WHEN SIKES AND NANCY RECAPTURE OLIVER, in Dickens's Oliver Twist, intending to return him to the gang of thieves, Sikes warns Oliver against crying out to passersby, announcing that his dog will go for Oliver's throat if he so much as speaks one word. Looking at the dog, who is eyeing Oliver and growling and licking his lips, “with a kind of grim and ferocious approval,” Sikes tells Oliver, “He's as willing as a Christian, strike me blind if he isn't!” (109; ch. 16). Sikes of course simply intends to say that his dog is as good as human, but Dickens's joke, in the context of the novel, is a chilling one. Sikes's bloodthirsty dog is as willing as the novel has shown many a professed Christian to be to exercise brute power over the weak and helpless, to drive Oliver into a life of crime, and to commit physical violence against him. In the course of the novel, Dickens shows what professed Christians have been willing to do to the poor and invites his readers to contemplate what they as Christians should instead be willing to do. Oliver Twist is of course deeply concerned with the condition of England's poor, and Dickens invokes the idea of Christianity as a rhetorical tool through which to make the social commentary that is at the novel's moral center.

Yet given the sympathy that Dickens expresses in Oliver Twist for the poor and the socially marginal, the portrayal of the Jewish underclass villain, Fagin, has perturbed some readers almost since the novel's first publication. Oliver at first sees Fagin as a benevolent gentleman, sheltering, feeding, and training homeless children–but of course he is a thief, a pimp, and a fence for stolen goods. Though Fagin proffers himself as a surrogate parent to Oliver, he is also villainous and corrupt, and his hideousness is made specifically Jewish. Not only does Dickens pointedly and repeatedly term him “the Jew,” but he emphasizes aspects of his character familiar from the antisemitic tradition, namely his miserliness, his greed, his exotic and strange appearance, his effeminacy, his obsequiousness, his cowardliness–and the size of his nose. In 1863, Mrs. Davis, a Jewish acquaintance of Dickens's, wrote to complain politely about Fagin's characterization:

Dickens was apparently surprised by the charge. He wrote back to Mrs. Davis to contest it, and throughout an exchange of several letters, Dickens never admitted that his representation of Fagin could reasonably be seen as in any way inimical to Jews. Yet in the following year he introduced the character of a kindly Jew, Riah, in Our Mutual Friend, and, for the 1867 edition of Oliver Twist, he made some careful revisions of the novel, editing out many instances in which he had substituted the words “the Jew” for Fagin's name and, in the process, indubitably lessening the heaviness of the novel's antisemitism.

Dickens's implicit response to Mrs. Davis's criticism was impressive and praiseworthy; that he was so easily convinced suggests, despite his denials, that he already had some sense of his own injustice in the portrayal of Jews through Fagin in Oliver Twist. Yet what Dickens did was only partial. He lessened the frequency with which the term “the Jew” was used for Fagin, especially in the chapter recounting Fagin's condemnation to death. But given that Dickens did this much, why did he not do more?

It is instructive to consider what some other strategies for revision might have been. Dickens might, for example, once having established Fagin as a Jew, have eliminated all reference to him by ethnic identity except where necessary for the plot, perhaps substituting the terms “the thief” or “the fence” for “the Jew,” just as he calls Sikes, the only other character repeatedly referred to by such a group designation, “the housebreaker.” Or Dickens might have gone so far as to change Fagin's ethnic identity altogether, to one not traditionally the target of prejudice in nineteenth-century England. Or, while continuing to refer to Fagin as “the Jew,” Dickens might have referred to other characters by ethnic or religious identity as well, periodically substituting for, say, Mr. Sowerberry's name, “the Englishman” or “the Christian.” He might, alternatively, have introduced other Jewish characters who were not associated with criminality, perhaps even making existing good characters, such as the Maylies or Mr. Brownlow, into Jews! I list these possible strategies for revision in increasing order of improbability, and to contemplate them is to realize how far outside what Dickens might possibly have imagined–and how much at odds with the workings of the novel–the latter ones are. (Some of the latter revisions may have been improbable under the circumstances in which Dickens revised the novel: we don't know exactly what those circumstances were.¹

) But why, if Dickens to some extent saw the problem and was willing to address it, did he not follow even the first, readily adoptable, strategy, consistently calling Fagin by name or terming him “the fence” rather than “the Jew”?

