkwardness by his shy smile and nervous hand movements when a servant girl opens the door for him. He and his mother enter their living quarters and she immediately labels him a “doze pot”. We already feel a degree of sympathy for the young Edward Monks: he is naïve, bumbling and browbeaten by his mother, who is clearly a formidable and unpleasant person. They are constantly on the move because of her propensity to live beyond their means. Edward notes, “I have never left anywhere except at the dead of night or first dawn. I never made a friend that I knew that I would keep.” Elizabeth cuttingly replies, “We could be an eternity in the same place, Edward, and it would make no difference to your hopes of friendship.” With a mother like that, who needs enemies?
Despite the somewhat sympathetic naivete of Monks, he is clearly a deeply disturbed individual. When trying to convince him to kill Agnes, Elizabeth notes, “You like to kill things, Edward. I have seen you in the fields”, to which he replies, “Only things … I won’t do it again.” He does, therefore, have serious mental issues and a sadistic bent, but he, unlike his mother, scruples at murder.
When, in the climactic scene of the first episode, he tries to kill Agnes, he is unable to bring himself to plunge the knife into her, and eventually falls onto a seizure. This corresponds to an incident in Dickens where Monks encounters Oliver:
“The man shook his fist, as he uttered these words incoherently. He advanced towards Oliver, as if with the intention of aiming a blow at him, but fell violently on the ground: writhing and foaming, in a fit.” (Oliver Twist, Ch. XXXIII)
While in Dickens this strange incident is never incorporated into the character of Monks in a coherent way, Bleasdale makes it central to Monks’ state of emotional disturbance, traumatised by an evil mother and uncaring father and forced towards an act of violence which, ultimately, runs against his nature.
That is where we leave Monks at the end of episode one: having been unable to kill Agnes, he has angered his mother and they have not got their hands on the money from Edward’s death. Yet he has been humanised far beyond any prior adaptation or the source.
Given just how popular Oliver! is, and how acclaimed Lean’s film has been, a straight adaptation of Oliver Twist struggles to create a reason for its own existence. There are many ways for an adopter to get around such an issue. One that is taken in this adaptation is to take a minor and hitherto ignored character, Monks, and add greatly to his backstory and complexity, interspersing it with more familiar scenes from the story. That works well in this instance, making this perhaps the most interesting serial adaptation of Dickens’ novel.
The Victorian Sage 