Oliver Twist (Barnes & Noble Classics) - Charles Dickens [13]
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.
PREFACE TO THE THIRD EDITION
“Some of the author’s friends cried, ‘Lookee, gendemen, the man is a villain; but it is Nature for all that’; and the young critics of the age, the clerks, apprentices, etc., called it low, and fell a-groaning.”—FIELDlNG.1
The 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,