Oliver Twist (Barnes & Noble Classics Series)

By Charles Dickens and Jill Muller

Oliver Twist, by Charles Dickens, is part of the Barnes & Noble Classics series, which offers quality editions at affordable prices to the student and the general reader, including new scholarship, thoughtful design, and pages of carefully crafted extras. Here are some of the remarkable features of Barnes & Noble Classics:

• New introductions commissioned from todays top writers and scholars
• Biographies of the authors
• Chronologies of contemporary historical, biographical, and cultural events
• Footnotes and endnotes
• Selective discussions of imitations, parodies, poems, books, plays, paintings, operas, statuary, and films inspired by the work
• Comments by other famous authors
• Study questions to challenge the readers viewpoints and expectations
• Bibliographies for further reading
• Indices & Glossaries, when appropriate

All editions are beautifully designed and are printed to superior specifications; some include illustrations of historical interest. Barnes & Noble Classics pulls together a constellation of influences—biographical, historical, and literary—to enrich each readers understanding of these enduring works.   One of Dickens’s most popular novels, Oliver Twist is the story of a young orphan who dares to say, "Please, sir, I want some more." After escaping from the dark and dismal workhouse where he was born, Oliver finds himself on the mean streets of Victorian-era London and is unwittingly recruited into a scabrous gang of scheming urchins. In this band of petty thieves Oliver encounters the extraordinary and vibrant characters who have captured readers’ imaginations for more than 150 years: the loathsome Fagin, the beautiful and tragic Nancy, the crafty Artful Dodger, and perhaps one of the greatest villains of all time—the terrifying Bill Sikes.

Rife with Dickens’s disturbing descriptions of street life, the novel is buoyed by the purity of the orphan Oliver. Though he is treated with cruelty and surrounded by coarseness for most of his life, his pious innocence leads him at last to salvation—and the shocking discovery of his true identity.   Features illustrations by George Cruikshank.  

Jill Muller was born in England and educated at Mercy College and Columbia University, and currently teaches at Mercy College and Columbia University. She is working on a book on the Victorian poet Gerard Manley Hopkins, to be published by Routledge.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Barnes & Noble Classics
• Release date: Jun 1, 2009
• ISBN: 9781411433892

Charles Dickens

Charles Dickens was born on 7th February 1812 in Portsmouth and grew up in London and Kent. His father was sent to a debtor's prison following financial difficulties and the young Dickens was sent temporarily to work in a boot blacking factory, until an inheritance allowed his return to school - however, he never forgot this formative experience. Dickens wrote many novels including A Tale of Two Cities, The Pickwick Papers, A Christmas Carol and Great Expectations. A leading celebrity of the Victorian Age, his short story The Signalman was likely based on a crash involving a train that Dickens was travelling on, with his mistress. Charles Dickens died in 1870.

Book preview

INTRODUCTION

Second novels separate the sheep from the goats, the possessors of enduring talent from the mere purveyors of flash-in-the-pan literary sensation. Many writers embark on a second novel with a good deal of trepidation, especially if their first book has achieved the kind of instant acclaim awarded to Charles Dickens’s Pickwick Papers. If Dickens experienced any such anxiety when he set out to write Oliver Twist, he countered it with his lifelong drug of choice, a frenetic and compulsive productivity. Appearing in monthly installments, the usual mode of publication for novels until late in the nineteenth century, Oliver Twist was mostly written in tandem with other projects. When the first two chapters were published in Bentley’s Miscellany in February 1837, Dickens was still writing Pickwick Papers as a serial for Chapman and Hall. With Pickwick Papers completed in November 1837, the twenty-five-year-old Dickens devoted himself to Oliver Twist for a mere four months before beginning a third novel, Nicholas Nickleby. Oliver Twist was finished and published in three volumes in November 1838, while the serial version in Bentley’s still had five months to run. This frenzied pace of production was halted only once, in June 1837, when the intensity of his grief over the sudden death of his seventeen-year-old sister-in-law, Mary Hogarth, forced Dickens to postpone that month’s installments of both Pickwick Papers and Oliver Twist. Mary Hogarth is memorialized as Rose Maylie in Oliver Twist.

