Fagin is back in the news. The English musical play, Oliver!, which is scheduled to open in New York next season, will almost certainly stir up the same kind of protest from various Jewish groups that the film of Oliver Twist did a decade ago. Alec Guinness’s lisping, asthmatic, and vaguely homosexual Fagin of the film has in the newest version apparently been displaced by an out-and-out East End type. Insofar as protest against such representations is directed against the implicit equation they set up between certain conventional Jewish characteristics and moral malignity, it is of course justified. Yet we should note that the dramatic interpretations of Fagin have always, in some degree, been radical departures from the Fagin of the novel. While Dickens was still writing Oliver Twist, a theatrical pirate made an adaptation of it which Dickens went to see. It was so offensively bad that in the middle of the first scene the young novelist laid himself down on the floor of his box and never rose until the curtain dropped.
Nevertheless, there is some reason behind all this confusion about how to interpret Fagin on the stage, for he is one of Dickens’s most puzzling characters. Much has been written about him, though very little light has been cast. Indeed, one of the most recent and most intelligent discussions of the subject—in Edgar Rosenberg’s excellent book, From Shylock to Svengali—ends with the writer throwing up his hands in frustration. “But how can one account for Fagin?” Mr. Rosenberg asks, making reference to how, given what we know of Dickens’s experience, Fagin should have come about. In order to track down these “curious processes,” he believes, “one should have to command some ultimate psychology.” Mr. Rosenberg may be right, but I do think that something at least can be done even without the help of such “ultimate” assurances.
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It has often been remarked that although Fagin—with his “villainous-looking and repulsive face . . . obscured by a quantity of matted red hair,” and his “greasy flannel gown”—is got up in the traditional habit of the stage Jew, Judas, and devil, there is otherwise nothing particularly Jewish about him. This formulation may not be entirely exact, and it has been alternatively suggested that Fagin is a renegade Jew. In any event, when we first see him, he is cooking sausages for his boys, and it is clear throughout that such matters as the dietary laws and the customs of the Jewish community mean nothing to him. In fact, on the eve of his execution, “Venerable men of his own persuasion had come to pray beside him, but he had driven them away with curses. They renewed their charitable efforts, and he beat them off.” Furthermore, he does not even speak with an accent or in any particular dialect—unless it be the thieves’ cant into which he, like his non-Jewish associates, often drops. This is all the more pointed because the one other Jew in Oliver Twist, Barney, the boy-of-all-work at The Cripples, speaks with the pronounced nasality which was apparently characteristic of London Jews during the 18th and 19th centuries. So far as speech is concerned, Fagin resembles no one so much as his opposite and counterpart, Oliver Twist, whose own speech—the most improbable and purebred English—is also symbolic of his alienation from the world in which he finds himself. And indeed, from the point of view of that “respectable” society which had recently created the New Poor Law of 1834, Oliver Twist—a bastard, an orphan, and a workhouse child—and Fagin—a vicious criminal—were alike if not identical. Under the new Malthusian dispensation, the English poor were to be treated so harshly and punitively that they were to have been willing to do almost anything rather than throw themselves on the tender mercies of the state. Poverty was at last tantamount to crime, and the new “unions” or workhouses soon came to be universally known as Bastilles. At this stage in the development of modern industrial society, the pauper and the criminal were regarded equally as outcasts. Both existed on the periphery of society; at the same time both existed within the shadow of that central and indispensable social institution, the prison—one of the many implications of this being that, in modern society at least, what seems to be marginal and alien can in fact prove to be central and essential, as the history of modern art and literature repeatedly indicates. Both paupers and criminals also existed within their own society or class, and one of the chief imaginative devices in Oliver Twist consists in Dickens’s representation of the values, habits, and structure of ordinary “respectable” society as analogous to those which inform the world of the thieves and the paupers. Oliver and Fagin are at the focus of this remarkable vision. They are symbiotic characters, like Mr. Pickwick and Sam Weller, or Don Quixote and Sancho Panza, or Stephen Dedalus and Leopold Bloom—that is to say, we cannot understand them apart from each other.
But we know something else about Fagin, something anterior to his function in this novel. We know how he got his name. Dickens took it from the name of a boy who played a part in the chief episode of his childhood. Our present purpose requires that we read this immortal story anew.
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Charles Dickens spent most of his childhood in the vicinity of Rochester, where his father, John Dickens, was employed as a clerk in the Navy Pay Office. John Dickens was a vivacious, energetic, garrulous, ambitious, but somehow incompetent man. He aspired particularly to genteel speech and manners, and clearly thought of himself as a rising young man. And with reason, for his parents had been domestic servants. It is also evident that Charles, his second child and oldest son, was his father’s favorite and special object of his pride. Although Charles had been, in John Forster’s words, “a very little and a very sickly boy” who suffered from “attacks of violent spasm which disabled him for any active exertion,” he was a precocious child and gave early evidence of a talent for imaginative play, for reciting and acting and singing little comic songs. His father delighted in his son’s small exertions of talent, and often found occasion to show them off before friends and guests. It was at this time too that John Dickens bought a set of cheap reprints of the classic novels, which his son chanced upon, read, re-read, and re-read again, living in them and impersonating his favorite characters with what was already characteristic intensity. “When I think of it,” he wrote years later, “the picture always arises in my mind of a summer evening, the boys at play in the churchyard, and I sitting on my bed, reading as if for life.” We will return to this memory.
