Review - Oliver Twist by Charles Dickens: No, I Do Not Want Some More

 As a currency of cultural and political exchange, ‘antisemitism’ is now probably completely worthless – coined, clipped, counterfeited, devalued and Greshamed to buggery & back – able to mean absolutely anything and nothing, a function of the cynicism of its users.  Which is not to say that the history of 1900 years of hatred and violence to which it was the mealy-mouthed pseudo-scientific climax, isn’t coming back to bite our enshittified society sooner and nastier than we think. So, in a modest spirit of cultural enquiry, I recently went back to one of the great unacknowledged disgraces of our national literature and found myself wondering, once again, why on earth I continue to give shelf-space to Charles Dickens’ Oliver Twist.

Because, gentle reader, it absolutely reeks of it.

Those only familiar with the Bart stage musical (shortly to be revived in the West End, which may make for some interesting reviews) and Harry Secombe’s comic turn as Bumble The Beedle, may find this assertion surprising.  Is Ron Moody’s Fagin really Jewish at all?  What about my old mucker Rowan Atkinson’s portrayal – all skin-crawling villainy and comic grotesque?  Read the book, and you’re in for a nasty surprise.

In essence, Oliver’s universe starts out conventionally improving – a young boy’s moral character is a clean slate, contested by the blandly good-humoured beneficence of Mr Brownlow and the repellently fascinating but minutely dissected evil of Bill Sikes’ criminal psychopath, Nancy’s abusive victimhood and Jack Dawkins’ cheerfully amoral gangsterism that’s the great-grandfather of Bugsy Malone via Marcel Carne’s Lacenaire   Then things turn nasty.  The monster in the fictional space is Dickens’ portrayal of the various Jewish characters, and specifically Fagin.  Because Dickens extends that conventional moral universe with all the tropes of racism at his disposal. And no, it just won’t wash that Dickens self-edited by removing numerous instances of the word ‘Jew’.  What he left in is a catalogue of every antisemitic trope you’d rather not be thinking about.  Dickens’ Jews all talk in comically adenoidal accents, look out for each other to the cost of their English host-culture, and are perpetually engaged in opaquely nefarious enterprise. 

All this is prologue to Fagin, whose portrayal occupies the depths of the antisemitic imagination.  Dickens descends into this midden in three distinct steps.

Firstly, he describes Fagin as a reptilian life-form inhabiting sub-human depths far beneath the moral landscape occupied by the Anglo characters – good, corruptible or evil as they may be.  So far, so antisemitic.

Secondly, Dickens shows Fagin deliberately encompassing the corruption of the (eminently corruptible)  English.  When Noah Claypole comes to London, Fagin invites him to pick one of his catalogue of criminal rackets – robbing small children of their pennies.  It’s easy money and if persisted in can make you a good living.  It’s also worth a brief excursus to understand the position that mugging defenceless infants occupies in the moral universe of 19^th century fiction. 

Readers only familiar with the stage-musical reinvention of Les Miserables – a 2-hour gallop through selected narrative highlights of a 1500-page novel – may imagine that Jean Valjean’s redemption begins directly after his theft of Bishop Myriel’s silver candlesticks.  Victor Hugo had other ideas – in the novel, after receiving the bishop’s forgiveness, Valjean promptly goes out and mugs a waif for the child’s last sou.  It is the nadir of his depravity and the crime for which Javert pursues him across decades, aflame with the righteousness of his cause – defender of the defenceless.  Valjean’s crime is something akin to the sin against the Holy Ghost, redolent of Matthew 18:6, an act that prevents the possibility of Christian redemption.  And this is also the crime by which Dickens has Fagin corrupt his new apprentice. 

And finally:  Dickens’ portrayal of Fagin’s last hours on death row is a bravura piece of writing.  It teases out the creeping minute-by-minute horror of the approach of personal extinction in the mind of the condemned man  And it does so with a care and precision of tone that permits the reader to experience absolutely no fellow-feeling or sympathy for Fagin at the imminence of his death.  Dickens pulls off a sort of novelistic totalitarianism, forbidding the reader to pity Fagin because in Dickens’ view he’s simply not human like you or me.  

You cannot close Oliver Twist without feeling defiled by having touched pitch and licked it off your fingers every time you turn a page - which is an odd sort of acknowledgement of Dickens’ implacable brilliance as a writer. Read it by all means, and then ask yourself not should we cancel our national treasure, jolly musical adaptation and all, rather would you really give this shelf-space if it appeared in any other work by any other writer?