Dickens could not do so, I will contend, because the negative energy in the representation of the Jewish Fagin is, paradoxically, so deeply involved in what is best in the novel. This is true from a literary perspective, as many have remarked: Fagin is certainly far more vivid and fascinating than the good characters.²

But it is also true from a social perspective. Fagin is inextricably involved, as a Jew, and as a character whom the reader must never forget to be a Jew, in the novel's extended commentary on the English treatment of the poor. That commentary is worked out through a symbolic schema in which the categories “Christian” and “Jew” play interconnected roles.

Dickens's Christianity is not an extensively discussed topic in the Dickens criticism: writing in 1962, John Gross, noting Dickens's interest in redemption and resurrection, commented that Dickens's Christianity “is more relevant than one tends to think nowadays” (xii). Twenty years later, Andrew Sanders again noted that the combination “of a sincere but simple enough faith with a general refusal to proclaim it from the house tops…[has] rendered Dickens's insistent Christianity…irrelevant to most modern critical discussion of his work” (Resurrectionist xi). When Dickens's Christianity is discussed, it is almost never considered in conjunction with Dickens's representation of Jews. In Dickens and the Broken Scripture (1985), for example, in a full and illuminating chapter devoted to the religious framework of Oliver Twist, Janet Larson scrupulously avoids even referring to Fagin as a Jew (45–72).

Critics writing on the subject of Dickens's treatment of Jews themselves have very little to say about the role of Christianity in Dickens's fiction, other than noting the associations between Fagin and the devil. Critics have debated at length on a number of subjects having to do with Dickens's representation of Jews, such as possible historical and literary models for Fagin, and Dickens's relation to antisemitic literary and dramatic stereotypes, or to medieval antisemitism. Others have discussed Oliver Twist in relation to the historical position of Jews in nineteenth-century England, or compared Dickens's treatment of Jews with those of other novelists of his day (see, for example, Clark; Tobias; Johnson; Lane; Stone, “Dickens”; Rosenberg). One lone critic, Joseph Gold, writing in 1972, takes up the meaning of Christianity in Oliver Twist in relation to the antisemitic treatment of Fagin, when he notes that “Fagin is used for satiric counter-point as a non-Christian (the Jew being the only reasonable choice for this purpose in nineteenth-century England) and not because Dickens was really interested in Jews at all” (Gold 51).³

Gold's work has been little cited by subsequent critics writing on the topic of Dickens's representation of Jews. My essay develops and expands upon this line of thought.

More recently, critics have had interesting things to say about the evolution in Dickens's attitude toward Jews over the course of his career in relation to his changing attitude toward society (Heller), Dickens's use of the Jew as scapegoat (Baumgarten), and the role of the narrator in relation to Dickens's use of the epithet, “the Jew” (Grossman).⁴

But the tendency has very much been to consider Dickens's structures of Christian meaning separately from the subject of Dickens's representation of Jews. Heller is representative in seeing these issues as completely separable in Dickens when she notes at one point that Dickens's “distrust of vulgarity and financial unscrupulousness was part of a profound critique of –nominally Christian–Victorian social and economic life, a critique in which anti-Jewish feeling was simply not involved” (136 n. 19). I will argue, to the contrary, that the anti-Jewish feeling in Dickens is intricately connected with the social argument that Dickens is often making through his references to Christianity, and that in order to understand the role of the Jew in Oliver Twist, we must consider it in connection with Dickens's sometimes heavy-handed deployment of the rhetoric of Christianity.⁵

In Oliver Twist, Dickens emphatically criticizes what he represents as unchristian in the behavior of the English toward the poor. He then introduces his readers to the distinctly non-Christian Fagin. At the novel's end he symbolically purges the novel's representative of the absence of Christianity by killing off Fagin, preparing the way for a vision of a purified England in the idyllic village, with the church at its moral center, to which Oliver, Mr. Brownlow, and the Maylies retreat in the novel's final pages. Dickens thus uses the Jew, I will contend, as a corrective figure for the instruction and improvement of English Christians, guiding them, by a skillful employment of the rhetoric of antisemitism, towards the practice of what he represents as a true Christianity, characterized by mercy and benevolence toward the poor.