Meanwhile things were not improving for his father. The family kept growing, in that inexorable 19th-century way; and John Dickens, kindly yet improvident, well-meaning but, like Mr. Micawber (who is a partial portrait of him), unable to meet the unyielding demands of the world of money and domestic responsibilities, began to descend the slippery slope of respectability which he had until then been confidently climbing. At the bottom of that decline, of course, gaped the abyss of that special middle-class hell, poverty. Sometime in the latter part of 1822, he was transferred to London, where the family was installed in a little four-room house in Camden Town. And things kept getting worse.
Charles had been attending school in Chatham and apparently expected that his parents would continue his education when they were settled in London, but they did not. It was a cause of undying bitterness to him. As he would write years later:
I know my father to be as kindhearted and generous a man as ever lived in the world. But, in the ease of his temper, and the straitness of his means, he appeared to have utterly lost at this time the idea of educating me at all; and to have utterly put from him the notion that I had any claim upon him, in that regard, whatever. So I degenerated into cleaning his boots of a morning, and my own; and making myself useful in the work of the little house; and looking after my younger brothers and sisters (we were now six in all); and going on such poor errands as arose out of our poor way of living.
Matters continued so for upwards of a year: the family’s fortunes steadily worsened, possessions were sold off (including, at the very outset, the books), schemes for salvation came to nothing, arrest for debt constantly threatened. As for Charles, forgotten amid the general hopelessness and distraction, he was afflicted by the recurrence of his early malady—spasms in the side often accompanied by fever—which had for a time subsided.
The crisis was reached in February 1824, the month of Charles’s twelfth birthday. Within two weeks, he was sent to work and his father was imprisoned for debt. Through the influence of a friendly relation, Charles was employed at a blacking warehouse, at 30 Hungerford Stairs, Strand: his wages were six or seven shillings a week, his hours 8 A.M. to 8 P.M. Edgar Johnson in his biography of Dickens properly reminds us that none of these circumstances were unusual for that time: boys were often sent to work at an earlier age, and the average period of schooling then and even later was something short of two years. What was unusual was that these things were happening to the person who was to become Charles Dickens, though his parents could hardly have been expected to know it. The boy himself, and the man after him, felt utterly violated. When he came to write about the incident twenty-five years later, his bitterness had not staled.
It is wonderful to me how I could have been so easily cast away at such an age. It is wonderful to me, that, even after my descent into the poor little drudge I had been since we came to London, no one had compassion enough on me—a child of singular abilities, quick, eager, delicate, and soon hurt, bodily or mentally—to suggest that something might have been spared, as certainly it might have been, to place me at any common school. . . . No one made any sign. My father and mother were quite satisfied. They could hardly have been more so, if I had been twenty years of age, distinguished at a grammar-school, and going to Cambridge.
Coupled with the emotions of betrayal and desertion were those of social disgrace and humiliation—the young prince suddenly discovers that he may be the swineherd’s son, and not the other way around.
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Eleven days after Charles began to work at Warren’s Blacking, his father was arrested; his last words addressed to his sobbing son as he entered the gates of the Marshalsea was that the sun had set upon him forever. As he heard this the boy felt that his heart was really breaking. Soon after John Dickens entered prison, Mrs. Dickens and her four younger children moved in with him. (Bankrupt as they were, they retained a little servant girl whom they had gotten from the Chatham workhouse: they were not, one must recall, paupers. These monstrous and pathetic distinctions are treated with incomparable mastery in Little Dorrit.) Charles was left to live alone on the outside, an outcast of freedom, a “small Cain” as he called himself. He was able to visit his parents and family on Sundays, but for some time he had to live without any “assistance whatever . . . from Monday morning until Saturday night. No advice, no counsel, no encouragement, no consolation, no support, from any one that I can call to mind, so help me God.” Left to shift for himself, his sense of abandonment and humiliation often seemed to border upon despair; he later thought it a miracle that he had been spared to survive. “I know that I worked from morning to night, with common men and boys, a shabby child. . . . I know that I lounged about the streets, insufficiently and unsatisfactorily fed. I know that, but for the mercy of God, I might easily have been, for any care that was taken of me, a little robber or a little vagabond.” If the impossible could happen, and Oliver Twist grow up into a man, this is what he would say—provided, of course, that he were to retain his virtue of telling the truth.
After John Dickens had been in prison for three months, his mother, the former domestic servant, died and left her son a legacy large enough to secure his release. The family was reunited, but nothing was done about Charles. “I had the same wanderings about the streets as I used to have, and was just as solitary and self-dependent as before; but I had not the same difficulty in merely living. I never however heard a word of being taken away, or of being otherwise than quite provided for.” In any event, only a chance quarrel between his father and the relation who had gotten the work for Charles brought his drudgery to an end. The conditions of this quarrel we shall recur to, but we may note here that it was at his father’s insistence that Charles left the warehouse.
