Reading Guide: Vintage Youth: Oliver Twist & Trainspotting

Featured Reading Guide

Irvine Welsh

Buy from rBooks

“Have your say”

Latest Comment

Be the first to comment, use the form below

Make your own comment

Social Bookmarks

Bookmark this page!

About Irvine Welsh

Irvine Welsh is the author of eight previous works of fiction, most recently Crime . He lives in Dublin.

top

About the Book

2 classic books for the price of 1: Vintage Youth is a limited edition gift pack which consists of beautifully designed separate volumes of O liver Twist by Charles Dickens and Irvine Welsh’s controversial bestseller Trainspotting . Vintage Youth is just one of ten Vintage Classic Twins to collect. Each twin consists of two books: a specially designed limited edition of one modern classic title and one established classic work. The books in each pair have been carefully selected to provide a thought-provoking combination. Oliver Twist : Oliver is an orphan living on the dangerous London streets with no one but himself to rely on. Fleeing from poverty and hardship, he falls in with a criminal street gang who will not let him go. Dickens graphically conjures up the capital s underworld, full of prostitutes, thieves and lost and homeless children, and gives a voice to the disadvantaged and abused. Trainspotting : Choose us. Choose life. Choose mortgage payments; choose washing machines; choose cars; choose sitting oan a couch watching mind-numbing and spirit-crushing game shows, stuffing fuckin junk food intae yir mooth. Choose rotting away, pishing and shiteing yersel in a home, a total fuckin embarrassment tae the selfish, fucked-up brats ye’ve produced. Choose life.

top

Irvine Welsh interview/review

By the time Oliver Twist was published in 1838, Charles Dickens already basking in literary glory – his first novel, Pickwick Papers , had been declared by the Quarterly Review as ‘one of the most remarkable literary phenomena of recent times’. With his second novel Dickens sealed his reputation as the great writer of the Victorian age. With its sympathetic portrayal of the lower classes, Oliver Twist was considered an instant classic and it marked the start of a literary love affair with his public.

Because his works appealed to people of all conditions, and because he could take advantage of new technological developments, he reached an audience of unprecedented size. During his own lifetime he became a mythic figure: when he died, a (perhaps apocryphal) little girl cried ‘Dickens dead? Then will Father Christmas die too?’ But there were dissenters. William Makepeace Thackeray, Dickens’s only serious literary rival, accused him of glamorising violence: ‘The pathos of the workhouse scenes in Oliver Twist … is genuine and pure. But, in the name of common sense, let us not expend our sympathies on cut-throats, and other such prodigies of evil.’

Trainspotting was an instant best-seller and critical success.

‘Welsh writes with a skill, wit and compassion that amounts to genius. He is the best thing that has happened to British writing for decades’ Sunday Times

‘One of the most significant writers in Britain. He writes with style, imagination, wit and force’ Nick Hornby ‘As clever as Alasdair Gray, as elegant as Jeff Torrington, as passionate as James Kelman, Welsh has got it all’ Tibor Fischer

‘A novel perpetually in a starburst of verbal energy – a vernacular spectacular – the stories we hear are retched from the gullet’ Scotland on Sunday

‘This marvellous novel might feel like a bad day in Bedlam, but boy, is it exhilarating’ Jeff Torrington

‘An unremitting powerhouse of a novel – Loud with laughter in the dark, this novel is the real McCoy’ The Herald ‘The Scottish C-line’ Guardian

AUTHOR INTERVIEWS

Charles Dickens It is a difficult thing for a man to speak of himself or of his works. But perhaps on this occasion I may, without impropriety, venture to say a word on the spirit in which mine were conceived. I felt an earnest and humble desire, and shall do till I die, to increase the stock of harmless cheerfulness. I felt that the world was not utterly to be despised; that it was worthy of living in for many reasons.

I was anxious to find, as the Professor has said, if I could, in evil things, that soul of goodness which the Creator has put in them. I was anxious to show that virtue may be found in the byeways of the world, that it is not incompatible with poverty and even with rags, and to keep steadily through life the motto, expressed in the burning words of your Northern poet [Robert Burns] – ‘The rank is but the guinea stamp, The man’s the gowd for a` that.’ And in following this track, where could I have better assurance that I was right, or where could I have stronger assurance to cheer me on than in your kindness on this to me memorable night?

If I have put into my books anything which can fill the young mind with better thoughts of death, or soften the grief of older hearts; if I have written one word which can afford pleasure or consolation to old or young in time of trial, I shall consider it as something achieved – something which I shall be glad to look back upon in after life. Therefore I kept to my purpose, notwithstanding that towards the conclusion of the story, I daily received letters of remonstrance, especially from the ladies. God bless them for their tender mercies!

