‘ I hope so,’ replied the child.’ After I am dead, but not before. I know the doctor must be right, Oliver, because I dream so much of heaven, and Angles, and kind faces that I never see when I am awake. Kiss me,’ said the child, climbing up the low gate, and flinging his little arms round Oliver’s neck. Good- b’ye, dear! God bless You!”
OLIVER TWIST
Whenever I think about Oliver Twist, I don’t know why? the only thing, the first thing, and the last thing that always involuntarily hit me right there in my hippocampus is this…
‘I am a little, freaky child, playing in the snow in winter. My woolen hat (which we used to call a topi there) is stuck on top of my head so lightly, that it threatened to fall off every moment, and I, giving my head an abrupt twitch every now and then, bringing my hat back to its proper place on my head. Seeing this, my friend, who is another freaky child playing snow-snow with me is running after me, trying to snatch my hat from my head and, I running away from him clutching my hat with both hands.’
Those were such happy days. You know! I spent my early childhood in the frequently occurring picturesque snow-capped ambiance in a hill station in the lapel of Himalaya. I miss those days! And hey! Merriam Webster defines the word ‘hippocampus’ something like this—
a curved elongated ridge that extends over the floor of the descending horn of each lateral ventricle of the brain, that consists of a gray matter covered on the ventricular surface with white matter, and that is involved in forming, storing, and processing memory.
As long as the novel is concerned, I read it only somewhere in 2016. I never read it in my school. The journey and hardship of this orphan boy and the gruesome conditions of an impoverished London and that poverty leading to those criminal activities. This all with that penmanship of Dickens had proved to be a painful yet charming affair for me. Dickens himself had faced those hardships as a child worker I know and the way he has portrayed it here in this book, has shown an apparent profundity of his experience.
“Trifles make the sum of life.”
― CHARLES DICKENS
BOOKBROODER 