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By Root 1618 0

evil. Hogarth’s images depict the opposite trajectory. In the 1841 preface to OliverTwist, Dickens cites Hogarth, “the moralist, and censor of his age” as an inspiration for his plan to show vice and crime in all their “miserable reality.” Bunyan’s allegorical hero, Christian, takes a secular form in Dickens’s conception of Oliver as “the principle of Good.” Oliver’s progress, like Christian’s, is destined to end in triumph. The fates of Nancy, Fagin, and Sikes, on the other hand, are as grim as those of Hogarth’s harlot and rake. While Bunyan presents the triumph of virtue as an individual moral struggle, Hogarth uses his representations of moral degradation as opportunities to expose social and political corruption. In Oliver Twist, as we shall see, Dickens struggles to reconcile Hogarth and Bunyan, social criticism and moral allegory.

Pilgrimage is one of literature’s universal themes. As Steven Marcus points out in Dickens: From Pickwick to Dombey (see “For Further Reading”), “when Oliver sets out on his road to London with nothing but ‘a crust of bread, a coarse shirt, and two pairs of stockings,’ he is traversing one of history’s best worn paths.”Yet Oliver is an unusual kind of pilgrim in that he has no particular destination or goal. He does not seek spiritual rewards, like Bunyan’s Christian. Nor is he in search of earthly gain, like that other famous British pauper boy, Dick Whittington, who came to London to seek his fortune, ended up as Lord Mayor of the city, and was memorialized in the statue that confronts the fleeing murderer, Sikes, on Highgate Hill. Oliver, one might say, is an accidental pilgrim.

At the beginning of The Pilgrim’s Progress, Christian announces his intention to set out from the City of Destruction in search of “an inheritance incorruptible, undefiled, and that fadeth not away.” In the terms of Bunyan’s Christian allegory, the riches his protagonist will inherit are salvation and eternal life. When Dickens’s Oliver leaves the town of his birth, he has no object beyond self-preservation in mind; he is in flight from the intolerable conditions of his apprenticeship to the undertaker, Sowerberry. Yet Oliver, like Christian, will come into an inheritance, and at the conclusion of Oliver Twist, we learn that Oliver’s earthly fortune, like Christian’s heavenly reward, can be gained only through virtue and moral rectitude. Oliver’s father’s will states that his son may receive his inheritance only if “in his minority he should never have stained his name with any public act of dishonour, meanness, cowardice, or wrong.” Oliver, who has steadfastly eschewed all criminal acts throughout his acquaintance with Fagin’s gang, deserves his inheritance. Yet whereas Christian earns his reward through active choices, perseverance, and cooperation with the workings of Grace, Oliver seems to achieve his by passivity and chance.

Dickens seems even more Calvinist than Bunyan in his insistence on human helplessness and the necessity to yield all to Grace. Like Christian, Oliver is alternately exposed to the forces of good and evil. Unlike Christian, who does battle with the dark angel Apollyon and even wounds him, Oliver acts only to refuse evil, never to combat it. Seized by Fagin, rescued by Mr. Brownlow, snatched back by Fagin, and then rescued again, Oliver is a passive bystander in the final battle for his soul. Oliver encounters the agents of Grace in his life, Mr. Brownlow and the Maylies, not as result of prayer and earnest supplication, but through a pair of outrageous coincidences: He pickpockets the only man in London who possesses a portrait of his mother, and then he assists in the robbery of his own aunt’s house. In both cases, it is his unwillingness to be a criminal, rather than any positive action on his part, that brings him into contact with his rescuers. In Calvinist terms, it seems that Oliver is already one of the Elect. Where Bunyan’s Christian must become worthy of salvation, Oliver’s innate worthiness must only be preserved. In an interesting reversal of Augustine’s formulation, the