Dickens could never forget the entire episode, but neither could he in certain senses confront it. For years he literally avoided the spot on which the warehouse stood. Moreover, this period of his childhood remained an absolute secret to everyone except his close friend Forster, whom Dickens allowed to read the autobiographical fragment, written sometime in the late 1840’s, from which I have been quoting. Although this remarkable document speaks for itself—and in its human impressiveness tends to make most comment seem trifling—if we recall that it was written by the greatest comic genius who ever lived, our sense of the nature and origins of comedy may be enlarged. Perhaps Plato was right when, at the end of The Symposium, he asserted through Socrates that the genius of comedy is the same as that of tragedy.
But the document we have been discussing was also written by a man who had become the most famous, successful, and adulated novelist of his time, who wrote it at the height of his fame and in the fullness of his powers. “My whole nature was so penetrated with the grief and humiliation of such considerations,” he nevertheless stated, “that even now, famous and caressed and happy, I often forget in my dreams that I have a dear wife and children; even that I am a man; and wander desolately back to that time of my life.” Though he might keep that time a dark secret even from his family—and his reasons for doing so were complex—it was never far from his mind. Indeed, it figures in some central way in every novel he wrote; and we cannot understand the creative thrust of his life without taking into account his developing attitudes toward this episode, as we find them successively transmuted in novel after novel. I am not suggesting this as, so to speak, a “key” to Dickens. There is no such thing for an artist, especially a great one, just as there is no single way of regarding or understanding a work of art. Nevertheless, this episode, and Dickens’s extreme ambivalence toward it—he was at once virtually unable to speak about it and obsessively drawn to it—became one of the foci or gathering places of his creative impulses. It provides us, furthermore, with an unsurpassable instance of how in a great genius the “impersonal” achievement of art is inseparable from an engagement on the artist’s part with the deepest, most personal stresses of his experience.
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II
And now to Fagin. When Charles first went to work at the ware-house, he was installed in a small recess in the counting-house, a privilege of class and relation. His work was “to cover the pots of paste-blacking” with two kinds of paper, then tie them round with a string, clip the paper close and neat, and paste a printed label on each pot. “Two or three boys were kept at similar duty downstairs on similar wages. One of them came up, in a ragged apron and a paper cap, on the first Monday morning, to show me the trick of using the string and tying the knot. His name was Bob Fagin; and I took the liberty of using his name, long afterwards, in Oliver Twist.” So casual and off-hand a revelation of what must by nature be a highly charged fact is itself evidence of the high charge. It hardly requires the command of an “ultimate psychology” to see that there is no great distance between Bob Fagin’s induction of Charles on his first day of work into the secrets of wrapping and tying, and the wonderful scene in which Fagin teaches class in elementary and advanced pickpocketing. His methods are admirably progressive: strictly learning by doing. The boys are rewarded for proficiency, and even Oliver, pure, innocent, and until that moment perfectly isolated in misery, is so charmed by the “game,” and by Fagin’s superb imitation of the victim that for the first time in the novel, he laughs, and is happy, and feels at home. Immediately thereafter, he has his own first lesson, and does quite well at it, another tribute to Fagin’s intuitive skills as an educator. Never try to instruct a child who seems unhappy: neither Freud nor John Dewey can be held accountable for communicating this diabolic wisdom to our age. The Devil himself has been at it all along.
When Charles started work it was proposed that his relative, who was employed in the counting-house, would teach him something—something more “academic,” that is, than fancy wrapping and tying—during the dinner-hour. But this sad little idea, along with Charles’s privileged segregation in the counting-house recess, soon proved incompatible with the conduct of business, and “it was not long, before Bob Fagin and I, and another boy [called Poll Green], . . . worked generally, side by side. Bob Fagin was an orphan, and lived with his brother-in-law, a waterman.” Poll Green’s father worked at Drury-Lane theater, and Poll’s little sister, “did imps in the pantomimes.” All innocent and pleasant enough in tone, and so it must have seemed to those who worked with or observed the small twelve-year-old briskly performing among the pots and paste.
But it did not seem that way from the inside, and Dickens’s very next sentence reveals in stark dialectical terms the other side of the reality he was experiencing.
No words can express the secret agony of my soul as I sunk into this companion-ship; compared these everyday associates with those of my happier childhood; and felt my early hopes of growing up to be a learned and distinguished man, crushed in my breast. The deep remembrance of the sense I had of being utterly neglected and hopeless; of the shame I felt in my position; of the misery it was to my young heart to believe that, day by day, what I had learned, and thought, and delighted in, and raised my fancy and my emulation up by, was passing away from me, never to be brought back any more; cannot be written.
These are certainly the emotions of Oliver Twist, but, the reader is entitled to ask, what “happier childhood” did the workhouse orphan, unlike his creator, have to look back to? We will, I think, be able presently to account for this discrepancy.
Nevertheless, Charles held a special “station” at the warehouse and was treated “as one upon a different footing from the rest.” At the same time, he
never said, to man or boy, how it was that I came to be there, or gave the least indication of being sorry that I was there. That I suffered in secret, and that I suffered exquisitely, no one ever knew but I. . . . But I kept my own counsel, and I did my work. I knew from the first, that if I could not do my work as well as any of the rest, I could not hold myself above slight and contempt. I soon became at least as expeditious and as skillful with my hands, as either of the other boys. Though perfectly familiar with them, my conduct and manners were different enough from theirs to place a space between us. They, and the men, always spoke of me as “the young gentleman.”