The novel's opening chapters, set in the unnamed town of Oliver's birth, make an emphatic criticism of those who created the new Poor Laws and those who justify, administer, and benefit from them, as well as of all the indifferent bystanders who profit from, or do not help to remedy, the situation of the poor. The critique of human evil in this part of the novel is for the most part comic, although not often uproariously so, because the subject matter is so dark and because Dickens's attitude is heavily censorious, rather than, as in some of his most effective humor, partly self-mocking and complicitous. Here Dickens directs our humor against the appropriately named Mrs. Mann, who has none of the feminine qualities Dickens admires, and is as far as possible from a nurturing mother, instead taking food out of the mouths of the starving babies she “farms.” We meet the workhouse cook, a fat man appalled at the scrawny Oliver's request for “more,” and the Sowerberries, undertakers who grow rich on the deaths of paupers, and who complain when the paupers are not thin enough to permit the use of the smallest possible amount of wood in the coffins. Mr. Gamfield, the chimney sweep, chuckles over his technique of lighting fires to hurry the boys he apprentices out of the chimneys; while “the gentleman in the white waistcoat” of the parish board overseeing the poor advocates the harshest treatment of Oliver while conspicuously dressed in the color of virtue. Dickens pokes dark fun in this section of the novel at the manifold forms of human weakness, greed, and cruelty.

These opening chapters repeatedly indicate that this sort of behavior is distinctly at odds with the tenets of Christianity. The beadle, Mr. Bumble, pompously and insistently repeats the word “porochial” in describing his own situation and the system of relief of the poor, and Dickens's misspelling of the word, presumably to indicate Mr. Bumble's faulty pronunciation and perhaps faulty comprehension of the word, gives it additional emphasis. Dickens also pointedly uses the word “parish” in the subtitle of the novel (“The Parish Boy's Progress”). The parish was the unit of local civil government in England in the 1830s, but these territorial divisions had their origins in the parishes of the Church of England, ecclesiastical districts surrounding local churches. The weight Dickens puts on the word reminds his readers that what was under the system of Poor Laws discharged as an onerous legal obligation was an extension of what had been seen as the charitable duty of the Church and of individual Christians. It might perhaps remind the reader as well that the Royal Commission appointed to investigate the Poor Laws in 1832, resulting in the Poor Law Amendment of 1834, was chaired by the Bishop of London (see Sanders, Spirit 57–58). Although Dickens does not directly comment on the Church's failure in relation to the new Poor Laws, the language he gives Mr. Bumble suggests the Church's involvement in the harsh and inadequate system of government charity.

The failure, Dickens indicates, is the consequence of flaws of both individual and institutional morality. There is not much that is subtle in Dickens's darkly comic critique of nominally Christian behavior in these opening chapters, but it is worth rehearsing, because it is in the context of this critique that the Jewish Fagin is introduced. One of the gentlemen of the board, for example, questioning Oliver when he is brought out of the baby farm, demands of him: “I hope you say your prayers every night…and pray for the people who feed you, and take care of you– like a Christian” (25; ch. 2). At this Dickens comments, “It would have been very like a Christian, and a marvellously good Christian, too, if Oliver had prayed for the people who fed and took care of him. But he hadn't, because nobody had taught him” (25; ch. 2). The failure of Christianity to which Dickens is pointing here is of course not Oliver's, but the board's. Not only have they spectacularly failed to provide for Oliver's material needs, but the only religious instruction they provide is a self-aggrandizing one. The only time Oliver ever receives religious instruction in these chapters occurs when he is locked up for requesting more food and is subjected to a nightly prayer-time in which the boys “entreat…to be made good, virtuous, contented, and obedient, and to be guarded from the sins and vices of Oliver Twist” (30; ch. 3). The workhouse officials wield Christianity as a device to maintain the subservience and docility of the poor.

All this is quite blatant, but the most overt criticism of human greed and lack of charity as unchristian in these opening chapters is the little episode in which Mr. Bumble and Mr. Sowerberry discuss the buttons on the beadle's official coat, which represent “the Good Samaritan healing the sick and bruised man,” a replica, Mr. Bumble explains, of “the porochial seal.”⁶

“I put it on, I remember, for the first time,” Mr. Bumble tells Sowerberry, “to attend the inquest on that reduced tradesman, who died in a doorway at midnight.” “‘I recollect,’ said the undertaker. ‘The jury brought in, “Died from exposure to the cold, and want of the common necessaries of life’” (38; ch. 4). It is hardly necessary to elaborate on the biting humor with which Dickens indicates that the people of this English town are very bad Christians indeed, not following, and not even comprehending, the lessons of their own scripture, as recounted in the parable of the Good Samaritan. They profit from the official structure of institutionalized charity, while self-righteously priding themselves on their own benevolence. As Mr. Sowerberry says later in the conversation, “I pay a good deal towards the poor's rates…. I was thinking that if I pay so much towards'em, I've a right to get as much out of 'em as I can” (38; ch. 4). The unchristian behavior of the professed Christians among whom Oliver Twist is living is the emphatic focus of the early chapters of Oliver Twist.

