Oliver Twist (2 page)

If you are mortal, or are said to partake of mortality, you are defined as someone who can die. Oliver’s birth, then, is an event all- about death: his mother dies as he is born, and he is aimed by his author toward the possibility of early death. Virtually all of the novel is about dying or not dying. Everything else—whether concerning the treatment of the poor, the cruelty of public officers, the public attitude toward poverty, the organization of the underworld, expressions of bigotry—is secondary to the primary concern of the novel: death.

Oliver and the other orphaned paupers in the workhouse are told by a large, nasty boy possessed of “a wild, hungry, eye” that he might well eat the small child sleeping beside him. The boys draw straws to see who must act to forestall this cannibalism. The point for us is that they believe that their lives are this contingent—that someone can decide to feast on them and do so if he will. It is no less perverse an idea than the twisted social Darwinism that enables public officials to permit the weak and helpless to starve because the poor are
guilty
of being poor. These children believe that they, too, are guilty; they are hounded and harried because they have committed the crime, in society’s eyes, of poverty: why, in punishment, should someone not be allowed to feed himself on their sparse flesh? So Oliver asks for more gruel not because he is brave, and not because he feels entitled to it, and not because of appetite. He begs because he must. He has drawn the short straw, and he is required to save one of his mates, and perhaps himself, from being a meal. The response to this reduction of children to food—remember Jonathan Swift’s satire, “A Modest Proposal,” in which mass starvation in Ireland in 1729 is to be relieved by the cooking and eating of the young—is of course neither mercy nor forbearance. Instead, Oliver is found guilty of wanting more than the Parliamentary act permits him. His destiny is obvious to Mr. Limbkins, who is Bumble’s supervisor: “ ‘That boy will be hung,’ said the gentleman in the white waistcoat. ‘I know that boy will be hung.’ ” The assertion by the poor of their needs is, to such as Limbkins, an assault on the order of this society, a hanging offense. We can read the rest of the novel in terms of that prediction. The book’s about the noose around the neck.

Oliver Twist
contains elements to be found in most of Dickens’ other novels. It concerns an innocent child who is menaced by a cruel world. There is an element of fairy tale—magic changes us, sometimes in terrifying ways—and there is a fairy godmother figure (in this case, Mr. Brownlow, abetted by Mr. Grimwig); lovely motherly women (Rose Maylie, say) of the purest heart will comfort the hero, who is pursued by nightmare forces (Sikes and Fagin); there will be violence, often murder, and Dickens’ prose generally becomes incandescent as the social contract is violated. In Oliver Twist, as Dickens examines the principle of goodness, he balances his scrutiny with Nancy, who is good but fallen, and with characters such as Fagin or Bill Sikes, whose absolute evil matches Oliver’s and Rose Maylie’s absolute good. Another important Dickensian element in the novel is the author’s anger: he detested the venality, the blindness, and the viciousness of his great and wealthy nation. His public officials may wear white waistcoats, but they are as covered with pitch as, say, Fagin, whom Dickens renders repulsive.

In preparing
Oliver Twist
for the Charles Dickens Edition of 1867, Dickens changed most uses of the phrase “the JEW” to “he” or “Fagin.” He did so partly in response to a letter from Mrs. Eliza Davis, who, with her husband, had purchased Tavi stock House, Dickens’ home in London. Mrs. Davis had written Dickens saying that his depiction of Fagin encouraged “a vile prejudice against the despised Hebrew.” Dickens had replied that “Fagin in
Oliver Twist
is a Jew, because it unfortunately was true of the time to which that story refers, that that class of criminal almost invariably
was
a Jew.... I have no feeling towards the Jewish people but a friendly one. I always speak well of them, whether in public, or in private....” But of course he did not, and, in writing Fagin, he does not. And because he knew it, one suspects, he made the changes in the edition of 1867; in writing his last completed novel,
Our Mutual Friend
(1865), he created a Jewish character named Riah, who is possessed of great humanity and kindness, and who is victimized by a Christian moneylender.

