Oliver Twist (67 page)

The emaciation of the “pale thin child” of nine is like that of the younger brother in the fairy tales. (The older brother is meanwhile thriving and scheming.) When Oliver is due to be indentured to the ogrelike Mr. Gamfield, the chimney sweep, he is given by Mr. Bumble “a basin of gruel and the holiday allowance of two ounces and a quarter of bread. At this tremendous sight, Oliver began to cry very piteously, thinking, not unnaturally, that the board must have determined to kill him for some useful purpose, or they never would have begun to fatten him up in that way” (III). This is Hansel without Gre tel. And the change to bliss is just as sharp. “There was dinner prepared, and there were bedrooms ready, and everything was arranged as if by magic” (LI) That last phrase still had force and freshness in Dickens’s day.

The human needs are simple—a little coddling and
two
bowls of a better cereal. But these are what are hard, it seems, for an orphan to get in the England of 1837, and it is in the development of this point that Dickens becomes what will soon be recognized as his usual crusading self. This is low life as it must have been, in its inexhaustible and monotonous squalor, with the creaking rat-infested buildings, the oozing walls and fetid clothes and foul-smelling food. The reader whose ordinary fare is present-day realism must marvel that the author is able to convey’ what he wants to convey without large splatter ings of criminal jargon and lascivious suggestion. A low word here and there puts in an embarrassed appearance—“drab” is the worst, dropped three times, but it
need
mean no more than slattern. (The repeatedly indecent mode of referring to Charley Bates belongs apparently to the humor of the unconscious.) For the most part Dickens more than gets along without the spice now considered indispensable. Bill Sikes is pure of speech. He curses, but the curses are not spelled out. Nancy is a prostitute, but she is never—with the possible exception just noted—called that in the story. She is called that in the Preface, the place where the author defends himself, “I saw no reason, when I wrote this book, why the very dregs of life, so long as their speech did not offend the ear, should not serve the purpose of a moral”; and again, “I endeavoured, while I painted it in all its fallen and degraded aspects, to banish from the lips of the lowest character I introduced, any expression that could by possibility offend.” He was driven to defend himself, for the
Quarterly
reviewer and others had found the book immoral. But it is as moral as periphrasis can make it.

But need it be a limitation? Is it in
Oliver Twist?
I think not. We understand Nancy’s status, and that is all that is required. “Do you know who you are, and what you are?” (xvi) It is enough for Sikes to say this to her, and we need not dictate that he substitute one monosyllable for these ten. Or it is enough that Oliver, long before, noticed the “great deal of colour” in her face. It is suggested that certain characters are foul-mouthed: the details can properly be left to the imagination. The data are not given, the words are not there, but we react as if they were. It is a case of successful illusion as distinguished from documentation.

Oliver can no more be contaminated by the surrounding filth than the Lady in
Comus.
If he got even physically smudged, we are not told. His mastery of the Queen’s English extends to the distinction between “should” and “would,” and a difficult sequence of tenses does not trouble him a bit: “I should have been very sorry not to have been at home when you and Mr. Maylie went away, sir,” he tells Mr. Losberne, who responds, “That’s a fine fellow.” (xxxvi). It may be indeed that the remark is too fine, too grammatically correct and too gratuitously polite, in the manner of Little Lord Fauntleroy. But this comes when Oliver is secure and is being treated like a lord. (Also we
can
catch him, in a moment of stress, using “don‘t” for “doesn’t,” but perhaps he spells it “do‘n’t.” xxxiii).

Unlike the Lady in
Comus
(who does not really need rescuing), Oliver does have, for more than half the story, the pathos of helplessness. Maybe he should have it longer. He conspicuously retires from the narrative while, in the last third, Nancy and Sikes and Fagin carry on alone. First he escaped from them to Mr. Brownlow‘s, then he escaped from them to the Maylies, and after that Dickens gives up trying to involve him. (The last-minute visit to Fagin’s cell is patently artificial.) At the end, when Sikes is being cornered, Charley Bates is put in the place of Oliver Twist. We have a happy ending before the ending, and this looks like a structural oddity. The British film of a decade ago made a logical adjustment when it put Oliver back into Sikes’s vile hands and onto the roof of the last perilous scene. Dickens may have loved Oliver too much to expose him for the third and most horrendous. time. He was unwilling to strain his own heart for the sake of straining his reader’s.

The strain was in any case considerable, and was there for the paying public to see in Dickens’s last series of readings, for as Forster reports, “the
Sikes and Nancy
scenes, everywhere his prominent subject, exacted the most terrible physical exertion from him.” There would be a physician-in the wings to take the author’s puise after each performance and frown at the way it had shot up. Reading these scenes to semi-hysterical audiences (the evening was not a success if no woman screamed or fainted) may literally have killed Dickens; the nervous energy that went into the writing is still coiled in the last chapters for all to sense. The inescapable fact is that murder took for Dickens the place of central excitement that sex takes for others. With morbid relish he pursued in book after book this crime and its terrifying after-effects, as felt by the haunted and hunted criminal. It is total—for the psychoanalyzing critic suspiciously total—identification with the murderer, with each slow ticking of his consciousness:

The pulp of a clubbed-in head in which the eyes are still horribly in place, the way human hair adheres to the club and the way it bums—what an obscene instinctive knowledge (assisted by newspaper accounts) this Victorian has of such things!