Dickens does not quite let us forget about this critique of the inadequate practice of Christianity when we move to the London chapters of the novel. The full implications of Sikes's comparison of his dog to a Christian might slip by middle-class readers ready to find here an easy source of mirth in the ignorance of the uneducated poor, who unwittingly represent themselves as like bloodthirsty, mongrel dogs. But lest it does, Dickens repeats the joke in a more pointed fashion two chapters later. The Dodger, who is cataloguing Bull's Eye's admirable qualities, ends by saying, with his characteristic facetious denial:

Dickens's narrative intrusion here disrupts any possibility of complacent amusement on the part of his middle-class readers. If such lady and gentleman readers are feeling safely distant from the thieves, in their amusement at Charley and his terminology, they are suddenly forced by Dickens's narrative intrusion to confront their sense of class distinctions and of comfortable distance from the poor. Dickens's comment sardonically urges such readers to consider whether they themselves feel and act toward the poor (those who “ain't of [their] breed”) in a way that indicates that they understand the meaning of the term “Christian” any better than the gang of thieves.

When Oliver goes to London, however, the focus of the novel changes, in that Dickens's comic scrutiny is no longer primarily on comfortable, complacent, nominally Christian characters. In London, Oliver and the reader are introduced to a character who is distinctly not a Christian, the Jewish Fagin. From the introduction of Fagin onward, we return very little to Dickens's critique of the nominally Christian characters from Oliver's earlier childhood. Mr. Bumble continues to figure somewhat in the plot, and through him we are introduced to Mrs. Corney, the mistress of the workhouse; we also briefly catch sight of Mrs. Mann. But for the most part, these important comic figures fade from view in the novel. In their place Dickens gives us the Jew and his circle of poor criminals. In the Jewish Fagin, Dickens creates a potent, sinister, no longer comic figure of evil and the absence of Christianity. Perhaps because unchristian evil is now represented through the figure of the Jew, Dickens can here introduce some good middle-class English characters: Mr. Brownlow, Mrs. Bedwin, Mr. Grimwig, the Maylies. From the London chapters onward, unchristian evil in the novel is centered in the figure of the Jew.

Much has been said over the years about the way the characterization of Fagin draws on the traditions of antisemitism.⁷

Fagin is diabolical, first seen grasping a pitchfork on which he is toasting sausages, hunched over a fire. He is an evil corrupter of children and a poisoner, he is scheming, miserly, dishonest, and willing to turn his associates in to be hanged when it is to his advantage to do so. He is subhuman, creeping along “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” (132; ch. 19). And throughout this repellent characterization, Fagin is repeatedly referred to, even in the 1867 revision, as “the Jew.”

A few other aspects of Fagin's characterization that also draw on antisemitic stereotypes have not been given as much attention by critics. For instance, Sikes comments that Fagin has been known to swallow coins surreptitiously to keep them away from his associates (105). Here Dickens commingles the idea of the Jew as obscenely money loving and the idea of the Jew as filthy: presumably Fagin searches through his excrement to retrieve these coins. Fagin is also represented as part of a mysteriously interconnected Jewish underworld. He secretly communicates with the minor Jewish character Barney (who speaks through his nose, in stereotypical fashion). And when Oliver has his cast-off clothes sold to a Jewish old clothes dealer, Fagin learns immediately where he is, as if all the Jews in London have an almost supernatural connection with one another, forming a sort of cabal.

But despite the many aspects of Fagin's characterization that derive from the antisemitic tradition, it is also true that Fagin is charismatic and perversely appealing. Steven Marcus observes that Dickens uses the phrase “a profound attraction of repulsion” to describe his reaction when, as a boy, he was taken on a walk through the criminal district of London. “This phrase,” Marcus aptly notes, “fairly suggests something of Dickens's attitude toward Fagin” (369). A mixture of fascination and disgust is evident in Dickens's representation of the Jew. Fagin provides Oliver with a home, a community, and appetizing food. Fagin speaks kindly to Oliver when he arrives, and protects him against the other boys' attempts to pick his pockets and their rough teasing. In some respects, the treatment Oliver receives at Fagin's hands is far better than what he received at the hands of the nominal Christians of the novel's opening chapters, and this contrast conveys an implicit rebuke to Dickens's fellow Englishmen and women: Christians though they are, Oliver Twist implies, they have become worse than the Jew.

