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Oliver Twist’s extreme polarities reproduce the moral landscape of childhood. In this respect, the novel resembles a fairy tale. As Bruno Bettelheim observes in The Uses of Enchantment, “The figures in fairy tales are not ambivalent—not good and bad at the same time, as we all are in reality. But since polarization dominates the child’s mind, it also dominates fairy tales” (p. 9). In the world of Oliver Twist, adult characters are either neglectful or corrupting parents, like Bumble, Sikes, or Fagin, or they are wise fathers and nurturing mothers, like Brownlow and Rose Maylie. Only Nancy, the sacrificial penitent, is allowed the least shade of moral ambiguity. Oliver’s good and bad adoptive families each have their own domestic hearth: While Brownlow and the Maylies sip tea from fine china and introduce Oliver to the pleasures of reading, Fagin presides over a den of drinking and gambling. The thieves’ London is a labyrinth of mean and dirty streets, noisy and noisome. Oliver’s refuges are neat and orderly. He picks flowers in the Maylies’ Edenic garden. Yet in Dickens’s novel, as in many a fairy tale, it is the ogre, the bad fairy, the wicked stepmother—that embodiment of all that we fear and reject in ourselves—who comes most convincingly to life. Brownlow is bland, Grimwig is tedious, but Fagin compels our attention with his exuberant villainy.

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