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.