Oliver Twist (Barnes & Noble Classics) - Charles Dickens [9]
In Oliver Twist, it is Bob Fagin’s namesake who attempts to socialize Oliver to the life of a pickpocket and, at the behest of Monks, to prevent him from discovering his true parentage. Fagin’s prize pupil, the Artful Dodger, discovers Oliver soon after his arrival in London. Hungry and homeless, the orphan runaway is at the lowest ebb of “lonesomeness and desolation” as he sits, “with bleeding feet and covered with dust, upon a doorstep” (chap. VIII). The Dodger takes him home to Fagin’s den, where he is given food and shelter. At first, the world of Fagin and his apprentices seems one of fellowship and fun. Only later, through the corrupting game with the pocket-handkerchiefs, do the real motives of the “merry old gentleman” become clear. He is preparing his charges for the gallows. Fagin is the most dangerous person a lonely and vulnerable child could meet, a corrupter with a smiling face.
Whether or not he realized it at the time, in hindsight Dickens knew how close he had come, during the months at the blacking factory, to disappearing, like Oliver, into the criminal world of the London streets: “I know that I have lounged about the streets, insufficiently and unsatisfactorily fed. I know that, but for the mercy of God, I might easily have been, for any care that was taken of me, a little robber or a little vagabond” (Forster, p. 28). The youthful Charles Dickens preserved himself from such an outcome, or so he afterward believed, only by keeping aloof from other boys and constantly reminding himself of his superior origins and ambitions: “Though perfectly familiar with them, my conduct and manners were different enough from theirs to place a space between us. They ... always spoke of me as ‘the young gentleman’ ” (p. 29). If, in his “lonesomeness and desolation,” he had allowed himself to make friends with the well-meaning Bob Fagin, who knows what might have been his fate?
Dickens’s boyhood miseries came to an end when his grand-mother died, leaving her son, John Dickens, enough money to discharge his debts. Charles was rescued from the blacking factory and sent to school at Wellington House Academy. From then on, successes came rapidly. Leaving school at the age of fifteen, he became a lawyer’s clerk and later a parliamentary reporter. By the time he was twenty-one, Dickens was contributing stories to newspapers and magazines under the pen name of “Boz.” At twenty-four, he was the celebrated author of Pickwick Papers. Yet his experiences at the blacking factory left their mark. Fear of poverty and debt drove Dickens to a lifetime of frenzied overwork. Obsession with childhood, and especially with the experiences of vulnerable and abused children, is a primary feature of his imaginative world.
Looking back on the most traumatic five months of his life, Dickens recalled, “That I suffered in secret, and that I suffered exquisitely, no one ever knew but I. How much I suffered, it is ... utterly beyond my power to tell. No man’s imagination can overstep the reality. But I kept my own counsel, and I did my work” (Forster, p. 29). Though it seems most unlikely, judging from his ebullient adult personality, that the twelve-year-old Charles Dickens bore much outward resemblance to Oliver Twist, it is easy to see how Oliver might represent the young Dickens’s hidden feelings of helplessness and abandonment. Pale, thin,