The Professor was quite right when he said that I had not reached to an adequate delineation of their virtues; and I fear that I must go on blotting their characters in endeavouring to reach the ideal in my mind. These letters were, however, combined with others from the sterner sex, and some of them were not altogether free from personal invective. But, notwithstanding, I kept to my purpose, and I am happy to know that many of those who at first condemned me are now foremost in their approbation.

Taken from a speech given by Charles Dickens in Edinburgh, 25 June 1841 (Dickens Literature website) Irvine Welsh Did you always intend to write Trainspotting in Edinburgh vernacular or was it something you slipped into because it felt like the most comfortable form of expression for those characters? It seemed pretentious to write about it in any other way, as the characters’ voices didn’t come to me like that.

I wanted to get a rhythm to it, which you don’t find in standard English as it’s an administrator’s weights-and-measures language. It’s not a living language and can’t be used to depict a culture. We wouldn’t accept it in television, film or music, and see fiction as a cultural medium, rather than an academic concern.

A name that’s often been invoked in relation to yours is Alexander Trocchi, yet you’ve been ambivalent about him and his work in the past. Who would you say are your greatest influences? It’s what rather than who. Some writers do books that influence you, and the rest of their stuff leaves you cold. I always go back to four sources; my Scottish contemporaries, classic English (Austen, Brontë, Elliot), Russian (Dostoyevsky, Tolstoy) and modern American. Taken from a publicity interview for Trainspotting ,Jonathan Cape files

top

Starting Points for Discussion

In each novel the city is key, becoming almost a character in its own right. In Trainspotting , Renton and his friends inhabit the underbelly of a once poverty-stricken but ever gentrifying area of Leith in Edinburgh, while London’s squalid East End is the setting for Oliver Twist . How do both authors make their portrayal of the city convincing? Do they challenge any views you may have held about either city? How does the city reflect the main themes of each novel?

Renton is forced to make a decision at the end of Trainspotting , to betray his friends and escape his life, or return to a cycle of addiction and destruction. Oliver, on the other hand, is betrayed time and time again by the people around him. Ultimately, though, it could be argued that friendship is a central theme of both novels. Discuss how the authors portray friendship, paying particular attention to Renton and Spud, and Oliver and the Artful Dodger. Which depiction did you find most authentic?

Both Oliver Twist and Trainspotting have been made into hugely successful films. Think about the adaptations – which do you think was the most convincing?

Oliver and Renton both struggle against a society that seems to have locked them in, but while Renton insists on his right to choose his own individual path, to ‘choose life’, others intervene to change the direction of Oliver’s life. To what extent do you think these two different viewpoints reflect the social mores and attitudes of Victorian England and late twentieth-century Scotland?

Welsh’s and Dickens’s characters all speak colloquially, using strong local dialect. How successful did you find this technique in each novel, and how easy was the language to get to grips with? Is there a relationship between class and dialect in both novels? Do you think the main characters are ultimately articulate?

Oliver Twist and Trainspotting have similar structures – both are told in short interconnected episodes. Trainspotting was originally conceived of as a collection of short stories, and Oliver Twist began its life as a serialisation in a periodical, but would you agree that these structures are born of something more than necessity – do they help to express the novels on another level?

The family, or absence of it, is a central theme of the novels. For Oliver, the family in the shape of the Brownlows offers solace, while most representations of the family in Trainspotting are dysfunctional, even damaging – think of the death of Lesley’s baby, and Hazel’s abuse by her father. Compare the portrayal of the family in each, and what it comes symbolise in terms of redemption and entrapment.

Dickens and Welsh both use humour and irony in their narratives – particularly in scenes in which figures of authority feature are turned into parodies. Examine Spud’s job interview and Mr Brownlow’s defence of Oliver at the magistrates’ court. What do you think the novelists are attempting to say about British society?

Each novel portrays a world of crime, and, in the case of Trainspotting , drug abuse. Charles Dickens and Irvine Welsh were both accused of glamorising these worlds. To what extent do you agree with their critics?

Both books contain a section in which the characters escape the city for the countryside; for Oliver, this is the summer he spends with Rose Maylie; for Renton and his friends, it’s a day out in the Scottish countryside. Consider the different portrayals of the countryside in each book.

top

Other Books by Irvine Welsh

4 Play: With an introduction…
Adapted from Irvine Welsh’s best-selling novels and novellas:Trainspotting by…
Buy Now
Babylon Heights
If you put four dwarfs in one room with enough opium and alcohol, it s bound…
Buy Now
Crime
Now bereft of both youth and ambition, Detective Inspector Ray Lennox is re…
Buy Now
Ecstasy: Three Tales of C…
Rebecca Navarro, best-selling authoress of Regency romances, suffers a para…
Buy Now
Filth
With the festive season almost upon him, Detective Sergeant Bruce Robertson is…
Buy Now
Glue
Glue is the story of four boys growing up in the Edinburgh schemes, and about…
Buy Now