Oliver Twist

by Charles Dickens

  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.

  There was one young man sketching his face in a little notebook. He wondered whether it was like, and looked on when the artist broke his pencil-point and made another with his knife, as any idle spectator might have done....

  Not that, all this time, his mind was for an instant free from one oppressive overwhelming sense of the grave that opened at his feet; it was ever present to him, but in a vague and general way, and he could not fix his thoughts upon it. Thus, even while he trembled, and turned burning hot at the idea of speedy death, he fell to counting the iron spikes before him, and wondering how the head of one had been broken off, and whether they would mend it or leave it as it was. Then he thought of all the horrors of the gallows and the scaffold--and stopped to watch a man sprinkling the floor to cool it--and then went on to think again.

  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.

  Significantly, one way Dickens takes to show how bad his villaiits are is to show how very unsentimental they are. Fagin, a lost soul by comparison with Nancy, furnishes proof of this with his remark: "The worst of these women is, that a very little thing serves to call up some tong-forgotten feeling; and the best of them is, that it never laste' (XIX). Of what value is a long-forgotten feeling to a practical person? In the death cell all Oliver can think of is getting the condemned man to pray; all the condemned man can think of is getting Oliver to help him escape. So too the other villain is specifically damned as "the unsentimental Mr. Sikes." when Nancy declares that "if it was you that was coming out to be hung, ... I'd walk round and round the place till I dropped, if the snow was on the ground and I hadn't a shawl to cover me." "And what good would that do?" inquires he. (XVI). Fagin and Sikes are as tem peramentally incapable of appreciating Oliver and Nancy as they would be incapable of relishing large parts of a Dickens novel. It is only fair to say that they would dislike this author almost as much as he dislikes them, In one early page we get the difference: Oliver sheds tears at a thought, the thought of his mother dead "of a broken heart"; Noah Claypole sheds tears at a blow: Older persons can be measured by whether they shed tears at all.

  . The brief paragraph describing Rose Maylie's first meeting with Oliver is crucial for giving us Dickens's ideal woman: The honest gentleman held the curtain in his hand and looked on for a minute or so in silence. Whilst he was watching the patient thus. the younger lady glided softly past and, seating hersetf in a chair by the bedside, gathered Oliver's hair from his face. As she stooped over him, her tears fell upon his forehead. (xxx)

  Our author is never more lovingly occupied than when picturing a fair, delicately constitutioned young heroine bending tearfully over a bedside. I say delicately constitutioned advisedly, for it is all the more moving if the nurse herself gets sick: Rose is in this as in other respects ideal, since after nursing Oliver she hovers on the threshold of death herself. In fact Dickens had intended her to die, but he could not bear to carry the plan through after he had himself lost Mary Hogarth (a better choice than Georgina for the original of Rose--the adjectives of
Mary's epitaph are applied to Rose when she is stricken, "young and good"--but is not this recurring type really a response to a longing rather than to a model?). A sufficiently sensitive patient will begin to entertain anxieties over the health of his faithful nurse: it is but a step from this to the projection of her as seriously in need of care herself. So, to cite the extreme case, Little Nell worries about her grandfather, and he worries about her, and the fears of both turn out, with excruciating gradualness, to be justified. In no other Victorian novelist does sickness loom so large. Trollope's Doctor Thorne gives much less attention to sickness than Oliver Twist. The young Julia Newberry wrote in her diary that a novelist must remember to let his characters get sick once in a while; only with reluctance, if at all, would Dickens let his get well. The illnesses are lingering illnesses.

  Not only are the novels full of young and sisterly nurses like Rose (" 'Not aunt,' cried Oliver, throwing his arms about her neck: 'I'll never call her aunt--sister, my own dear sister!' [Ll]) and older, motherly nurses like Mrs. Bedwin: they abound in bad nurses who are punished with comedy. Oliver's mother is prey to such a one, the bibulous Mrs. Thingummy. And Mrs. Bedwin is succeeded at night at Oliver's bedside by a fat old snorer, for the bad nurses are never young. On the other hand, doctors, from Mr. Losberne on (or from Bob Sawyer on), are always bluff, hearty fellows. (The predatory Dr. Jobling of Martin Chuzzlewit is not a practitioner but a consultant, a medical officer--an important and invidious distinction.) A hypochondriac could not show greater regard for the faculty.

