Oliver Twist (Barnes & Noble Classics Series) (5 page)

The extraordinary power of Dickens’s Fagin comes from the author’s ability to clothe his childhood bogeyman in the sinister vestments of a cultural archetype. While communicating the very personal distaste he felt for his companion in the blacking factory, Dickens also exploits the shameful burden of anti-Semitism in European culture. Fagin, who is referred to as “the Jew” almost three hundred times in
Oliver Twist,
is not only morally contemptible; he is also physically repellent and possessed of several characteristics and accessories that directly link him to Judas Iscariot and even Satan. When Oliver first meets the “old shriveled Jew,” we learn that his “villainous-looking and repulsive face was obscured by a quantity of matted red hair” (chap. VIII). In medieval morality plays, Judas Iscariot traditionally wore long red hair, and Dickens would later bestow the same greasy red locks on another of his arch-villains, Uriah Heep, in
David Copperfield.
At his first encounter with Oliver, Fagin is crouched over the fire, cooking sausages and wielding a toasting fork that might easily be mistaken for Satan’s pitchfork. Just in case we do not pick up on these cues, Dickens repeatedly refers to Fagin as “the merry old gentleman,” a traditional English nickname for the devil. Like Satan, Fagin is compared to a serpent; like Satan, he flourishes in darkness. Describing one of Fagin’s nighttime excursions through the slum streets of Little Saffron Hill, Dickens informs us that, as he “glided stealthily along, creeping beneath the shelter of the walls and doorways, the hideous old man seemed like some loathsome reptile, engendered in the slime and darkness through which he moved: crawling forth, by night, in search of some rich offal for a meal” (chap. XIX). Invoking the most hideous charge of medieval anti-Semitism, Fagin is shown to prey upon Christian children. When his protégées no longer serve him, he makes sure that they hang.

As Humphry House explains in his 1949 introduction to the Oxford Illustrated Edition of
Oliver Twist,
the stereotype of the Jewish “fence,” or receiver of stolen goods, was widely accepted in Victorian England. House quotes from an article in the popular periodical, the
Quarterly Review:
“A Jew seldom thieves, but is worse than a thief; he encourages others to thieve. In every town there is a Jew, either resident or tramping.... If a robbery is effected, the property is hid till a Jew is found, and a bargain is then made” (House, p. vii). In creating a Jewish villain and scapegoat, Dickens was articulating prejudices so deeply and unquestioningly held in his culture that he appears to have been quite shocked and stung when a Jewish reader, Eliza Davies, reproached him for them. He endeavored to make amends by eliminating many of the references to Fagin as “the Jew” in the 1867 edition of
Oliver Twist.

Without in any way attempting to mitigate the offensiveness of Dickens’s anti-Semitic caricature, it is worth pointing out that Fagin is a lawless outsider even within his own religion. Not only does he disregard Jewish dietary laws by cooking sausages (in nineteenth-century England these would certainly have been made with pork), but we learn that during his last night in the condemned cell at Newgate: “Venerable men of his own persuasion had come to pray beside him, but he had driven them away with curses. They renewed their charitable efforts, and he beat them off” (chap. LII).

Like his victims, Fagin is a hapless exile from bourgeois society. As a predatory outcast, his literary lineage goes back to Grendel in the Anglo-Saxon epic
Beowulf
and to Cain in the Book of Genesis. As a human type, he embodies the young Charles Dickens’s worst fears for himself as he wandered the London streets, hungry and resentful, after long days in the blacking factory. Fagin and his boys are the criminal outsiders that Dickens narrowly escaped becoming. They are the shadow selves he must reject utterly in order to identify with Oliver and the “principle of Good.”Yet, although Fagin and the murderer Sikes are brought sternly to justice, and indeed their final sufferings are described with ghoulish glee, it is undeniably true that the criminal characters in
Oliver Twist
receive the author’s most inspired and loving attention.

