These activities give students a chance to consider the use of language in the film of Oliver Twist in detail as a way of getting students to consider their own vocabulary and its origins.

Dickens was not the first writer to be fascinated by the criminal underworld – its structures and customs. Back in Elizabethan times there were attempts to classify all the various kinds of criminal specialisation that existed – so, for example 'cony-catching' described cheating an innocent using cards (a cony is an old word for a 'rabbit'). Meanwhile, in Shakespeare's day a 'diver' was a burglar that would use a small boy to gain access to people’s homes or rooms. To judge by the novel Oliver Twist, there was a thieves' vocabulary in existence in early Victorian London every bit as rich. And it is one of the great pleasures of Polanski's film that the script retains a lot of this colourful language and asks the audience to work a bit to establish precisely what is being said from the action.

Activity One

Invite students to consider why people from different sectors of society choose to use specialist vocabulary? How might the criminal underworld particularly benefit from having their own words and phrases to describe their activities? And what might have made reading this language of interest or pleasurable to the middle class buyers of the magazine Bentley's Miscellany in which they followed Oliver’s adventures episode-by-episode between 1837 and 1838?

Activity Two
Using the table showing a list of some of the main words and phrases used by the London 'low life' characters in the novel (available in the Learning Resources: Glossary section ofthis website), complete these three activities.

1. Ask students to use their imagination and intelligence to see how many of the terms they can define. (A list of definitions is also included to enable cross checking).
2. Invite students to try to invent a piece of dialogue involving at least five exchanges using this language.
3. Ask students to attempt to research the origins of some of these words and phrases. There are dictionaries of historic slang and Brewer's Dictionary of Phrase and Fable is also a great source of information.

Activity Three

For students:

"The words you use to communicate are as personal to you as your finger print. It is a record of your life. In your vocabulary is recorded your interests, your childhood, your education, and your place of growing up. It is a flexible tool. You control it. You can change it to suit your circumstances and your audience. It grows with you. As you experience new people and places, it grows. As the world around you changes so your vocabulary changes too. As well as being a tool for communication, language can be a way of defining yourself and your friends - possibly by excluding others through the use of new slang or coded words. The vocabulary you use is also a record of your parents and your people. All words have a history. They are part of you at a very deep level."

Once you have read this passage, the task is to map your own personal language history.

What influences can you detect in the words that you use? Consider the impact of:
family; friends; place of birth; television and film; youth culture; sport; foreign travel; and your interests (hobbies past and present).

For each of these categories (and any others you can think of), choose one or more words and then explain why you feel this word has special meaning for you and where it comes from. It might be an 'endearment' or nickname you had as a child; or a word that has become a family convention or a word that really conjures up a place or an incident.

Related Activities:

Learning Resources
Glossary