  Whatever the rather pathological touches of melodrama, such as the "fits" of Monks (XLVI) and the "foam" of Fagin (XLVII), that remind us of the author's incorrigible love for the theater, there is no surpassing the inspired honesty of certain bits of dialogue--such as the exchange between Noah and his beast of burden, Charlotte, as the two rest on the road in sight of London. This is one of the places where Dickens is purely realistic--neither broadly comic nor unmistakably moral. At other times we feel vaguely that we are in the presence of a lesson; while wondering about the reverberation of the words, we do know that they ring true.

  "I don't belong to them. I don't know them. Help! help!" cried Oliver, struggling in the man's powerful grasp.

  "Help!" repeated the man. "Yes; I'll help you, you young rascal! What books are these? You've been stealing 'em, have you? Give 'em here." With these words, the man tore the volumes from his grasp and struck him on the head.

  "That's right!" cried a looker-on from a garret window. "That's the only way of bringing him to his senses!"

  "To be sure!" cried a sleepy-faced carpenter, casting an approving look at the garret window.

  "It'II do him good!" said the two women.

  "And he shall have it, too!" rejoined the man, administering another blow and seizing Oliver by the collar. "Come on, you young villain! Here, Bull's-eye, mind him, boy! Mind him!" (XV)

  We may decide that the point of this mingling of the spectators' voices with that of Sikes is to illustrate the ease with which ill will becomes unanimous. All snarl, the dog last. It is a scene technically and morally similar to that of Faithful's quick conviction in The Pilgrim's, Progre.ss. The jury there was unanimous too.

  Mr. Blind-man, the foreman, said, "I see clearly that this man is a heretic."

  Then said Mr. No-good, "Away with such a fellow from the earth."

  "Ay," said Mr. Malice, "for I hate the very looks of him."

  Then said Mr. Love-lust, "I could never endure him."

  "Nor I," said Mr. Live-loose, "for he would always be condemning my way."

  "Hang him, hang him," said Mr. Heady.

  "A sorry scrub," said Mr. High-mind.

  And so on through the twelve. This was Vanity Fair, which in the person of the more respectable part of the state looked down on the sorry scrub Oliver at board meetings early in Dickens's story; now Bunyan's successor is demonstrating the still more despairing truth that "a low neighborhood"--Blake's "London"--is not the place to turn up easily a human heart either; that even the poor do not love the poor.

  Dickens is Bunyan's successor on more than one count, including the names. For again and again his names tell almost as plain a tale as Bunyan's. There is, for example, Mr. Grimwig: his grimness is something he puts on only--we may as well learn this the easy way, since that does not preclude our learning it the hard way, too, the more complicated, novelist's way. It is wrong to deny Bunyan any subtlety of characterization merely because he tells us in advance what sort of person he is going to portray. The greatest storytellers can afford to lay some cards on the table because their supply is not limited. If the commentators oversimplify Dickens, he gave them false encouragement by oversimplifying himself. He gives us a handle to grasp (who can forget, given the handle "Pecksniff," that here is a hypocrite and a prude?), or a man nerism to hang on to, but these aids to memory must not regularly be mistaken for the whole conception.