Dickens mentioned to Mrs. Davis, in his own defense against the charge of antisemitism, that, although the wicked Fagin is a Jew, all the other wicked characters in the novel are Christians. Unlike the evil Christian characters in the novel's opening chapters, however, the Jew is not a subject of the narrator's comic treatment (dark though the comedy is), but is instead a figure of terror and loathing. There is plenty of comedy, and comedy pointedly involved in social criticism, throughout the section of the novel treating Fagin's gang. But although comedy circles around Fagin, Fagin himself is not a comic subject. This absence of comedy creates a coolness at the center of the warmth surrounding Fagin.

Dickens exercises a good deal of comic wit on all the members of the gang of thieves other than Fagin himself. For instance, when the prostitutes Bet and Nancy come to call at Fagin's on Oliver's first morning, Oliver thinks of them as “young ladies,” and, the narrator comments, “Being remarkably free and agreeable in their manners, Oliver thought them very nice girls indeed. As there is no doubt they were” (70; ch. 9). Oliver is of course comically wrong to see Bet and Nancy as young ladies, and they would never be seen by respectable people as “nice girls.” Dickens uses Oliver's humorous misperception, however, not to mock the girls for their immorality, but to express sympathy for them and a sense of shared humanity: in a broader and more humane sense than the one Dickens's respectable readers are likely to employ, “there is no doubt they were” nice girls. And when the Dodger, after stealing the handkerchief, himself joins in the pursuit of Oliver as the thief, Dickens comments that, “Although Oliver had been brought up by philosophers, he was not theoretically acquainted with the beautiful axiom that self-preservation is the first law of nature” (73; ch. 10). Here Dickens's humor, although mocking the Dodger's amoral self-centeredness, cuts primarily against the “philosophers” who created and justify the Poor Laws, by equating them with pickpockets, who take from others in order to aggrandize themselves. Charley Bates is also constantly the subject of Dickens humor, when he names him “Master Bates,” suggesting, from a nineteenth-century perspective, the self-wasting and unhealthy sexuality that is the consequence of the premature initiations of childhood poverty.⁸

Dickens suspends the use of this comical name at the moments when he treats Charley Bates with more seriousness, that is, when Charley is mourning the Dodger's capture and imprisonment and when Dickens describes his abandonment of the life of crime at the novel's end. Dickens does not ultimately use the joke to deprive Charley of dignity, as he allows him to retrieve his dignity at these points in the novel, but instead to point to the social failings that produce boys like Charley. Even the horrible Bill Sikes is not beyond the pale of humorous treatment, although not a humor designed to create readerly sympathy or indignation on his behalf: at one point the narrator tells us that he was in a good humor, as evidenced by his not letting out more than four-score oaths during one meal.

But there are no true jokes at Fagin's expense. It is perhaps worth noting here as well that, according to the account of one contemporary observer, when Dickens acted Fagin on stage, comedy was completely absent: “There is nothing comic about him, there is nothing grand or tragic, as in Shylock; he is sordid, mean, avaricious, and revengeful…the Jew fence, crafty and cunning even in his bitter vengeance, is here before us” (qtd. in Stonehouse vi–vii). The closest approach to a joke about Fagin in the novel really turns out to be a joke about Noah Claypole, that aspiring young criminal. Fagin makes a sharp observation about Noah, and, Dickens writes: “The Jew followed up this remark by striking the side of his nose with his right forefinger,–a gesture which Noah attempted to imitate, though not with complete success, in consequence of his own nose not being large enough for the purpose” (284; ch. 42). The joke here turns on stereotypes about large Jewish noses, but the comedy redounds on Noah, who misses his own nose when trying to tap it with his finger. If this little piece of physical comedy were performed on stage, the actor playing Noah, not the actor playing Fagin, would get the laugh. This snub-nosed English boy, despicable though he is, Dickens suggests, is ludicrously foolish to believe himself wily enough to emulate the Jewish criminal mastermind–he simply doesn't have the equipment. Otherwise the only real comedy at Fagin's expense is slapstick: once the Dodger threatens him with his own toasting fork (89; ch. 13) and once Fagin accidentally receives a blow from Mr. Chitling intended for Charley: “it lighted on the chest of the merry old gentleman, and caused him to stagger to the wall, where he stood panting for breath, while Mr. Chitling looked on, in intense dismay” (169; ch. 25). These moments of slapstick do not evoke laughter at Fagin himself, and they are, in their physical violence, predictive of Fagin's violent death. Fagin does not evade Dickens's comedy in the novel because Dickens grants him dignity: he is degraded not by humor but by narrative comments indicating his subhuman status and by his self-abasing humility to Sikes. Dickens's humor is not directed at Fagin simply because he is too terrible for comic treatment.