Where many young writers would have been tempted to stay with a winning formula, Dickens’s second novel was a total departure from the timeless comedic world of Pickwick Papers. The first three installments of Oliver Twist employed ferocious satire to address a contemporary social evil, the sufferings of the poor in the new workhouses mandated by the 1834 Poor Law Amendment Act. Then, with the introduction of Fagin and his gang of juvenile pickpockets in the fourth installment, Dickens’s readers found themselves plunged into London’s criminal underworld. The novel’s final installment contained a gruesome murder, a manhunt, and a hanging. While a few readers, such as the Prime Minister, Lord Melbourne, were shocked by Dickens’s turn to such sordid subject matter, many more, including nineteen-year-old Queen Victoria, were enthralled.

Oliver Twist was every bit as popular as Pickwick Papers. Three dramatizations played in London theaters during the winter of 1838—1839. Perfectly complemented by George Cruikshank’s quirky illustrations, the novel was in a third edition by 1841, and even spawned an imitation, Thomas Prest’s Oliver Twiss. It remained a best-seller through Dickens’s lifetime and beyond. The penny edition of 1871 sold 150,000 copies in three weeks. During the last decade of his life, Dickens toured England, Ireland, and America, giving public readings of favorite sections from his novels. Sikes and Nancy, based on chapter XLVII of Oliver Twist, was a particular favorite of both author and audience. While Dickens’s rendition of Nancy’s brutal murder sent audiences into fits of screaming and fainting, a physician waited backstage to monitor the ailing author’s pulse rate. Dickens’s friend and biographer John Forster speculated that the energy and fervor with which Dickens threw himself into these performances may have contributed to his early death from heart disease in 1870.

Oliver Twist remains one of the best known and most popular of Dickens’s novels. Translated, adapted, dramatized, filmed (most notably by David Lean in 1948), and even turned into a musical, the story of Little Orphan Oliver and his grotesque tormentors has passed into popular culture. Millions of people who have never opened the nineteenth-century novel are familiar with the image of a ragged child holding out his porringer and asking for more. Like Robinson Crusoe or Huck Finn, Oliver has evolved from fiction into fable and archetype. Or perhaps he has simply returned to his roots. The characters and settings of Oliver Twist resonate so deeply and so variously because they echo a diverse collection of popular genres. The novel is at once social satire, thriller, melodrama, autobiography, fairy tale, moral fable, and religious allegory. While some of the specific texts that influenced Oliver Twist’s composition are no longer familiar to contemporary readers and may require some literary excavation, each of the various genres whose competing voices create the novel’s seductive energy survive and are easily recognizable in modern forms of entertainment.

Like its predecessor, Pickwick Papers, Dickens’s second novel reflects his childhood passion for the eighteenth-century picaresque novels Tom Jones and Roderick Random. As in the novels by Henry Fielding and Tobias Smollett, the plot of Oliver Twist revolves around illegitimacy and disputed inheritance. Like his literary forebears, Oliver is unaware of his true identity and adrift in a world of rogues and schemers. Unlike the more robust heroes of Fielding and Smollett, however, Dickens’s orphan does not grow up; he remains a frail and passive child throughout the novel, more victim than protagonist. Oliver’s failure to reach adolescence preserves him from the sexual temptations that befall Tom Jones and Roderick Random, perhaps making it easier for Dickens to persuade his Victorian audience that little Oliver embodies the purest good.

Dickens’s 1841 preface to the third edition of Oliver Twist echoes his eighteenth-century masters in its declaration of high moral purpose. Where Smollett’s preface to Roderick Random had announced the author’s wish to arouse generous indignation ... against the sordid and vicious disposition of the world, and Fielding’s dedication of Tom Jones had insisted that to recommend goodness and innocence hath been my sincere endeavour in this history, Dickens assures the readers of Oliver Twist of his intention to show the principle of Good surviving through every adverse circumstance and triumphing at last. Indeed, in his efforts to persuade us that his depiction of the most criminal and degraded of London’s population is intended for instruction and not titillation, Dickens cites both Fielding and Smollett, among a host of other eighteenth-century novelists, as examples of writers who described the very scum and refuse of the land for wise purposes.

