Why would Monks go to the incredible trouble of destroying his half-brother

Why would Monks go to the incredible trouble of destroying his half-brother by first having him incarcerated in a workhouse, then recruited into Fagin's criminal gang?Monks is an enigma in the novel. We need different signals to alert us to Oliver's middle-class pedigree. They received no education, other than blows and floggings when they spoke out of turn. They did not speak good English - how could they? A child like Oliver, raised in the squalid surroundings of Bumble's baby-farm, would not say "Please, sir, I want some more"; he would grunt like a starved savage.For Dickens's readers, with their eugenic prejudices, the fact that Oliver speaks so well is the clearest of signs that he is middle class, decent, like them He is no guttersnipe, no Artful Dodger. Obviously, children brought up in an 1830s workhouse were paupers.

In Dickens's novel, nothing is known of Oliver's mother, other than that she had no wedding ring and was a victim of "the old story".Lean felt it necessary to condition the Forties audience for one of the troubling anomalies in Dickens's narratives. This shows, as I recall, a clearly middle-class woman - an outcast - arriving at the workhouse hospital to give birth to a baby and promptly die. But it is less from Bart's saccharine travesty than from the montage prelude that David Lean attached to his 1948 film of Oliver Twist. I'd go so far as to say I found it fascinatingly speculative There is, I agree, some borrowing (not, surely, a "theft").

Worst of all, it didn't work as melodrama: "I did not shed a single tear during the whole hour and a half" (a nice Victorian test of literary quality).I have to say my hankie also remained dry But I did find Bleasdale's novel before the novel effective. They reserve to themselves artistic licence at least equal to that of the writers whose work they adapt. I recently presumed to ask Andrew Davies why he had taken it on himself to alter the end of Thackeray's Vanity Fair. Because, he replied with the most amiable of smiles, it improved the novel.All this is apropos the ending which, perforce, Davies will add to Wives and Daughters, Mrs Gaskell having died before she could get the last pages down; and the full-scale "back-narrative" that Bleasdale prepends to Oliver Twist.In this paper yesterday, Laura Tennant tore into Bleasdale in her Monday TV review "I just lost patience.. lurid melodrama.. unconvincing Gothic horror" Bleasdale "stole" from Lionel Bart(!). WE'RE BLESSED, as I've said before in these columns, to live through a golden age of literary adaptation.

Its masters (currently Alan Bleasdale and Andrew Davies, arm-wrestling it out on Sunday evenings) are - in their chosen field - the equals of the great television dramatists of the Sixties and Seventies (Dennis Potter, Simon Gray, David Mercer), of the Victorian novelists or the Jacobean dramatists. Masters of adaptation such as Bleasdale and Davies do not regard themselves as slaves to the text. Only when Prescott starts delivering on real, hard cash for the railway shall we be able to say that he does not deserve his appellation "two Jags".The author's book, `Stagecoach', was published last week in paperback by Orion Books, price pounds 9 99. If we are really going to have a new golden age of the railways, the BBC survey shows clearly that the bulk of extra new transport spending will have to go on ensuring that the network can cope with the influx of passengers.