Dickens takes many opportunities to insist on “the wide contrast” between the two worlds of his story (reaching a climax in the interviews with Nancy), and when he has Fagin and Monks scowling in at the window on Oliver as he dozes “in his own little room” at the Maylies‘, all the ingredients of a nightmare are present (as they were when Oliver had to go to bed among the coffins of Mr. Sowerberry). And these frightening figures prove repeatedly to be a seclusive as any spectre—“ ’tis here, ‘tis there, ’tis gone”—when the world of light goes to look for them, so that his benign friends really find Oliver difficult to believe; nor are matters helped when Mr. Brownlow vanishes mysteriously from London like a good fairy. If a dream does not separate the two worlds, a fever does-after Oliver’s false arrest, that blessing in Mr. Fang’s disguise. The ending can only come when the spectres are themselves haunted, Sikes tumbling down to self-execution because he thinks he sees a dead woman’s eyes, Fagin in the death cell tortured by the church-clock’s striking of the hours and hoping it was all “a trick to frighten him.”

A trick of the author’s that frightens us today is his fixed epithet for Fagin. This villain is referred to almost exactly three hundred times as “the Jew.” After Hitler and Eichmann we can scarcely be expected to find this, to put it as mildly as possible, in good taste, though it
can
be defended—out of the sensitive context of our times. They go further than they can demonstrate, those who shout that Dickens is here being anti-Semitic. This is not anti-Semitism, this is the phantom of anti-Semitism—others provided the reality. Nowhere in the description of Fagin is there anything specifically anti-Semitic ; nowhere, neither in his physiognomy nor in his gestures nor in his language, is he a caricature—master of caricature though Dickens was—of a Jew. (The illustrations by Cruik shank, the modem film—these are something else again—what we see is more offensive than anything Dickens has to say.) The term “Jew” or its equivalent is never flung at Fagin by Sikes, who despises him, or by anyone else, as a reproach. It is used, by the author only (and on one occasion by Oliver), as a means of matter-of-fact identification, a convenient alternative for “Fagin,” as “answered” might be a convenient alternative for “said.” The only “tendentious” traits he is given are greed and avarice, and these certainly do not occupy the central place they do in
The Merchant of Venice,
a play that, once regularly assigned children in our schools, has now, along with Oliver Twist, been dropped from the reading lists, even as professional performances of it, once so common, have pru deritly ceased.

Most of Dickens’s reply to a Jewish acquaintance who had taken him to task is such as we must admit is reasonable “Fagin, in Oliver
Twist,-is
a Jew because it unfortunately was true, of the time to which the story refers, that that class of criminal almost invariably was a Jew.” Here then is the great reason—the novelist’s loyalty to his sense of fact. (If fences of that time and place had been “almost invariably” Turks, would we call the author anti-Turkish for so labeling them? We might, if bloody and widespread persecution of the Turks was one of the issues of our time on which everyone had had to take sides. What, by the way, does a Sinn Feiner make of the reference, just before Fagin is introduced, to “the lowest order of Irish,” whom Oliver sees “wrangling with might and main” in the public houses he passes? Suppose Sikes had been referred to as “the Irishman”?) Dickens went on to remark to his Jewish correspondent, “But surely no sensible man or woman of your persuasion can fail to observe—firstly, that all the rest of the wicked
dramatis personae
are Christians; and, secondly, that he is called ‘The Jew,’ not because of his religion, but because of his race.” The “firstly” is good argument—Sikes is a Christian, or at any rate a Gentile, as are the despicable bully Noah Claypole, the unnatural half-brother Monks, and other vile figures, to say nothing of the society that is itself being indicted, though naturally the alien stands out and gets the distinguishing name. But the “secondly” is of course the reverse of the extenuation Dickens deemed it, to be. It does not even appear to be true, for although Fagin’s religion is scarcely more evident than Sikes‘s, we read that while he was in the death cell, “Venerable men of his own persuasion had come to pray beside him, but he had driven them away, with curses” (LII). Presumably the only references either villain makes to Deity are in their curses.

Dickens in the preface speaks of Sikes in such a way as to indicate he had no doubt that this “Christian” murderer was the worst character in the book. But, however welcome such a conclusion might be to reinforce the above argument, one cannot be sure that it does justice to the wickedness of the rival villain. Both get and both deserve capital punishment, but Fagin would go lower down in Dante’s hell. Sikes’s crime is a crime of passion. Fagin is calculating and treacherous. It is right that he should be afraid of “the bolder villain,” even as the boys are afraid of
him
in an unholy hierarchy of fear. It is only cowardice that keeps him from bloodying his own hands. Dickens wanted a far cry from the fence Peachum of Gay’s Beggar’s Opera; he got it. “Repulsive” is one of the first words he uses of Fagin. Peachum was morally repulsive, but Fagin is physically repulsive, as well, and this serves to unify our loathing. We know that his nails are long and black before that late chapter where we see him biting them with the “few ... fangs” that are left him (XLVII). His filth is equaled only by his age. “I don’t feel like myself when you lay that withered old claw on my shoulder, so take it away,” exclaims Sikes nervously, adding, “Reminds me of being nabbed by the devil. There never was another man with such a face as yours, unless it was your father, and I suppose
he
is singeing his grizzled red beard by this time, unless you came straight from the old ‘un without any father at all betwixt you, which I shouldn’t wonder at a bit” (XLIV). That is the inevitable reference—“ the old ’un,” the old one who corrupts the young ones.

The nicest touch comes early, not late, in Chapter LII, when we are given Fagin’s trivial thoughts as he sits in the court awaiting the verdict.

This is the kind of psychological realistri that we generally think of as the discovery of a later age: At the same time we are conscious of the symbolic consistency—broken pencils, broken spikes, broken necks.