But Fagin is not only a Jew seen through the lens of bigotry and stereotype; he is Dickens’ way of setting absolute evil against Oliver’s absolute good. Oliver first sees Fagin with a fork in his hand before a fire: he is a childish portrait of the Devil, but Oliver sees him only as a kind and helpful man; it is we who see him as satanic. The boy’s vision of the world assumes that it is good, in spite of the harm it has done him; ours, as we dwell on the harm, does not. It is important, here, to consider how Dickens manipulates this novel’s point of view—the way a character perceives and reports his environment. Because Oliver is a principle of good, and not very much of an interesting person—except in his victimhood, which Dickens takes personally—Dickens does not keep his vision focused on Oliver’s thoughts and feelings. They are rather basic. In chapter V, when he is dealing with Sowerberry the undertaker, Oliver is told, concerning funerals—remember: this is a book about mortality—that “ ‘you’ll get used to it.... Nothing when you
are
used to it, my boy.’ ” Oliver’s response is to wonder “Whether it had taken a very long time to get Mr. Sowerberry used to it.” This is not a fascinating analysis, and Dickens seems to be merely rounding off the chapter that this colloquoy concludes. But we, through Dickens’ imagery, have witnessed the grief of the impoverished husband who could not help to save the woman he loved; we have seen the attendants throw a can of cold water over him after he faints, and we have seen him locked—consider how many doors and gates are locked and broken through in this novel of imprisonment—out of the churchyard. The reader is directed to social callousness, and Oliver, said to be “thinking over all he had seen and heard”—those are the chapter’s concluding words—walks away from us with those thoughts.

What interests Dickens more than Oliver’s routine thinking is social cruelty, violence, and inner darkness. When they impinge on Oliver’s mind, as when he understands Fagin’s enterprise with the street urchins, the prose employed by Dickens to describe the boy’s mental process becomes very different—as in chapter X: “In an instant the whole mystery of the handkerchiefs, and the watches, and the jewels, and the Jew, rushed upon the boy’s mind.” The blood so tingles in his veins “that he felt as if he were in a burning fire.” And when Oliver is safely out of the way in chapter XIX, recaptured by Fagin, see what Dickens does with mud and mist, with rain that falls “sluggishly,” as if it were a thick broth of evil, with everything “cold and clammy to the touch.” Fagin walks the streets: “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.” “The Jew” is the serpent—not only a reptile, but
the
reptile: Satan himself, evil incarnate. When Dickens later writes Riah, the upstanding Jew of
Our Mutual Friend,
the prose he uses for describing him is never this dynamic because Riah is mild, not fiendish.

Fagin, of course, will be hanged, and at the time of his penultimate moments, when he is on trial and alone in his cell, Dickens descends into his mind. He forgets to condemn him and he does what good writers cannot help but do: he becomes the character of whom he has so disapproved. He senses Fagin’s dark isolation “in all this glare of living light,” as he attends his trial; he notes the many faces turned toward him, he meditates on how the judge is dressed, for he is seizing details as if they may keep him afloat in this sea of Christian retribution. He watches a man who is sketching him, and he “looked on when the artist broke his pencil-point, and made another with his knife....” This lovely human moment, almost sacred in its ordinariness, suggests what Fagin is about to lose when he is executed, and its smallness is somehow more telling than any expatiation about loss of life and liberty. The artist in Dickens overwhelms the moralist as he portrays the mind of the guilty and condemned.

We might contrast the language Dickens employs when he celebrates the beauty and goodness of Rose Maylie, who, almost dying, loses nothing, we are told, of her beauty although “there was an anxious, haggard look about the gentle face,” and then she became “deadly pale.” Oliver cries out about “how young and good she is, and what pleasure and comfort she gives to all about her.... Heaven,” he concludes, “will never let her die so young.” This is the language of conventional mourning; it is all utterance and little particularity, and it is taken by Dickens directly from his own life. We return now to Mary Hogarth, his wife’s seventeen-year-old sister, who lived with them and who died in his arms at the house on Doughty Street; where we left them. He clearly loved her, and in noteworthy degree for a man whose young bride was pregnant early in their marriage. He took to wearing Mary’s ring after she died, and he kept a lock of her hair; he dreamed of her nightly and at one point expressed a wish that he might be buried so that their bones intermingled. For the first and only time in his career, he failed to meet the deadline for his monthly part of a novel in progress. And though he tries in
Oliver Twist
to import the sorrow of the lived event into his fiction, he at best only touches its surface.