Dickens’s invocation of Fielding and Smollett in defense of his decision to draw Fagin, Sikes, Nancy, and the Artful Dodger in all their deformity, in all their wretchedness, in all the squalid poverty of their lives was intended to refute charges, by his rival, Thackeray, and others, that Oliver Twist was an attempt to cash in on the immense popularity of the so-called Newgate novels of Edward George Bulwer-Lytton and William Harrison Ainsworth. Based on true accounts of notorious criminals published in compilations such as The Newgate Calendar (1773) and The New Newgate Calendar (1826—1828), the Newgate novels romanticized the lives of highwaymen and other lowlife characters. The popularity of the genre was at its height in the 1830s, beginning with Bulwer-Lytton’s Paul Clifford (1830) and culminating in the most successful Newgate novel of all, Ainsworth’s Jack Sheppard, which for four months in 1839 overlapped with Oliver Twist in Bentley’s Miscellany. Critics of the genre argued that such novels encouraged sympathy with vice and were a harmful influence on the young.

Dickens’s 1841 preface answers those who would lump Oliver Twist with the novels of Bulwer-Lytton and Ainsworth by insisting that his portrayal of Fagin’s gang, far from romanticizing villains, intends to show them as they really are, for ever skulking 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 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 principle of Good embodied in Oliver is in fact a vacuum, a mere absence of evil.

With his genius for adapting different genres to his own purposes, Dickens has reshaped formal elements of Bunyan’s religious allegory to construct a bourgeois and secular fable. Salvation, for Oliver, is a comfortable income and a cottage in suburbia. He is entitled to it not even primarily because he has resisted evil, but because he is the son of a gentleman. His ability to withstand the coercions of Fagin, the threats of Bill Sikes, the seductions of the Artful Dodger, is, it is implied, a part of his genetic inheritance. He is the offspring of a decent, though erring, man and an angelic, ill-used woman. Through all his trials, Oliver has retained the best aspects of his parents’ natures and justified their unconventional love. Dickens, the romantic, uses Oliver’s spotless character to argue that true affection is more valuable than an empty marriage contract. The orphan’s half-brother, Monks, the child of their father’s hate-filled coupling with his legal wife, is physically and morally scarred. Oliver, the result of true, though legally unsanctioned, love, is morally immaculate.

In some miraculous fashion, growing up in a workhouse and a thieves’ den, Oliver even possesses innate middle-class manners and a more genteel style of speech than any of his early companions. Dickens appears to be arguing that social class is a matter of essential, inherited characteristics that express themselves regardless of nurture. Oliver is like Hans Christian Andersen’s Ugly Duckling; out of place and cruelly abused in the squalid environment of his birth, he is eventually recognized and claimed by his true family. At some time or another almost every child, stung by some perceived parental injustice, takes refuge in the myth of a lost real family of rank and privilege. The particular appeal, for Dickens, of such a fantasy is best understood in autobiographical terms. Much of the story of Oliver Twist is driven by memories of childhood ordeals. As Michael Slater points out, in his introduction to the 1992 Everyman’s Library edition of Oliver Twist, Dickens had a closer, more intensely personal involvement with his story of a sensitive, intelligent young child’s exposure to social degradation and moral danger than his readers can possibly have dreamed of.

When Charles Dickens was twelve years old, his father was arrested for debt and sent to Marshalsea Prison. As was customary at the time, the whole family took up residence in the prison—all except Charles, the oldest boy, who was taken out of school and sent to work in Warren’s Blacking Factory. For six months, the studious and ambitious boy was employed pasting labels on bottles of shoe polish for six or seven shillings a week. He spent his nights in lodgings near the factory and visited his family only once a week, on Sundays. For years Dickens was unable to discuss this period of his life, or to walk past Warren’s factory in the Strand. Eventually he wrote an account of the experience for his friend John Forster, who included it in The Life of Charles Dickens (1872—1874). Writing decades after the event, Dickens vividly recalled his boyhood feelings of betrayal and wounded pride: It is wonderful to me how I could have been so easily cast away at such an age. It is wonderful to me that ... no one had compassion enough on me—a child of singular abilities, quick, eager, delicate, and soon hurt, bodily or mentally—to suggest that something might have been spared ... to place me at any common school (Forster, p. 25).

