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

“Some of the author’s friends cried, ‘Lookee, gentlemen, 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.”—FIELDING.

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.

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.

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. 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, 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 Voltaire says, the right to command a couple of thousand men or so and to affront death at their head.