The novel is most compelling when Fagin, Sikes, and the Artful Dodger hold court. We turn the pages impatiently when forced to stay too long with Brownlow or the Maylies. Once he has left the workhouse, Oliver becomes a mere pawn in the novel’s larger game, and scarcely a character at all. It is the Artful Dodger, another orphan, though emphatically not a victim or a principle, who bursts out of the novel endowed with all of the author’s industry, vigor, and comic energy. Dickens cannot bring himself to assign the Dodger a bad end. After his dazzling linguistic performance in court, he is shipped off to Australia, protesting to the last, “I shall have something to say elsewhere” (chap. XLIII). Somewhere, outside the margins of Victorian society and free from the constraining polarities of
Oliver Twist,
Dickens promises him a blank page and a brilliant career. His creator is, we suspect, as Blake said of Milton, “of the Devil’s party without knowing it.”

 

Jill Muller
was born in England and educated at Mercy College and Columbia University. She is currently teaching at Mercy College and Columbia University. She has published articles on James Joyce, John Henry Newman, Gerard Manley Hopkins, and the medieval women mystics. She is working on a book on the Victorian poet Gerard Manley Hopkins, to be published by Routledge.

T
he greater part of this tale was originally published in a mag azine. When I completed it, and put it forth in its present form three years ago, I full expected it would be objected to on some very high moral grounds in some very high moral quarters. The result did not fail to prove the justice of my anticipations.

I embrace the present opportunity of saying a few words in explanation of my aim and object in its production. It is in some sort a duty with me to do so, in gratitude to those who sympathized with me and divined my purpose at the time, and who, perhaps, will not be sorry to have their impression confirmed under my own hand.

It is, it seems, a very coarse and shocking circumstance that some of the characters in these pages are chosen from the most criminal and degraded of London’s population, that Sikes is a thief and Fagin a receiver of stolen goods, that the boys are pick-pockets and the girl is a prostitute.

I confess I have yet to learn that a lesson of the purest good may not be drawn from the vilest evil. I have always believed this to be a recognized and established truth, laid down by the greatest men the world has ever seen, constantly acted upon by the best and wisest natures, and confirmed by the reason and experience of every thinking mind. 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 at least as well as its froth and cream. Nor did I doubt that there lay festering in Saint Giles’ as good materials towards the truth as any flaunting in Saint James’s.
²

In this spirit, when I wished to show in little Oliver the principle of Good surviving through every adverse circumstance and triumphing at last, and when I considered among what companions I could try him best—having regard to that kind of men into whose hands he would most naturally fall—I bethought myself of those who figure in these volumes. When I came to discuss the subject more maturely with myself, I saw many strong reasons for pursuing the course to which I was inclined. I had read of thieves by scores—seductive fellows (amiable for the most part), faultless in dress, plump in pocket, choice in horseflesh, bold in bearing, fortunate in gallantry, great at a song, a bottle, pack of cards or dice-box, and fit companions for the bravest. But I had never met (except in Hogarth) with the miserable reality.
³
It appeared to me that to draw a knot of such associates in crime as really do exist; to paint them in all their deformity, in all their wretchedness, in all the squalid poverty of their lives; to show them as they really are, for ever skulking uneasily through the dirtiest paths of life, with the great, black, ghastly gallows closing up their prospects, turn them where they may—it appeared to me that to do this would be to attempt a something which was greatly needed and which would be a service to society. And therefore I did it as I best could.

In every book I know, where such characters are treated of at all, certain allurements and fascinations are thrown around them. Even in the Beggar’s Opera, the thieves are represented as leading a life which is rather to be envied than otherwise; while Macheath,
^a
with all the captivations of command, and the devotion of the most beautiful girl and only pure character in the piece, is as much to be admired and emulated by weak beholders as any fine gentleman in a red coat who has purchased, as Voltaire
^b
says, the right to command a couple of thousand men or so and to affront death at their head. Johnson’s question, whether any man will turn thief because Macheath is reprieved, seems to me beside the matter.
⁴
I ask myself whether any man will be deterred from turning thief because of his being sentenced to death and because of the existence of Peachum and Lockit; and remembering the captain’s roaring life, great appearance, vast success, and strong advantages, I feel assured that nobody having a bent that way will take any warning from him, or will see anything in the play but a very flowery and pleasant road, conducting an honourable ambition, in course of time, to Tyburn Tree.
^c