The young Charles Dickens, acutely aware of his family’s fallen status in the world, and full of conventional nineteenth-century snobbery, was particularly humiliated to find himself working side by side with uneducated street urchins: No words can express the secret agony of my soul as I sunk into this companionship; compared these everyday associates with those of my happier childhood; and felt my early hopes of growing up to be a learned and distinguished man, crushed in my breast (Forster, p. 26). One of Dickens’s companions, an orphan named Bob Fagin, seems to have had some real regard for him. Dickens recounts how Fagin taught him the job, nursed him when he was sick, and protected him from the bullying that his refined accent provoked. However, Bob Fagin’s kindness was more threatening to Dickens than the other boys’ taunts. By helping him to function in his new, degraded world, Fagin also unintentionally helped to undermine the boy’s sense of his true identity. The last thing the twelve-year-old Charles Dickens wanted was to fit in with his new companions. Years later, Dickens rewarded Bob Fagin for his solicitude by giving his name to the most dangerous villain in Oliver Twist.

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, starved, and utterly pathetic, passive little Oliver is the embodiment of all that his creator had suffered secretly. Dickens’s childhood feelings of undeserved humiliation and lack of control over the circumstances of his own life are relived in his account of the ordeals of an orphan boy, born in the workhouse and later left to fend for himself on the streets of London.

Kathleen Tillotson, in her introduction to the Clarendon edition of Oliver Twist, traces the novel’s long incubation. Several significant scenes and characters are reworkings of ideas in Sketches by Boz, Dickens’s 1836 compilation of his early stories. The Artful Dodger has a prototype in Criminal Courts, Sikes and Nancy resemble characters in The Hospital Patient, and A Visit to Newgate anticipates Oliver’s interview with Fagin in the condemned cell. Tillotson suggests that elements of the narrative that would later become Oliver Twist had begun to take shape in Dickens’s mind long before he started writing Pickwick Papers. As the first novel Dickens published under his own name (for Pickwick Papers he retained the pen name of Boz), Oliver Twist is far more autobiographical than its genial predecessor. Indeed it exhibits many of the strengths and weaknesses of a first novel.

Dickens’s intense identification with Oliver, while contributing to Oliver Twist’s powerful emotional impact, also accounts for many of the novel’s structural flaws. The author’s insistence on his protagonist’s absolute innocence and helplessness severely limits Oliver’s potential for interesting character development. He is too much a principle and not enough a real child. Dickens himself appears to recognize this and, in the second half of the novel, increasingly turns his focus from Oliver to more entertaining secondary characters. A further problem lies in Dickens’s insistence on Oliver’s innate superiority to other boys in the workhouse and on the streets, and on the eventual restoration of his status as gentleman. The myth of gentility as an inborn trait may have helped the author to come to terms with the social humiliations of his youth, but it severely undermines the effectiveness of Oliver Twist as social criticism. If Oliver is to arouse readers’ indignation at the plight of children in workhouses, it is essential that they view him not as a specimen of unique virtue and sensitivity, but as a typical case.

Dickens’s method of composition may explain some of the apparent conflicts and inconsistencies in the narrative of his second novel. Unlike contemporary writers, Dickens composed his novels episodically, publishing early installments long before he had decided on the eventual direction of the plot. His relationship with his characters undoubtedly evolved and shifted as Oliver Twist progressed; his intense identification with Oliver may have taken him by surprise, subverting his original intention of using the child as a representative victim of an inhumane system of poor relief.

The initial inspiration for Oliver Twist seems to have been Dickens’s opposition to the Poor Law Amendment Act of 1834. This law brought to an end the practice of out-of-door relief (aid given to the poor in their own homes) on the grounds of inefficiency, and compelled everyone in need of parish assistance to enter the workhouse. At the same time, the indigent were to be deterred from coming to the workhouse, except as a last resort, by ensuring that conditions there were as harsh as possible. Inmates were kept on near starvation diets, forced to do hard labor of a kind normally allocated to prisoners, and denied adequate medical care. Death rates were high, especially among children. Every child who died was one less charge on the parish. Dickens set out to dramatize the cruelty of the new law by charting its effects on a helpless orphan. His satirical exposure of heartlessness and greed made an immediate and powerful impression on his audience. He was by no means the first to protest the inhumanity of the new system, but the first fifty pages of Oliver Twist constituted the liveliest and most compelling literary onslaught the new legislation had yet received.