Two of the older men occasionally called him Charles, but “it was mostly when we were very confidential, and when I had made some efforts to entertain them over our work with the results of some of the old readings, which were fast perishing out of my mind. Poll Green uprose once, and rebelled against the ‘young gentleman’ usage; but Bob Fagin settled him speedily.”
Amidst the pathos and ambiguity of emotion in such passages, the myriad analogies between this experience and Oliver Twist are unmistakable. The differences are equally informing: in Oliver Twist it is Fagin and the Dodger who do the entertaining, who provide the gaiety amid the novel’s darkness; in real life it was the deserted, neglected, suffering child—that is to say the latent novelist, the person who created Fagin and had Fagin within him—who did the entertaining. Oliver Twist suffers exquisitely and in public, and would have become the world’s most incompetent pickpocket had he ever permitted himself to really learn; in life, the suffering was concealed, the dexterity was open and pronounced (in later years Dickens was a brilliant amateur magician) and aggressive. Oliver tells us what Dickens suffered passively; but Dickens also had Jack Hawkins, the Artful Dodger, master pickpocket and comic genius hidden within him.
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But there is that line about Bob Fagin cutting short Poll Green’s rebellion against the status of “the young gentleman.” In the novel Fagin’s role is to be tempter and corrupter; his intention is to make Oliver into a thief and so deprive him of his birthright, for he is in fact the son of a gentleman and will inherit his father’s estate “only on the stipulation that in his minority he should never have stained his name with any public act of dishonor, meanness, cowardice, or wrong.” That Oliver knows nothing of this until the very end is characteristic of the novel’s miraculous and parabolic machinery, and also serves to remind us that in writing it Dickens had more things in mind than an imaginative recreation of his autobiography. Yet Fagin’s method—his style of tempting and corrupting Oliver—is, at first, to use friendliness, warmth, and protectiveness; the escaped workhouse orphan, “a poor houseless, wandering boy, without a friend to help him, or a roof to shelter his head,” isolated and alienated in an alienating world, finds his first shelter and affection in the person of “the merry old gentleman.” This very affection, the thing Oliver most wants and needs, is at the same time the greatest threat to his moral existence. To trust in it and to return it would be to betray his unknown father and his unknown birthright. And so young Charles must have felt about Bob Fagin’s benevolent and protective interferences on his behalf; the paradox, of course, was that Bob was acting to preserve “the young gentleman’s” status, while Fagin’s amicable devices have the opposite purpose. Furthermore, friendship with Bob Fagin, the brother-in-law of a waterman, would in Charles’s condition have been equivalent to an admission that his lostness and desolation were not merely real but somehow permanent.
This acute and profound ambivalence received fuller expression in the course of Charles’s experience at the warehouse. Cheerful, skillful, and resourceful as he was and strove to be, his inner sufferings could not be wholly denied, and he was seized repeatedly with his “old disorder.” On the occasion of a particularly bad attack, he says,
Bob Fagin was very good to me. . . . I suffered such excruciating pain that time, that they made a temporary bed of straw . . . and I rolled on the floor, and Bob filled empty blacking-bottles with hot water, and applied relays of them to my side, half the day.
Toward evening he began to feel better.
But Bob (who was much bigger and older than I) did not like the idea of my going home alone, and took me under his protection. I was too proud to let him know about the prison; and after making several efforts to get rid of him, to all of which Bob Fagin in his goodness was deaf, shook hands with him on the steps of a house near Southwark-bridge on the Surrey side, making believe that I lived there. As a finishing piece of reality in case of his looking back, I knocked at the door, I recollect, and asked, when the woman opened it, if that was Mr. Robert Fagin’s house.
Oliver Twist, the workhouse boy, is the son of a gentleman; and it is Fagin’s task to prevent him from discovering that secret and entering upon that salvation. In life, young Charles Dickens was the son of a gentleman who was at the time inhabiting comfortable but close apartments in the Marshalsea prison; and it is he who keeps the secret from Fagin. The shame of admitting this secret is, in part, transformed in the novel into Oliver’s incorruptibility and innocence, his instinctive repugnance for lying or stealing: so strangely are some of our virtues derived. In both instances, however, the danger is connected with a companionship or affection which is at once needed and intolerable; Bob Fagin’s protectiveness is transformed into Fagin’s treacherous maternal care.