The chapter that Dickens most thoroughly revised for the 1867 edition was the novel's penultimate one, narrating the events of Fagin's trial and the period leading up to his hanging. Dickens edited out nearly every use of the term “the Jew,” instead substituting Fagin's name or a pronoun, and even changing the chapter title from “The Jew's Last Night Alive” to “Fagin's Last Night Alive.” But what Dickens did not, and really could not, edit out was the novel's juxtaposition of the Jew with the Christianity that he has rejected and the suggestion of his consequent damnation. The juxtaposition of the damned Jew with spurned Christianity is at the heart of this disturbingly powerful chapter.

Yet this chapter is also the only one in which we enter into Fagin's head for many pages, and at first this choice of narrative perspective aligns us sympathetically with Fagin. Robert Garis writes persuasively of the account of Fagin's mental processes at his trial that while another novelist, such as George Eliot, might have “implicated us in…[an] inner drama of remorse and fear, Dickens's guess about Fagin's state of mind seems at once more truthful and more generous to Fagin” (60). The wandering course of Fagin's thoughts feels immediately convincing, recognizable:

Because every reader's mind must have worked like this at one time or another, magnifying trivial details into vivid significance at moments of emotional intensity, the passage draws us in toward Fagin, and makes the trial that throws him into such a state feel brutal and inhuman.

In positioning us inside Fagin's head, Dickens also immediately makes us aware of the way he is the subject of a ruthless and relentless gaze:

In the legal proceedings as Dickens presents them in this chapter, Fagin has almost no voice. The Jew is the silent object of scrutiny, gazed at, interpreted, judged, condemned, unable to voice his own perspective in reply. The same might be said of Jews as represented in Dickens's novel, and Dickens for a moment seems to be aware of this parallel. As the chapter continues, Dickens draws our attention to Fagin's status as a represented object: Is Dickens's own representation of the Jew “like”? For the flicker of a moment here Dickens calls into question the accuracy of his own representation of the Jew, reminding us that the Jew might have his own point of view on that matter.

But as the chapter progresses, Dickens gives us fewer glimpses of Fagin's consciousness. In our last moment inside his head, we hear Fagin counting the strikings of the clock, thinking “at eleven–” (354; ch. 52) and there the workings of Fagin's mind break off. By the chapter's ending, Fagin has become virtually inhuman, “with a countenance more like that of a snared beast than the face of a man” (355; ch. 52). As the chapter progresses, and Fagin moves from trial to judgement to death, Fagin becomes progressively less human, and more and more a character used in his symbolic capacity–as a Jew who has put himself beyond the reach of Christian redemption.

Fagin's last day alive is, and Dickens urges the recognition of this fact on us, a Sunday. There is one member of Fagin's gang who has by this point in the novel undergone a moral transformation, and she has done so, significantly, on a Sunday. Sunday is the day of the week that Nancy appoints for her meeting with Rose on London Bridge to help Oliver, and, through this decision and this meeting, Nancy at the last possible moment achieves her own moral redemption–in the last quarter hour of the last hour of that Sunday. But for Fagin Sunday has no meaning, offers no redemption. “Saturday night,” Dickens writes. “He had only one night more to live. And as he thought of this, the day broke–Sunday. It was not until the night of this last awful day, that a withering sense of his helpless, desperate state came in its full intensity upon his blighted soul” (353; ch. 52). To the Jewish Fagin, that Sunday is not, as it should be, a day of awe, but only an awful day, his last day alive. From his cell, Fagin listens to the striking of the clocks, as they tell the hours he has left to live, and (in the original version) Dickens writes: “Other watchers are glad to hear the church-clocks strike, for they tell of life and coming day. To the Jew, they brought despair. The boom of every iron bell came laden with the one, deep, hollow sound–Death” (353; ch. 52). Even as edited to read “to him, they brought despair” in the 1867 version (see Tillotson 361), Dickens's juxtaposition of the condemned Jew with the sound of the church clocks, which should mean life and hope, clearly indicates that he is stone-deaf to the possibility of Christian mercy.