Oliver Twist contains scathing and memorable portraits of hypocritical and self-important officialdom. Much of the novel’s harshest irony is directed at the parish beadle, Mr. Bumble, who proudly wears his porochial seal of the Good Samaritan healing the sick and bruised man (chap. IV) while allowing the indigent to die in the streets. Bumble boasts that his great principle of out-of-door relief is, to give the paupers exactly what they don’t want; and then they get tired of coming (chap. XXIII). Dickens makes use of mordant satire to animate melancholy statistics. The infant Oliver is farmed out to a branch workhouse in which twenty or thirty ... juvenile offenders against the poor-laws, rolled about the floor all day, without the inconvenience of too much food or too much clothing, and where it seemed to perversely happen that in eight and a half cases out of ten children sickened from want and cold, or fell into the fire from neglect, or got half-smothered by accident (chap. II). Yet for all its poignant scenes and memorable characters, Oliver Twist has serious limitations as social criticism. The novel arouses our indignation against the general treatment of the poor but does not argue for any specific reforms. Indeed it is not entirely clear whether Dickens is attacking the Poor Law Amendment Act itself, or the failure of the new commissioners to stamp out abuses that had become entrenched under the old system. The main targets of his satire, Bumble, Mrs. Corney, and Mrs. Mann, are all relics of the old system of poor relief. In Oliver Twist, and throughout his writings, Dickens fails to present cogent arguments for reform at a systemic or institutional level because he harbors a deep mistrust of all systems and institutions. As Steven Marcus points out, Oliver Twist’s determined, aggressive satire cannot in any convincing sense be assigned to partisan allegiance. Dickens can conceive of reform only on a personal level.

In the world of Oliver Twist, public officials are at worst negligent and corrupt like Bumble or Mrs. Mann, at best merely inept and comic like the Bow Street Runners Blathers and Duff, who fail to solve the Maylies’ burglary. Oliver’s rescue is accomplished through the compassionate actions of individuals in the private sphere. Dickens nowhere offends his middle-class readership by suggesting that Brownlow, Grimwig, or the Maylies, as members of bourgeois society, can be blamed for condoning or collaborating in institutionalized oppression of the poor. He further assuages bourgeois sensibilities by providing his readers with a middle-class hero in disguise. In reality, Noah Claypole, and even Charley Bates and the Artful Dodger, present far more convincing models of the likely fate of a penniless nineteenth-century orphan.

Successful or not, social criticism ceases to be Dickens’s chief concern once his orphan hero arrives in London. In his portrayals of the workhouse officials, Dickens gives evil a comic face: Polemic is never far from pantomime. In their marital squabbles, Mr. Bumble and Mrs. Corney are like Punch and Judy, the sparring couple in a traditional English slapstick puppet show. When Oliver falls among thieves, the characters he encounters are recovered from a much darker and more primitive layer of the author’s imagination. From now on, Dickens can rarely muster enough detachment to write satire. He has entered Oliver’s orphanhood and is once again the abandoned and fearful boy in the blacking factory. As many readers have noticed, the denizens of Dickens’s underworld are curiously sexless: Nancy, the prostitute, is a slatternly Madonna, and there is never a hint of pederasty in Fagin’s relationship with the boys. Rather than, as is commonly supposed, distorting his characters to please a prudish Victorian audience, I believe Dickens created them this way because this was how they presented themselves to him: exaggerated, larger-than-life, erotic but sexless, grotesque, and mysteriously powerful, as grown-ups appear to a child.

Oliver Twist’s extreme polarities reproduce the moral landscape of childhood. In this respect, the novel resembles a fairy tale. As Bruno Bettelheim observes in The Uses of Enchantment, The figures in fairy tales are not ambivalent—not good and bad at the same time, as we all are in reality. But since polarization dominates the child’s mind, it also dominates fairy tales (p. 9). In the world of Oliver Twist, adult characters are either neglectful or corrupting parents, like Bumble, Sikes, or Fagin, or they are wise fathers and nurturing mothers, like Brownlow and Rose Maylie. Only Nancy, the sacrificial penitent, is allowed the least shade of moral ambiguity. Oliver’s good and bad adoptive families each have their own domestic hearth: While Brownlow and the Maylies sip tea from fine china and introduce Oliver to the pleasures of reading, Fagin presides over a den of drinking and gambling. The thieves’ London is a labyrinth of mean and dirty streets, noisy and noisome. Oliver’s refuges are neat and orderly. He picks flowers in the Maylies’ Edenic garden. Yet in Dickens’s novel, as in many a fairy tale, it is the ogre, the bad fairy, the wicked stepmother—that embodiment of all that we fear and reject in ourselves—who comes most convincingly to life. Brownlow is bland, Grimwig is tedious, but Fagin compels our attention with his exuberant villainy.