Yet give him an imagined murderer, and his language is set alight. After Bill Sikes has killed Nancy, he sits all night with the corpse. As sunlight fills the room, we are witness to a kind of aubade, the traditional dawn song of love poetry—the lovers, waking in each other’s arms, observe that they must part before they are discovered—and Dickens turns it perverse. In the blindness of his rage, Sikes had “struck and struck again.” Then, trying to evade the reality of his act, “he threw a rug over it”: Nancy has been reduced from personhood to thing; she is “it,” an item of mortality. But he could not cover “it,” because “it was worse to fancy the eyes, and imagine them moving toward him....” Dickens lives inside Sikes now, with his great gift of understanding outcasts.
His
dawn song is to see the victim’s eyes “as if watching the reflection of the pool of gore that quivered and danced in the sunlight on the ceiling.” Blood is everywhere in the room. “The very feet of the dog were bloody”: Dickens leaves us to imagine how the bloody paw prints go back and forth between the victim and Sikes himself.

Chapter XLVIII, “The flight of Sikes,” is a descent into the fear and alienation of the murderer. Dickens examines how he is isolated from the human community—how he is impelled to hurl himself into fighting the fire he comes upon because it is a communal response to emergency and he yearns to be part of the social group, but finally cannot. The index of Sikes’ utter alienation is, of course, his dog. We must recall that he is a large and fearless animal. We have seen him yank on the end of a fireplace poker with his big jaws to keep Sikes from beating him with it. But he is loyal to Sikes and, even when driven away, follows his master at a distance. He senses when Sikes decides to kill him, for the murderer finally knows no loyalties; in separating from the dog, his very shadow, he displays his final separation from himself. The dog doesn’t abandon him, and he follows his master into death.

The death is accidental. Sikes is trying to use a long rope for his escape. Still haunted by Nancy’s staring dead eyes, he loses his balance and falls from the parapet of the building from which even his gangster associates have driven him. “The noose was at his neck. It ran up with his weight, tight as a bow-string, and swift as the arrow....” He falls thirty-five feet, and then “There was a sudden jerk, a terrific convulsion of the limbs; and there he hung....” We have watched a noose slowly tighten for the length of the book. It was the rope with which Oliver was threatened when, in chapter VI, Noah Claypole “announced his intention of coming to see him hung”; it was suggested when, in chapter XIII, “Mr. Sikes contented himself with tying an imaginary knot under his left ear, and jerking his head over on the right shoulder ...”; it is suggested when, in chapter XVI, Fagin is “knitting his shaggy eyebrows into a hard knot”; Oliver is threatened with it when, in chapter XVIII, “Mr. Fagin concluded by drawing a rather disagreeable picture of the discomforts of hanging”; “The gallows,” Fagin says in chapter XLIII, “the gallows, my dear, is an ugly finger-post ... ,” and it points throughout the book toward this immense moment.

Dickens closes with an image of a church and its graveyard, but the buildings that linger for us will probably be the slums through which Fagin slithered and Bill Sikes swaggered, the doors through which thieves entered and behind which boys were imprisoned, the scuffed wooden floors on which a death-bound dog, in his distress, tracked the blood of a woman who tried, at last, to be good, and who was punished by a man whose resolute criminality excited their author far more than the pure, innocent, helpless small boy who gave this book his name.

 

—FREDERICK BUSCH

PREFACE TO
THE THIRD EDITION

THE GREATER PART OF THIS TALE WAS ORIGINALLY PUBLISHED IN a magazine. 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.