In fact, Gay’s witty satire on society had a general object which made him careless of example in this respect and gave him other, wider, and higher aims. The same may be said of Sir Edward Bulwer’s admirable and most powerful novel of Paul Clifford,
^d
which cannot be fairly considered as having, or being intended to have, any bearing on this part of the subject, one way or other.

What manner of life is that which is described in these pages, as the everyday existence of a Thief? What charms has it for the young and ill-disposed, what allurements for the most jolter-headed of juveniles? Here are no canterings upon moonlit heaths, no merry-makings in the snuggest of all possible caverns, none of the attractions of dress, no embroidery, no lace, no jack-boots, no crimson coats and ruffles, none of the dash and freedom with which “the road” has been time out of mind invested. The cold, wet, shelterless midnight streets of London; the foul and frowsy dens, where vice is closely packed and lacks the room to turn; the haunts of hunger and disease, the shabby rags that scarcely hold together—where are the attractions of these things? Have they no lesson, and do they not whisper something beyond the little-regarded warning of a moral precept?

But there are people of so refined and delicate a nature that they cannot bear the contemplation of these horrors. Not that they turn instinctively from crime, but that criminal characters, to suit them, must be, like their meat, in delicate disguise. A Massaroni
^e
in green velvet is quite an enchanting creature, but a Sikes in fustian is un-supportable. A Mrs. Massaroni, being a lady in short petticoats and a fancy dress, is a thing to imitate in tableaux and have in lithograph on pretty songs; but a Nancy, being a creature in a cotton gown and cheap shawl, is not to be thought of. It is wonderful how Virtue turns from dirty stockings, and how Vice, married to ribbons and a little gay attire, changes her name, as wedded ladies do, and becomes Romance.

Now, as the stern and plain truth, even in the dress of this (in novels) much exalted race, was a part of the purpose of this book, I will not, for these readers, abate one hole in the Dodger’s coat or one scrap of curl-paper in the girl’s dishevelled hair. I have no faith in the delicacy which cannot bear to look upon them. I have no desire to make proselytes among such people. I have no respect for their opinion, good or bad, do not covet their approval, and do not write for their amusement. I venture to say this without reserve; for I am not aware of any writer in our language having a respect for himself, or held in any respect by his posterity, who ever has descended to the taste of this fastidious class.

On the other hand, if I look for examples and for precedents, I find them in the noblest range of English literature. Fielding, Defoe, Goldsmith, Smollett, Richardson, Mackenzie—all these for wise purposes, and especially the two first, brought upon the scene the very scum and refuse of the land. Hogarth, the moralist, and censor of his age—in whose great works the times in which he lived and the characters of every time will never cease to be reflected—did the like, without the compromise of a hair’s breadth, with a power and depth of thought which belonged to few men before him and will probably appertain to fewer still in time to come. Where does this giant stand now in the estimation of his countrymen? And yet, if I turn back to the days in which he or any of these men flourished, I find the same reproach levelled against them every one, each in his turn, by the insects of the hour, who raised their little hum and died and were forgotten.

Cervantes
^f
laughed Spain’s chivalry away by showing Spain its impossible and wild absurdity. It was my attempt, in my humble and far-distant sphere, to dim the false glitter surrounding something which really did exist by showing it in its unattractive and repulsive truth. No less consulting my own taste than the manners of the age, 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, and rather to lead to the unavoidable inference that its existence was of the most debased and vicious kind than to prove it elaborately by words and deeds. In the case of the girl in particular I kept this intention constantly in view. Whether it is apparent in the narrative, and how it is executed, I leave my readers to determine.