The extraordinary power of Dickens’s Fagin comes from the author’s ability to clothe his childhood bogeyman in the sinister vestments of a cultural archetype. While communicating the very personal distaste he felt for his companion in the blacking factory, Dickens also exploits the shameful burden of anti-Semitism in European culture. Fagin, who is referred to as the Jew almost three hundred times in Oliver Twist, is not only morally contemptible; he is also physically repellent and possessed of several characteristics and accessories that directly link him to Judas Iscariot and even Satan. When Oliver first meets the old shriveled Jew, we learn that his villainous-looking and repulsive face was obscured by a quantity of matted red hair (chap. VIII). In medieval morality plays, Judas Iscariot traditionally wore long red hair, and Dickens would later bestow the same greasy red locks on another of his arch-villains, Uriah Heep, in David Copperfield. At his first encounter with Oliver, Fagin is crouched over the fire, cooking sausages and wielding a toasting fork that might easily be mistaken for Satan’s pitchfork. Just in case we do not pick up on these cues, Dickens repeatedly refers to Fagin as the merry old gentleman, a traditional English nickname for the devil. Like Satan, Fagin is compared to a serpent; like Satan, he flourishes in darkness. Describing one of Fagin’s nighttime excursions through the slum streets of Little Saffron Hill, Dickens informs us that, as he glided stealthily along, creeping beneath the shelter of the walls and doorways, the hideous old man seemed like some loathsome reptile, engendered in the slime and darkness through which he moved: crawling forth, by night, in search of some rich offal for a meal (chap. XIX). Invoking the most hideous charge of medieval anti-Semitism, Fagin is shown to prey upon Christian children. When his protégées no longer serve him, he makes sure that they hang.

As Humphry House explains in his 1949 introduction to the Oxford Illustrated Edition of Oliver Twist, the stereotype of the Jewish fence, or receiver of stolen goods, was widely accepted in Victorian England. House quotes from an article in the popular periodical, the Quarterly Review: A Jew seldom thieves, but is worse than a thief; he encourages others to thieve. In every town there is a Jew, either resident or tramping.... If a robbery is effected, the property is hid till a Jew is found, and a bargain is then made (House, p. vii). In creating a Jewish villain and scapegoat, Dickens was articulating prejudices so deeply and unquestioningly held in his culture that he appears to have been quite shocked and stung when a Jewish reader, Eliza Davies, reproached him for them. He endeavored to make amends by eliminating many of the references to Fagin as the Jew in the 1867 edition of Oliver Twist.

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, that the boys are pick-pockets and the girl is a prostitute.

I confess I have yet to learn that a lesson of the purest good may not be drawn from the vilest evil. I have always believed this to be a recognized and established truth, laid down by the greatest men the world has ever seen, constantly acted upon by the best and wisest natures, and confirmed by the reason and experience of every thinking mind. I saw no reason, when I wrote this book, why the very dregs of life, so long as their speech did not offend the ear, should not serve the purpose of a moral at least as well as its froth and cream. Nor did I doubt that there lay festering in Saint Giles’ as good materials towards the truth as any flaunting in Saint James’s.²

In this spirit, when I wished to show in little Oliver the principle of Good surviving through every adverse circumstance and triumphing at last, and when I considered among what companions I could try him best—having regard to that kind of men into whose hands he would most naturally fall—I bethought myself of those who figure in these volumes. When I came to discuss the subject more maturely with myself, I saw many strong reasons for pursuing the course to which I was inclined. I had read of thieves by scores—seductive fellows (amiable for the most part), faultless in dress, plump in pocket, choice in horseflesh, bold in bearing, fortunate in gallantry, great at a song, a bottle, pack of cards or dice-box, and fit companions for the bravest. But I had never met (except in Hogarth) with the miserable reality.³ It appeared to me that to draw a knot of such associates in crime as really do exist; to paint them in all their deformity, in all their wretchedness, in all the squalid poverty of their lives; to show them as they really are, for ever skulking uneasily through the dirtiest paths of life, with the great, black, ghastly gallows closing up their prospects, turn them where they may—it appeared to me that to do this would be to attempt a something which was greatly needed and which would be a service to society. And therefore I did it as I best could.