This episode reverberates in many other ways in Oliver Twist—the knocking at the door, for example, turns up properly transformed. Fagin’s final grand plot to destroy Oliver is to send him into the country as Bill Sikes’s assistant in a breaking-and-entering job. Terrorized, Oliver goes along, though inwardly resolved to alarm the family. However, he is immediately discovered, is shot in the dark, and hauled back out. The robbers flee carrying the wounded boy but are forced to leave him in a ditch. Oliver lies there insensible till dawn; then he rouses himself and begins to “stumble onward, he knew not whither.” He staggers on, sees a house; it happens to be the one broken into the night before; terrified, he has neither strength to fly nor a place to fly to. He makes it to the door, knocks, and collapses; he has committed himself to fate. Who lives in this house? The Maylies—who turn out to be his own true family. So, an innocent lie, told to protect a poor boy’s pride and shame from the meddling of a kindly and curious Bob Fagin, and sealed by a knock on some stranger’s door, turns out in the novel to be the poor boy’s deliverance: the innocent lie becomes Oliver’s coercion into the burglary; the knock on the door which permitted him to keep his father’s imprisonment a secret becomes the knock on the door which leads him to his family, his father, and his identity. Oliver Twist endures his trial, discovers who his father is, and is confirmed in his identity by the discovery—the “parish Boy’s progress” ends in the knowledge that he is the son of a gentleman, something few readers by that point would dare to doubt. Charles Dickens, “the young gentleman,” kept his father’s disgrace a secret from Bob Fagin, and was confirmed in the concealment; that refusal to betray his father—and his father in himself—even as he, young Charles, felt betrayed and abandoned by him, is one of his chief sources of strength as a novelist. And the conflict from which this strength emerges—his relation to his father—supplies what I believe to be the master theme of Dickens’s novels.
Yet if we return to this incident from Dickens’s young life, we are struck by what he called the “finishing piece of reality,” his knocking at the door and asking “if that was Mr. Robert Fagin’s house.” It is a fine piece of audacity and presence of mind: certainly it is something we cannot imagine Oliver Twist ever doing. But we can imagine the Artful Dodger or Fagin—if he could get away with it—doing it; in fact, it is precisely the kind of thing that Fagin puts Nancy up to do in order to recapture Oliver. The ruse that Charles invented to escape from Bob Fagin’s friendly clutches is transformed in Oliver Twist into one of the devices that Fagin commands against the orphan boy.
We see, then, that Dickens’s recreation in the novel of his boyhood experience has a tolerable inner coherence. In particular, his mixed attitudes toward Bob Fagin and Fagin seem up to a point remarkably congruent. When as a small boy, Dickens told Forster, he was taken for a walk through a criminal district of London, he felt “a pro-found attraction of repulsion.” This phrase fairly suggests something of Dickens’s attitude toward Fagin, and toward Bob Fagin too, although it might be more precise to say that toward Bob he felt the reverse, a profound repulsion of attraction. Yet if we could do no more than demonstrate that Dickens had transposed what he felt about Bob Fagin onto the figure of Fagin, we would not have advanced very far in our understanding of the fictional Fagin. We might of course go through Oliver Twist in tedious detail, exhibiting how in literally scores of places Dickens was imaginatively alluding to events from his boyhood. But this would in itself bring us no nearer to a solution of the problem. Bob Fagin, after all, was a boy, however much bigger, older, and tougher than Charles he might have seemed. Fagin is a terrible old man, Jew, devil, demon, and master-criminal. The difference remains large.
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III
Bob Fagin is mentioned once more, toward the end of the autobiographical fragment. Sometime during Charles’s period of employment, but after his father had been released from prison, Warren’s moved their premises. Several windows of the new building looked out on a busy street. “Bob Fagin and I,” Dickens writes, “had attained to great dexterity in tying up the pots, I forget how many we could do, in five minutes.” For the sake of light, the two boys worked together at one of the windows, “and we were so brisk at it, that the people used to stop and look in. Sometimes there would be quite a little crowd there. I saw my father coming in at the door one day when we were very busy, and I wondered how he could bear it.” This is a puzzling little scene. It seems at once flat and over-intense; it is characterized by extreme, if unarticulated, ambivalence: pride in dexterity and shame over the work; pleasure in skillful performance before a crowd or “audience,” yet anxiety and humiliation at being observed or seen; and of course an utter mélange of feelings about being seen by his father. Young Charles had hidden from Bob Fagin the fact that his father’s home, and thus in a sense his own, was a prison; now, his father came publicly to his son’s place of degradation and saw him exposed to full view in the company of Bob Fagin.
The sense one has of emotions so intense as to be almost incoherent is strengthened by what follows. Dickens’s father apparently “could bear it,” at least for a while. But “at last, one day,” he writes, “my father, and the relative so often mentioned, quarrelled.” It was by letter, which Charles carried, and the quarrel, he says, was very fierce. “It was about me. It may have had some backward reference, in part, for anything I know, to my employment at the window.” This is the purest conjecture, as Dickens himself admits; but we should note that he is connecting this climactic scene with the previous one about being seen in the window. All Dickens was “certain of,” he says, is that he gave his relative the note; soon after (how long? the same day? next week?) the relative told him that he was “very much insulted about me,” and that Charles would have to leave the warehouse. At that the boy broke down: “I cried very much, partly because it was so sudden, and partly because in his anger he was violent about my father, though gentle to me.” And then, “with relief so strange that it was like oppression, I went home.” The incoherence of this memory, along with Dickens’s unsupported but wishful association of it with the scene at the window, lead me to suggest that the entire incident and Dickens’s memory of it are what is known in psychoanalysis as “over-determined”: a multiplicity of meanings and motives converge upon an event, charging its separate elements with significances which refer elsewhere and to other things. This episode of young Charles, Bob Fagin, John Dickens, and the window has, I believe, the character of what is called a “screen memory.” But in order to discover what it is screening we must turn back to the novel.
