Oliver Twist (Barnes & Noble Classics) - Charles Dickens [237]
ENDNOTES
1 (p. 13) “Some of the author’s friends... Fielding: The epigraph is from book 8, chapter 1 of Tom Jones: A Foundling (1749), by Henry Fielding. Dickens is invoking Fielding’s support for his plan to present an honest portrayal of vice.
2 (p. 13) Saint Giles’ ... Saint James’s: Dickens contrasts two very different London districts: Saint Giles’s was a notorious slum area, whereas the Court of Saint James was a center of fashionable life.
3 (p. 14) Hogarth: William Hogarth (1697—1764) was most famous for his series of satirical engravings The Rake’s Progress (1735), which portrayed the seamier side of London life.
4 (p. 14) Johnson’s question: In his Life of John Gay (1779), Samuel Johnson writes that no one is going to ”imagine that he may rob with safety, because he sees Macheath reprieved upon the stage.”
5 (p. 27) workhouse: The Poor Law Amendment Act of 1834 decreed that all unemployed and destitute people seeking assistance must do so within the workhouse. Victorian workhouses were massive, prison-like structures in which living conditions were intentionally harsh, in order to dissuade all but the most desperate from seeking relief Families were separated, and inmates were required to wear identical uniforms, to sleep in cramped dormitories, and to perform ten hours of hard labor per day. Mortality rates were high.
6 (p. 30) lowest depth a deeper still: Dickens is alluding to Satan’s description of hell in John Milton’s Paradise Lost (1667): ”And, in the lowest deep, a lower deep / Still threatening to devour me opens wide, / To which the Hell I suffer seems a Heaven” (book 4, lines 76-78).
7 (p. 33) half-baptized: Oliver was baptized privately and without the full rites of the Church of England, a measure often taken when it seemed likely that an infant would die before a full baptism could be arranged.
8 (p. 45) indentures were to be conveyed before the magistrate: An apprentice was bound to his master by legal documents, known as indentures, which defined his terms of service. In the case of certain hazardous occupations, such as chimney-sweeping, a magistrate was required to approve the indenture, and to ensure that the contract was voluntarily entered into. Hence Mr. Bumble commands Oliver to say that he ”should like it very much indeed” (p. 46) .
9 (p. 52) millstone: This is an ironic reference to the words of Jesus in the Bible, Matthew 18:6: ”But whoso shall offend one of these little ones which believe in me, it were better for him that a millstone were hanged about his neck, and that he were drowned in the depth of the sea” (King James Version). Dickens’s heavy irony regarding Mr. Bumble’s hypocrisy and perversion of Christian teachings on compassion continues in the following paragraphs. The beadle wears a large brass button, bearing the “porochial” seal of the Good Samaritan healing the sick and bruised man (Luke 10:30—37). The grimly ironic equation of beadle and Good Samaritan is underscored when we learn that Bumble wore the button for the first time when attending the inquest of a man who ”died from exposure to the cold” (p. 53) in a doorway at midnight, a reference to the parable of the rich man and Lazarus (Luke 16 :19-31 ) .
10 (p. 62) some medicine in a blacking-bottle: The medicine bottle had formerly contained shoe polish. This is an autobiographical reference to an unhappy period in Dickens’s life. When his father was briefly imprisoned for debt, twelve-year-old Charles Dickens was sent to work pasting labels on bottles in a blacking factory. When