In every book I know, where such characters are treated of at all, certain allurements and fascinations are thrown around them. Even in the Beggar’s Opera, the thieves are represented as leading a life which is rather to be envied than otherwise; while Macheath,a with all the captivations of command, and the devotion of the most beautiful girl and only pure character in the piece, is as much to be admired and emulated by weak beholders as any fine gentleman in a red coat who has purchased, as Voltaireb says, the right to command a couple of thousand men or so and to affront death at their head. Johnson’s question, whether any man will turn thief because Macheath is reprieved, seems to me beside the matter.⁴ I ask myself whether any man will be deterred from turning thief because of his being sentenced to death and because of the existence of Peachum and Lockit; and remembering the captain’s roaring life, great appearance, vast success, and strong advantages, I feel assured that nobody having a bent that way will take any warning from him, or will see anything in the play but a very flowery and pleasant road, conducting an honourable ambition, in course of time, to Tyburn Tree.c

In fact, Gay’s witty satire on society had a general object which made him careless of example in this respect and gave him other, wider, and higher aims. The same may be said of Sir Edward Bulwer’s admirable and most powerful novel of Paul Clifford,d which cannot be fairly considered as having, or being intended to have, any bearing on this part of the subject, one way or other.

What manner of life is that which is described in these pages, as the everyday existence of a Thief? What charms has it for the young and ill-disposed, what allurements for the most jolter-headed of juveniles? Here are no canterings upon moonlit heaths, no merry-makings in the snuggest of all possible caverns, none of the attractions of dress, no embroidery, no lace, no jack-boots, no crimson coats and ruffles, none of the dash and freedom with which the road has been time out of mind invested. The cold, wet, shelterless midnight streets of London; the foul and frowsy dens, where vice is closely packed and lacks the room to turn; the haunts of hunger and disease, the shabby rags that scarcely hold together—where are the attractions of these things? Have they no lesson, and do they not whisper something beyond the little-regarded warning of a moral precept?

But there are people of so refined and delicate a nature that they cannot bear the contemplation of these horrors. Not that they turn instinctively from crime, but that criminal characters, to suit them, must be, like their meat, in delicate disguise. A Massaronie in green velvet is quite an enchanting creature, but a Sikes in fustian is un-supportable. A Mrs. Massaroni, being a lady in short petticoats and a fancy dress, is a thing to imitate in tableaux and have in lithograph on pretty songs; but a Nancy, being a creature in a cotton gown and cheap shawl, is not to be thought of. It is wonderful how Virtue turns from dirty stockings, and how Vice, married to ribbons and a little gay attire, changes her name, as wedded ladies do, and becomes Romance.

Now, as the stern and plain truth, even in the dress of this (in novels) much exalted race, was a part of the purpose of this book, I will not, for these readers, abate one hole in the Dodger’s coat or one scrap of curl-paper in the girl’s dishevelled hair. I have no faith in the delicacy which cannot bear to look upon them. I have no desire to make proselytes among such people. I have no respect for their opinion, good or bad, do not covet their approval, and do not write for their amusement. I venture to say this without reserve; for I am not aware of any writer in our language having a respect for himself, or held in any respect by his posterity, who ever has descended to the taste of this fastidious class.

On the other hand, if I look for examples and for precedents, I find them in the noblest range of English literature. Fielding, Defoe, Goldsmith, Smollett, Richardson, Mackenzie—all these for wise purposes, and especially the two first, brought upon the scene the very scum and refuse of the land. Hogarth, the moralist, and censor of his age—in whose great works the times in which he lived and the characters of every time will never cease to be reflected—did the like, without the compromise of a hair’s breadth, with a power and depth of thought which belonged to few men before him and will probably appertain to fewer still in time to come. Where does this giant stand now in the estimation of his countrymen? And yet, if I turn back to the days in which he or any of these men flourished, I find the same reproach levelled against them every one, each in his turn, by the insects of the hour, who raised their little hum and died and were forgotten.