There are two passages in Oliver Twist which have always struck me as being out of place in the sense that they do not emerge out of any inner logic or necessity of the story but seem to have been written by Dickens because what he was about to describe had some special private resonance. In both Dickens ceases momentarily to speak as the impersonal narrator and addresses the reader in a personal, essayistic, and almost musing voice; both act as preludes to a scene between Oliver and Fagin; both are connected with an experience of sleep; both also contain “illogical” or “false” details in the sense that something mysterious happens in each which Dickens fails subsequently to clear up. They are in fact the same scene, though they are separated by two hundred pages, and each contains elements which augment or complete the other.
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The first of these scenes occurs on the morning after Oliver has first been introduced to Fagin’s den. The boys have gone out, Fagin is boiling coffee for breakfast, and Oliver is on the point of waking, but is still half-asleep. Dickens goes on to describe this condition:
There is a drowsy state, between sleeping and waking, when you dream more in five minutes with your eyes half open, and yourself half conscious of everything that is passing around you, than you would in five nights with your eyes fast closed, and your senses wrapt in perfect unconsciousness. At such times, a mortal knows just enough of what his mind is doing to form some glimmering conception of its mighty powers, its bounding from earth and spurning time and space, when freed from the restraint of its corporeal associate.
Dickens is representing what is now called a “hypnagogic” phenomenon, that condition between sleep and waking when the conscious mind and its censor relax and unconscious processes and impulses become more than usually accessible. Oliver is in that half-state, apparently asleep and yet able to see and hear Fagin. Fagin looks at him, calls him by name, and when the boy does not answer, locks the door, draws forth from the trap-door “a small box” which he lays on the table and then takes out of it gold watches, “sparkling with jewels,” and “rings, brooches, bracelets, and other articles of jewellery,” while he chuckles with pleasure over his late cohorts who hanged without “peaching” on him. He then takes out another trinket which seems to have “some very minute inscription on it,” which he pores over “long and earnestly.” Suddenly—
his bright dark eyes, which had been staring vacantly before him fell on Oliver’s face; the boy’s eyes were fixed on his in mute curiosity; and although the recognition was only for an instant—for the briefest space of time that can possibly be conceived—it was enough to show the old man that he had been observed. He closed the lid of the box with a loud crash; and laying his hand on a bread knife which was on the table, started furiously up.
He questions Oliver about what he has seen, and whether he was awake an hour ago. Oliver, in his stupefaction or his innocence, has seen nothing or understands nothing of what he has seen, and the scene ends inconsequentially.
The second scene takes place two hundred pages later. Oliver has been rescued and restored by the Maylies; they have retired to the country where Oliver is learning to read better and to write, and has his own “little room” on the ground floor at the back of the house “in which he was accustomed to sit, when busy at his books.” It looks out onto a small garden. One summer evening, Oliver sits at this window “intent upon his books. He had been poring over them for some time . . . he had exerted himself a great deal . . . [and] gradually and by slow degrees, he fell asleep.” At this point Dickens enters upon a second explanation of the hypnagogic phenomenon:
There is a kind of sleep that steals upon us sometimes, which, while it holds the body prisoner, does not free the mind from a sense of things about it, and enable it to ramble at its pleasure. So far as an overpowering heaviness, a prostration of strength, and an utter inability to control our thoughts or power of motion, can be called sleep, this is it; and yet, we have a consciousness of all that is going on about us, and, if we dream at such a time, words which are really spoken, or sounds which really exist at the moment, accommodate themselves with surprising readiness to our visions, until reality and imagination become so strangely blended that it is afterwards almost matter of impossibility to separate the two. Nor is this, the most striking phenomenon incidental to such a state. It is an undoubted fact, that although our senses of touch and sight be for the time dead, yet our sleeping thoughts, and the visionary scenes that pass before us, will be influenced and materially influenced, by the mere silent presence of some external object; which may not have been near us when we closed our eyes, and of whose vicinity we have had no waking consciousness.
Oliver knew, perfectly well, that he was in his own little room; that his books were lying on the table before him; that the sweet air was stirring among the creeping plants outside. And yet he was asleep. Suddenly the scene changed; the air became close and confined; and he thought, with a glow of terror, that he was in the Jew’s house again. There he sat, the hideous old man, in his accustomed corner, pointing at him, and whispering to another man, with his face averted, who sat beside him. [This is Monks, Oliver’s legitimate half-brother, who has enlisted Fagin in his scheme to destroy Oliver.]
They discuss him for a moment, and then Oliver wakes, and
There—there—at the window, close before him—so close, that he could have almost touched him before he started back: with his eyes peering into the room, and meeting his: there stood the Jew. . . .
It was but an instant, a glance, a flash, before his eyes; and they were gone. But they had recognized him, and he them: and their look was as firmly impressed upon his memory, as if it had been deeply carved in stone, and set before him from his birth. He stood transfixed for a moment; then, leaping from the window into the garden, called loudly for help.
Help arrives, but the two cannot be traced; indeed their footprints cannot even be found, and this detail, like that of the trinket which Fagin pores over in the previous scene, is never explained.
