The World's Greatest Books — Volume 03 — Fiction — Background and Themes

The Baobab and the Workhouse: Contrasting Openings

The editorial introductions frame each novel with biographical context, but the excerpts themselves reveal how setting functions as a character. In Daudet's Tartarin, the hero's back garden is a miniature world of imported plants, including a baobab that is “only big enough to occupy a mignonette pot.” This detail is both absurd and endearing, establishing Tartarin as a collector of curiosities whose ambitions exceed his means. Dickens, by contrast, opens Oliver Twist in a workhouse where the boys are fed “three meals of thin gruel a day.” The language is spare, almost clinical, until Oliver's famous request for more breaks the monotony. The contrast between these two openings—one lush and comic, the other bleak and restrained—highlights the range of fictional modes in this volume.

Recurring Motifs: Mistaken Identity and Sudden Violence

Both excerpts rely on scenes of mistaken identity and abrupt violence. In Oliver Twist, the young woman Nancy seizes Oliver in the street, claiming he is her brother who ran away from his parents. The crowd turns on Oliver, and Bill Sikes emerges from a beer-shop to strike him. The attack is swift, brutal, and public. Similarly, in Tartarin, the hero's reputation as a mighty hunter is built on stories rather than deeds, and his first encounter with a lion (not shown in the excerpt) is anticipated with comic dread. The pattern of characters being misrecognized or thrust into danger recurs across the volume, from Oliver's kidnapping back to Fagin's den to Tartarin's bumbling adventures. The editors note that Daudet “contrives to keep a warm corner in our hearts” for his bragging hero, a technique that softens the violence of his misadventures.

Movement Between Scenes: From Domestic to Criminal

The excerpts show a deliberate movement from domestic settings to criminal or exotic ones. Oliver's journey begins in the workhouse, shifts to the undertaker's, then to London's streets, and finally to the house-breaking at Shepperton. Each transition is marked by a change in lighting and atmosphere: from the “darkness” of the street to the “lantern” in the window. In Tartarin, the hero's garden and den represent a domesticated exoticism, but the narrative promises a journey to Algeria. The editors' introduction emphasizes that Daudet's satire targets the “amiable weakness” of exaggeration, so the movement from home to abroad is both literal and comic. Dickens, however, uses movement to heighten tension: Oliver is dragged through “courts and alleys” back to Fagin's house, and later carried “over uneven ground” after being shot. The physical dislocation mirrors his loss of agency.

Voice and Narrative Distance

The editorial voice in this volume is notable for its warmth and specificity. The introduction to Tartarin describes Daudet's style as “lively” and notes that the story “attracts us to it time and again with undiminished pleasure.” This is not a neutral summary but a personal endorsement, typical of early twentieth-century anthologies. The excerpts themselves vary in narrative distance: Daudet's narrator uses the first person (“I remember my first visit”), creating intimacy, while Dickens employs a third-person omniscient narrator who can report Oliver's thoughts (“Weak and dizzy, he yet...”). The juxtaposition of these voices within a single volume invites readers to compare techniques. The editors' framing suggests that both authors, despite their differences, excel at making readers care about flawed protagonists—Tartarin the braggart and Oliver the orphan.

Readers approaching this collection should attend to how each abridgment preserves the original's distinctive rhythm. The editors have chosen excerpts that highlight turning points—first encounters, captures, escapes—rather than continuous plot. This makes the volume ideal for comparing how different authors handle suspense and character revelation. Notice, too, the recurring image of the threshold: Tartarin's garden gate, Oliver's workhouse door, the shuttered window at Shepperton. These boundaries mark transitions between safety and danger, reality and fantasy, and they recur across the ten novels represented here.

That rainy afternoon, I lost myself in the volume’s abridgements, struck by how Oliver’s workhouse gloom and Tartarin’s absurd garden both housed such longing. The introductions hinted at more lives behind these characters, which made me wander to The Annals of the Parish Or, the Chronicle of Dalmailing During the Ministry of the Rev. Micah Balwhidder — Themes and Context. Somehow, the minister’s quiet, daily record felt like the gentler cousin to those grander fictions.