Cervantesf laughed Spain’s chivalry away by showing Spain its impossible and wild absurdity. It was my attempt, in my humble and far-distant sphere, to dim the false glitter surrounding something which really did exist by showing it in its unattractive and repulsive truth. No less consulting my own taste than the manners of the age, I endeavoured, while I painted it in all its fallen and degraded aspects, to banish from the lips of the lowest character I introduced, any expression that could by possibility offend, and rather to lead to the unavoidable inference that its existence was of the most debased and vicious kind than to prove it elaborately by words and deeds. In the case of the girl in particular I kept this intention constantly in view. Whether it is apparent in the narrative, and how it is executed, I leave my readers to determine.

It has been observed of this girl that her devotion to the brutal housebreaker does not seem natural, and it has been objected to Sikes in the same breath—with some inconsistency, as I venture to think—that he is surely overdrawn, because in him there would appear to be none of those redeeming traits which are objected to as unnatural in his mistress. Of the latter objection I will merely say that I fear there are in the world some insensible and callous natures that do become, at last, utterly and irredeemably bad. But whether this be so or not, of one thing I am certain: that there are such men as Sikes, who, being closely followed through the same space of time and through the same current of circumstances, would not give, by one look or action of a moment, the faintest indication of a better nature. Whether every gentler human feeling is dead within such bosoms, or the proper chord to strike has rusted and is hard to find, I do not know; but that the fact is so, I am sure.

It is useless to discuss whether the conduct and character of the girl seems natural or unnatural, probable or improbable, right or wrong. It is true. Every man who has watched these melancholy shades of life knows it to be so. Suggested to my mind long ago—long before I dealt in fiction—by what I often saw and read of in actual life around me, I have for years tracked it through many profligate and noisome ways, and found it still the same. From the first introduction of that poor wretch to her laying her bloody head upon the robber’s breast, there is not one word exaggerated or overwrought. It is emphatically God’s truth, for it is the truth. He leaves in such depraved and miserable breasts, the hope yet lingering behind, the last fair drop of water at the bottom of the dried-up weed-choked well. It involves the best and worst shades of our common nature, much of its ugliest hues and something of its most beautiful ; it is a contradiction, an anomaly, an apparent impossibility, but it is a truth. I am glad to have had it doubted, for in that circumstance I find a sufficient assurance that it needed to be told.

DEVONSHIRE TERRACE

April, 1841

PREFACE TO THE FIRST CHEAP EDITION

At page 267 of this present edition of Oliver Twist there is a de scription of the filthiest, the strangest, the most extraordi nary of the many localities that are hidden in London. And the name of this place is Jacob’s Island.

Eleven or twelve years have elapsed since the description was first published. I was as well convinced then as I am now, that nothing effectual can be done for the elevation of the poor in England until their dwelling-places are made decent and wholesome. I have always been convinced that this reform must precede all other Social Reforms; that it must prepare the way for Education, even for Religion; and that, without it, those classes of the people which increase the fastest must become so desperate, and be made so miserable, as to bear within themselves the certain seeds of ruin to the whole community.

The metropolis (of all places under heaven) being excluded from the provisions of the Public Health Act passed last year, a society has been formed called the Metropolitan Sanitary Association, with the view of remedying this grievous mistake. The association held its first public meeting at Freemason’s Hall on Wednesday the sixth of February last, the Bishop of London presiding. It happened that this very place, Jacob’s Island, had lately attracted the attention of the Board of Health, in consequence of its having been ravaged by cholera; and that the Bishop of London had in his hands the result of an inquiry under the Metropolitan Sewers Commission, showing, by way of proof of the cheapness of sanitary improvements, an estimate of the probable cost at which the houses in Jacob’s Island could be rendered fit for human habitation—which cost, as stated, was about a penny three farthings per week per house. The Bishop referred to this paper with the moderation and forbearance which pervaded all his observations, and did me the honour to mention that I had described Jacob’s Island. When I subsequently made a few observations myself, I confessed that soft impeachment.

Now the vestry of Marylebone parish, meeting on the following Saturday, had the honour to be addressed by Sir Peter Laurie, a gentleman of infallible authority, of great innate modesty, and of a most sweet humanity. This remarkable alderman, as I am informed by The Observer newspaper, then and there delivered himself (I quote the passage without any correction) as follows:

"Having touched upon the point of saving to the poor, he begged to illustrate it by reading for them the particulars of a survey that had been made in a locality called—‘Jacob’s Island’—(a laugh)—where, according to the surveyor, 1300 houses were erected on forty acres of ground. The surveyor asserted and laid down that each house could be supplied with a constant