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These scenes have in common several elements : a boy in a state of sleep or half-sleep in which conscious and unconscious impressions, fantasies and realities, dreams and recollections, tend to be fused and confused; supervening on this is an intense experience of watching and of being watched, which then gives way to emotions of threat and terror. In one scene there are the jewel box and the trinkets and the brandished knife; in the other the book and the window. I think that we are witness here to the decomposed elements of what Freud called the primal scene, to either a memory or fantasy of it: the child asleep, or just waking, or feigning sleep while observing sexual intercourse between his parents, and, frightened by what he sees or imagines, is either then noticed by the parents or has a fantasy of what would occur if he were noticed. The symbolism of the jewel box and the knife in the first scene are self-explanatory; for the window and the book we recur to the scene in the window at the blacking factory, and behind it, perhaps, to Dickens’s earlier recollection of himself as a small boy on “a summer evening . . . sitting on my bed, reading as if for life.”
Dickens’s experience of desolation, fear, and anguish during the months of his father’s imprisonment and his employment at the factory had the effect of re-awakening and reviving in him similar emotions which he, like every child, experienced at an earlier age, the age when parents seem like gods, giants, and demons. Indeed, the trauma of the London experiences was so acute that in a peculiar sense it seemed to absorb and obliterate his earlier life. Dickens was not, after all, a young child when he came to live in London—he was eleven years old. And yet it is an interesting fact that he was rarely able to write with conviction or credibility about life outside the city. “The memories which peaceful country scenes call up,” he says in Oliver Twist, “are not of this world, nor of its thoughts and hopes.” However we may regard them, he goes on, “there lingers, in the least reflective mind, a vague and half-formed consciousness of having held such feelings long before, in some remote and distant time, which calls up solemn thoughts of distant times to come.” The paradise or Eden of infancy which we all have known and out of which we create all our ideas of supernal happiness are, in other words, a foretaste of heaven; but Dickens seems uncertain whether these are memories of anything he ever actually experienced. It was almost as if the months in London had canceled or cut him off from the reality of his earlier life, even while they reactivated other emotions and memories from that same period.
The scene of young Charles and Bob Fagin at the window being suddenly seen by Dickens’s father—to which Charles responded so strongly—acted as a screen for earlier thoughts of being suddenly seen in an exposed and dangerous situation; and very likely as a screen for memories of the reverse situation of suddenly seeing something that is dangerous. (The two cannot in fact be separated, as in Oliver Twist they are not.) It seems clear, therefore, that the Bob Fagin whose friendship contained the threat of exposure, and the father whose freedom was a fraud and an outrage while his son slaved in a window, coalesced in Dickens’s mind. But they coalesced into an image which has its origin in an earlier phase of Dickens’s development, a phase which the London experience re-awakened and which the scene at the window both refers to and conceals. This is the image of the father of infancy and earliest childhood. And it is at this point that Fagin, the terrible, frightening old Jew, becomes relevant. For the traditional popular mythology of the Jew as Devil and Anti-Christ, as the castrator and murderer of good little Christian boys, corresponds itself to this image of the terrible father of infancy and of our primal fantasies, and is indeed one of western culture’s chief expressions of it.1
The argument I have been proposing would be less convincing if these were the only examples from Dickens’s writings of such scenes. But the fact is that variations of this scene recur in Dickens repeatedly; moreover, the image of being closely watched, stared at, and suddenly surrounded by glaring eyes appears with obsessive frequency in Dickens’s novels. There are, in addition, two other instances in Oliver Twist, both of which support the point I have been trying to make.
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Before unconscious ideas or memories are permitted to emerge into consciousness, they are made to undergo certain disguises and distortions—such as condensation, decomposition, displacement, reversal, or multiplication. In the two scenes from Oliver Twist, which I have discussed as expressing a primal fantasy or recollection of Dickens’s, one thing seems missing. Except for a symbolic representation in the jewel box and the trinkets inside it which Fagin hoards and caresses, there is no direct representation either of the primal act itself or of the other partner in the act. In the mind of a very small child, we know, sexual intercourse is first apprehended as a form of violence, specifically of murder, inflicted by the male upon the female. There is such a scene in Oliver Twist, one of its most famous, the murder of Nancy by Bill Sikes—and in this connection, it is relevant to observe that Sikes kills her because he believes she has betrayed him out of her affection for Oliver. It is after he has clubbed her to death that the image of the staring eyes reappears. Sikes throws a rug over her corpse, “but it was worse to fancy the eyes, and imagine them moving toward him, than to see them glaring upward.” He flees the city and wanders about the country all day, but is pursued by “a vision . . . as constant and more terrible than that from which he had escaped.” Then follows one of Dickens’s incomparable passages:
Those widely staring eyes, so lustreless and so glassy, that he had better borne to see them than think upon them, appeared in the midst of darkness; light in themselves, but giving light to nothing. There were but two, but they were everywhere. If he shut out the sight, there came the room with every well-known object . . . each in its accustomed place. The body was in its place, and its eyes were as he saw them when he stole away. He got up, and rushed into the field without. The figure was behind him. He re-entered the shed, and shrunk down once more. The eyes were there, before he had laid himself along.
He flees again, “flying from memory and himself,” but is pursued by the vision, and finally by that hydra-headed and argus-eyed great beast, the London mob. At the end, surrounded by “tiers and tiers of faces in every window,” by people fighting each other “only for an instant to see the wretch,” he tries to escape across the roof-tops and lower himself by a rope into a ditch. Suddenly he looks behind him, cries out, “The eyes again,” loses his balance, is caught in the noose of the rope, and hangs himself. “He fell for five-and-thirty feet. There was a sudden jerk, a terrific convulsion of the limbs; and there he hung, with the open knife clenched in his stiffening hand.” Without pausing to analyse, we can see how recurrent and how suggestive in their recurrence are the elements of these episodes.