Earlier, Fagin and Sikes, enraged with Nancy for going over to the other side, had looked at each other with a fire in their eyes “which could not be mistaken” (315; ch. 47). It is hardly necessary for Sikes to have just uttered one of his stage curses, “Hell's fire!” (315; ch. 47) to indicate to the reader what sort of fire that is. In this chapter, Dickens clearly indicates that hellfire is beginning to burn Fagin's body even before death: “His red hair hung down upon his bloodless face; his beard was torn, and twisted into knots; his eyes shone with a terrible light; his unwashed flesh, crackled with the fever that burnt him up” (353–54; ch. 52).⁹

Lisa Rodensky discusses the legal ambiguity of the charges on which Fagin is brought to trial: he is an “accessory before the fact,” Kags, the returned transport, notes, but to which crime? He cannot be tried for Sikes's murder of Nancy, because Sikes is already dead by the time of Fagin's trial, and an accessory before the fact can only be tried after the principal has been tried and convicted (Rodensky 48–56). The ambiguity of the legal charge on which Fagin is brought to trial makes Fagin's trial and judgement, Rodensky writes, “feel all the more like a matter of who Fagin is and not what he has done” (Rodensky 49). Fagin is condemned to death not because of Nancy's murder itself, but because his role in the novel is to incarnate all that is evil and unchristian. As Mr. Brownlow says to Nancy earlier, in a passage Dickens did not edit, “You must deliver up the Jew” (308; ch. 46). By the end of “Fagin's Last Night Alive,” whatever complexity of response Dickens has evoked toward Fagin earlier, he has become the damned, soulless Jew, grovelling like a caged animal, his humanity sacrificed to the exigencies of the novel's symbolic structure.

The symbolic purging of the anti-Christian Jew from the English world of the novel leaves Dickens with little need to punish the many English townspeople who have behaved in an unchristian way toward Oliver in the past. Mr. Bumble is the only one who gets a comeuppance, as he is humbled and belittled by his own wife and becomes himself an inmate in the workhouse. He is certainly punished, but his is a comic, rather than a dreadful fate. He is allowed to voice perhaps the most memorable joke in the novel, and this inevitably gains him some readerly sympathy. It is what we might call a wild card joke, evoking amusement, and with amusement the greater degree of sympathy we feel toward humorous characters, from both those male readers who would like to exert greater control over women and those female readers who resist such control. Mr. Brownlow tells Bumble that legally he will be held to be more guilty than his wife of wrongdoing, for:

The events that lead to the symbolic purging, by means of Fagin, of the anti-Christian forces in the novel, also allow Dickens to create, at the novel's end, a distinctly Christian English village that stands in counterpoint to the flawed English town of the novel's opening. Part of what makes that village wholesome is that it is in the country, away from urban corruption, and part of what makes it wholesome is that it has the Church at its moral center. Other Dickens novels end with a similar retreat to a rural setting; here what Dickens specifically emphasizes about the rural village is its Christianity. To live in this village, with his wife and mother, with Oliver and Mr. Brownlow nearby, Harry Maylie gives up his vaguely delineated aspirations for worldly prosperity and success. He also gives up his aspirations to participate in the national politics, which Dickens represents as contaminated by false ideas of virtue, as in that world Rose would be held up to shame because her sister gave birth to an illegitimate child. Instead, Harry chooses to marry Rose and retreat to Dickens's alternative vision of a purified, Christian England: “there are smiling fields and waving trees in England's richest county; and by one village church–mine, Rose, my own–there stands a rustic dwelling which you can make me prouder of, than all the hopes I have renounced, a thousandfold” (349; ch. 51).

The last sentences in the novel take us into that village church and leave us there. Cruikshank created two illustrations for the last chapters, one of “Fagin in the condemned Cell” and one of Rose Maylie and Oliver in the church. The two illustrations are visually parallel, as Janet Larson notes, with a stained glass window replacing the barred window of Fagin's dark prison cell (Larson 51),¹¹

and in the parallel Cruikshank aptly suggests the connection between's Fagin's death and the restored Christianity of the novel's conclusion. Dickens concludes the novel by telling his readers that Oliver and Rose remembered the lessons of adversity “in mercy to others and mutual love”: “without strong affection, and humanity of heart, and gratitude to that Being whose code is Mercy, and whose great attribute is Benevolence to all things that breathe, true happiness can never be attained” (360; ch. 53). The final image of the novel is of a white marble tablet on the wall of the church bearing “but one word, –‘Agnes!’,” the name of Oliver's dead mother, who died in giving birth to him, her illegitimate child. Dickens concludes the novel, “I believe that the shade of Agnes sometimes hovers round that solemn nook. I believe it none the less, because that nook is in a Church, and she was weak and erring” (360; ch. 53).

