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uneasily through the dirtiest paths of life, with the great, black, ghastly gallows closing up their prospects, turn them where they may.” He argues that Oliver Twist’s relationship to the Newgate novel is comparable to Don Quixote’s relationship to the chivalric romance: Both seek to expose the absurdity of a genre they appear to imitate. Certainly Fagin and Bill Sikes would be unlikely to tempt even the most impressionable reader into a life of crime, though Dickens may be skating on thinner ice with the Artful Dodger, regarded by many as the novel’s most energetic and engaging character. Nancy, the prostitute who sacrifices her life for Oliver, has always presented a different kind of problem for readers. In his representation of Nancy, Dickens is hindered in his aim of showing vice in all its wretchedness by his anxiety to conform to “the manners of the age” and avoid “any expression that could by possibility offend.” The constraints of Victorian prudery, and Dickens’s “own taste” prevent any direct reference to Nancy’s occupation and result in a character scarcely less colorless than her respectable counterpart, Rose Maylie.

While it may be true that Dickens’s moral purposes are very different from those of Bulwer-Lytton and Ainsworth, there can be no doubt that the popularity of the Newgate novel contributed to the initial success of Oliver Twist. Dickens’s shrewd literary instincts are further revealed in his omission of any direct reference to Bulwer-Lytton or Ainsworth in the 1841 preface. Instead he uses John Gay’s The Beggar’s Opera (1728) as an example of a work in which villains are romanticized. As the editor of Bentley’s Miscellany, he was not about to alienate two popular contributors.

Another influence on Oliver Twist was the Gothic novel, a fashionable genre in the 1790s and the early decades of the nineteenth century whose best-known practitioners included Ann Radcliffe and Matthew (“Monk”) Lewis. The word “Gothic” originally implied medieval, as in Horace Walpole’s influential The Castle of Otranto: A Gothic Story (1765), but by the late eighteenth century Gothic fiction was primarily concerned with the supernatural and the macabre, the medieval element being sometimes entirely abandoned. Oliver’s evil half-brother, Monks, with his swirling cloak, scowling features, and foaming at the mouth, is an all-too-perfect Gothic villain. Likewise, the episode in chapter XXXIV in which Oliver wakes from a deep sleep to see Fagin and Monks peering at him through the Maylie’s cottage window has the hallmarks of Gothic mystery. When Oliver calls for help, an extensive search reveals no trace of the intruders: “in no one place could they discern the print of men’s shoes, or the slightest mark which would indicate that any feet had pressed the ground for hours before” (chap. XXXV) . Oliver’s friends try to persuade him it was all a dream. Yet the atmosphere of threat generated by this scene comes from Fagin and not from his companion. While Fagin transcends anti-Semitic caricature to become a highly complex character whose motives and mental processes are carefully explained, Monks is a cardboard figure who never comes alive beyond his generic Gothic attributes. Oliver Twist’s Gothic elements seem tired and mechanical, as though Dickens never really had his heart in them.

The full title of his second novel, The Adventures of Oliver Twist; or, The Parish Boy’s Progress, suggests that Dickens intended to confront deeper moral and spiritual issues than are found in the popular crime stories and mysteries of his time. The subtitle invokes both John Bunyan’s The Pilgrim’s Progress (1678, 1684), and Hogarth’s two best-known and most powerful series of engravings, The Harlot’s Progress (1732) and The Rake’s Progress (1735). In the early nineteenth century, Bunyan’s Puritan allegory, tracing the journey of Christian through the snares of the world to the Celestial City, remained one of the most widely read books in the English language. Bunyan describes a perilous but ultimately successful struggle against temptation and