  When the scene shifts to the comic, Mr. Bumble is the featured player, throwing a portly shadow over such minors as the risible Bates, the Dodger (Artful to the end), and the valiant "boy" Brittles (who with Mr. Giles and the tinker and the other excited servants has the same function as Dogberry, Verges, and the Watch in Much Ado About Nothing). Mr. Bumble does not become downright funny until he woos and weds Mrs. Corney, but there are early signs that his villainy, though used, will be mitigated: on one occasion he appears to be not completely unmoved by Oliver's tears, and in general he blusters more than he beats. In his brass buttons and plush knee breeches he has the pride of office of a rooster: his very hat is cocked. But this Chanticleer is undone by Pertelote in a wooing scene--and later in domestic scenes--that compare with the best of Pickwick. The scene before marriage is crystallized in one parenthesis, when the beadle makes so bold as to mention to "you" who "have been a married woman, ma'am" the brazen arrival at the overseer's door of a beggar "with hardly a rag upon his back": "(here Mrs. Corney looked at the floor)." To find the like of this, one has to go back to Restoration comedy. In Wycherley's The Country Wife, Lady Fidget, who, it goes without saying, is about to be flagrantly unfaithful to her husband, demurs when he happens to begin a sentence with the words, "To tell you the naked truth--": "Fy, Sir Jasper! do not use that word naked." Where Wycherley is stylizing, Dickens is breathing the breath of life.

  We associate coincidence with the drama, too. The smallness and the tension of the stage call for fateful meetings between characters who in the wide world ought never to run into each other. So there has been strident objection to the turn of plot whereby the book-lover whom Oliver is accused of pickpocketing is the one person in London who has at home, where the convalescent orphan can dreamily contemplate it, a picture of that boy's mother. As if that were not enough, the second time he is required to assist in a robbery he breaks into the house where his own aunt is living.

  The reader's own experience of "coincidences" (what used to be called providence) will of course vary not only from individual to individual but from city to city and time to time. The chances of two persons happening to meet in London today are mathematically smaller than they were in 1837. But this is hardly a promising line of argument. It would be better to draw the skeptic up short with the irrefutable suggestion that his experience, not Dickens's-story, is at fault. The author's life exhibited some astonishing coincidences. Is it for nothing that London has been called "the city of encounters"? The hero of Wilkie Collins' The Moonstone says drily to a skeptical steward whose life had been too sheltered: "Nothing in this world, Betteredge, is probable unless it appeals to our own trumpery experience; and we only believe in a romance when we see it in a newspaper." What about the use made of Oliver by Sikes and Crackit in the burglary of the Maylies? Those who require newspapers to assist their belief can be satisfied here, as in many another case: The New York Times of October 2, 1951, carried this headline on the front page: "Boy, 6, Tool of Two Older Lads, Held as Jersey Skylight Burglar." Or, if we are antiquarians, we can t
urn to the Gentleman's Magazine of March 25, 1765, where the latest news was, "that a man who kept a public house near Fleet-Market had a club of boys, whom he instructed in picking pockets, and other iniquitous practices; beginning first with teaching them to pick a handkerchief out of his own pocket, and next his watch.... "

  But resort to documentation is, admittedly, trumpery, to answer a trumpery criticism. It argues neither for nor against the total impression that Oliver Twist, amidst all the accouter ments of a novel, has the primitive appeal of a fairy tale; it forms one of those basic stories that are not forgotten because they were partly familiar before they were read, being the stuff of young dreams and fears.

  --EDWARD LE COMTE

  Columbia University

  SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY

  WORKS BY CHARLES DICKENS

  Sketches by Boz, 1836, 1839 Sketches and Stories

  The Posthumous Papers of the Pickwick Club, 1837 Novel

  Oliver Twist; or, the Parish Boy's Progress, 1838 Novel

  The Life and Adventures of Nicholas Nickleby, 1839 Novel

  The Old Curiosity Shop, 1841 Novel

  Barnaby Rudge, 1841 Novel

  American Notes: For General Circulation, 1842 Travel Book

  Christmas Carol: in Prose, 1843 Christmas Book

  The Life and Adventures of Martin Chuzzlewit, 1844 Novel

  The Chimes, 1844 Christmas Book

  The Cricket on the Hearth, 1845 Christmas Book

  Pictures from Italy, 1846 Travel Book

  The-Battle of Life: A Love Story, 1846 Christmas Book

  Dealings with the Firm of Dombey. and Son, 1848 Novel

  The Haunted Man and the Ghost's Bargain, 1848 Christmas Book

  The Personal History of David Copperfield, 1850 Novel

  A Child's History of England, 1852, 1853, 1854 History