The rhetorical moves of this ending are in some ways quite daring. The word “Agnes” on the white tablet in the church at the novel's end stands in symbolic counterpoint to the death of the Jew. Agnes's name alludes to one of the messianic titles of Jesus, used of him by John the Baptist, “Agnus Dei,” or the “Lamb of God,” who takes away the sins of the world. For Dickens to picture this woman, whom most others of his day would have seen as hopelessly sinful and fallen, as an image of Jesus is startling, but is also consistent with the sacredness Dickens sees in the intact home and family. The family is violated in this novel alike by the unchristian laws of the workhouse, which separate husbands and wives, and by the Jew, Fagin, who makes “the cold, wet, dirty streets” Nancy's home, as she screams in her agonized outcry against him (116; ch. 16). But here Dickens figures a redemptive Christianity through the image of a suffering woman, using a mother's gentle, selfless love for her child, the love at the heart of the home, as an image of Christian mercy. Rose and Oliver are safely restored to families as the novel comes to an end, as Rose is married and Oliver is adopted. Then, as true Christians, Rose and Oliver learn from suffering to extend mercy and benevolence “to all things that breathe.” This vision of an English village, centered around a church, whose inhabitants practice a true Christianity, characterized by mercy and benevolence toward the poor, is the corrective vision Dickens offers to the self-serving, unchristian behavior that he so scathingly represents earlier in the novel.

It is ironic, however, that, in order to arrive at this corrective vision of mercy and benevolence, Dickens needs to exercise the death penalty against the Jew, and, what is more, to represent the Jew, ultimately, as hopelessly damned. Even the unregenerate Bill Sikes, who brutally murders the woman who loves him, is a character whom Dickens came to see as not unreachable by Christian mercy. J. Hillis Miller observes that when Dickens revised the preface he appended to the novel in 1841 for the 1856 edition, he changed the language he used to describe Sikes. In 1841 Dickens had termed Sikes “utterly and irredeemably bad”; for the 1856 edition he changed the description to read “utterly and incurably bad.” He evidently made this change, Miller notes: “to remove the theological implications of ‘irredeemably.’ Dickens did not want to deny God's power to redeem even those who are apparently hopelessly evil” (Miller 67). But Dickens did not extend this vision of accessibility to redemption to the Jew. Despite Dickens's “attraction of repulsion” toward Fagin, in the novel's ending Fagin must be unable to hear the message of hope in the striking of the church clocks; he must experience hellfire in the feverish burning of his flesh. It was necessary for the symbolic structure of the novel that the Jew, the representative of all that is at odds with Christianity, be consigned to damnation.

Dickens did not eradicate the antisemitism from Oliver Twist in his revision of 1867 because the antisemitism could not be eradicated from the book. The antisemitism is inextricably implicated in the book's great strength, its compelling argument, through Christian rhetoric, for a recognition of the humanity of the poor. Dickens does not seem, as Gold notes, to have been particularly interested in Jews at all (Gold 51), or, I believe, in their real presence or experience in the English world of his day. This is, however, characteristic of most instances of racial prejudice: what Dickens was interested in was what he used the Jews to signify in his own mind and in the rather hermetic logic of his own text. Dickens's use of the figure of the Jew in this novel is consistent with his dislike of the Old Testament in favor of the New: he insisted that the women of Urania Cottage (the house he helped to create for former prostitutes) were to hear “the New Testament” without “injudicious use of the Old” and he urged his children in his will “humbly to guide themselves by the teaching of the New Testament in its broad spirit” (Larson 319 n. 33; Sanders, Resurrectionist x). Yet, despite Dickens's known dislike of the Old Testament, and despite the seeming viciousness of the representation of Jews through Fagin, the antisemitism of the novel does not strike me as very deeply felt. It is almost possible to believe that Dickens could have been completely unaware of it.¹²

Dickens seems to have been using an available rhetoric, antisemitism, as a vivid and powerful part of the novel's structure of Christian meaning, for his own social ends, namely, to improve the treatment of the English poor. His strong feelings and convictions on that subject, together with his immense literary talent, produced a great novel. Unfortunately, precisely because the negative representation of the Jew is so implicated in Dickens's passionate social critique, it is a novel from which the antisemitism is inextricable.