BEASTLY CRIMINALS & CRIMINAL BEASTS: Stray Women & Stray Dogs in Oliver Twist with Grace Moore

This talk will examine Dickens’s use of dogs in his novels. It will focus particularly on Oliver Twist and the extraordinary relationship between the criminal Bill Sikes, his mistress Nancy, and his dog Bull’s-eye, examining the ways in which taboo subjects and emotions are displaced onto the dog.

GRACE MOORE teaches at the University of Melbourne. She is a Dickens scholar with research interests in neo-Victorianism and, more recently, literary representations of bushfires. Her most recent book is the edited collection Pirates and Mutineers of the Nineteenth Century (Ashgate, 2011).