The second additional instance is the great scene of Fagin’s trial, and now it is Fagin who is the object of this frightful scrutiny.
The court was paved, from floor to roof, with human faces. Inquisitive and eager eyes peered from every inch of space. From the rail before the dock, away into the sharpest angle of the smallest corner in the galleries, all looks fixed upon one man—Fagin. Before him and behind: above, below, on the right and on the left: he seemed to stand surrounded by a firmament, all bright with gleaming eyes.
He stood there, in all this glare of living light, with one hand resting on the wooden slab before him, the other held to his ear. . . .
Sikes and Fagin, both of them figures who threaten to ruin, castrate, and destroy Oliver, are now in Oliver’s place; and the reader’s emotions are enlisted in their terror, as they were in Oliver’s. What has happened here is too intricate and compressed for simple analysis, but it is essential to note again the identification Dickens dramatically asserts between Oliver on the one hand and Fagin and Sikes on the other—and by inevitable implication between himself and his father. It is essential because otherwise we would be unable to understand how it is that Fagin, inhuman monster that he is, is also human and charming and an imaginative triumph. Part of the answer, I believe, has to do with the fact that at the deeper levels of his being Dickens maintained and had access to a feeling of identity with his father, even with that father who appeared to him as destroyer and betrayer of his son. His father was alive in him, as was Fagin, and in creating Fagin Dickens affirmed that fact as much as he negated it.
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Two more bits of evidence and we are done. While Dickens was writing Oliver Twist he was afflicted with a return of his boyhood illness. The spasms came on him with particular severity while he was writing the final, climactic parts of the novel, and he understood this, he wrote, as “the penalty for sticking so close to Oliver.” He was to pay one further penalty. Years later, toward the end of his career, Dickens embarked upon a series of public readings from his works. He was a superb actor and reader, and the accounts of these performances are uniform in their praise of his brilliance and power. He eventually decided to make some readings from Oliver Twist, choosing a series of scenes from it which ended in Fagin’s betrayal of Nancy, the murder of Nancy, and Sikes’s flight and death. He was at first reluctant to read these particular passages because he thought they might make too horrifying an impression on his impressionable Victorian audiences. And the impression they did make was from all accounts extravagant: women fainting and being carried from the auditorium “stiff and rigid” came to be a preposterous matter of course. But the impression they made on Dickens was more profound, and disastrous. They became an obsession with him; he read them more than any of his other selections; and he killed himself by means of them. After each reading of the scenes from Oliver Twist he was literally prostrated; his pulse would rise to 120 and above; it would take ten or fifteen minutes before he could utter a rational or coherent phrase. In already uncertain health, he was advised by his family, friends, and physicians to stop this suicidal pursuit. Yet he would not and could not, and at last it killed him.
This culminating episode of Dickens’s career has been much discussed; various explanations of it have been advanced, none of which is really satisfactory. I think that now we can understand it better. In returning at the end of his life to Oliver Twist, Dickens was returning to his first and most intense representation of the crisis of his young boyhood. But he was also returning to events in the still more remote past, events which had been re-aroused by the months of suffering in the blacking factory, and which were both expressed and concealed in his recollection of them and in Oliver Twist. These events we all experience, and most of us then forget them forever. It was part of Dickens’s destiny as a genius, part of the pain as well as the glory, that it was not given to him to “forget” such things in the way it is to most. They recurred in him, they spoke through him, he wrote them out symbolically, he acted them out, and still they recurred, and still he was bitterly loyal to them—they were, after all, himself. Dickens is one of the heroes of literature, and if my interpretation of these events in his life is persuasive, it is possible to see something heroic even in his self-destruction. Blind and unknowing as his struggle was on the level of consciousness, he was at least struggling with the depths of his being—the same depths that exist in all of us. That he remained until death engrossed in his most primitive and vital conflicts may also add to our understanding of his extraordinary development as a novelist: to remain in touch with vital conflicts is to remain in touch with vital feelings, with one’s roots in life.
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What, then, have we accomplished? We have, I believe, accounted in some degree for the genesis of Fagin, demonstrating how various details of Dickens’s experience were brought together in him. That the part of Fagin which is Jewish turns out to be not merely minor but almost fortuitous, or if not fortuitous then curiously unpremeditated in its mythological cast, and that Fagin’s relations to Oliver are more paradoxical than might at first seem likely, is not really surprising. Similar things have been suspected before. But we have not accounted for the power of Fagin as an imaginative creation; we have not explained why this demonic, disgusting, and monstrous old man should be so fascinating, so comic, even so winning in his abominable wickedness. It will not do to invoke genius, which in this context is a convenient way of avoiding explanation—though Fagin is nothing if not a creation of genius. Perhaps the closest we can come to an answer is to say that the boy who suffered passively in the blacking warehouse, who grieved in solitude, and felt himself to be Oliver Twist, was also the boy who was not afraid to lie to protect his and his father’s poor pride and shame, who acted out that lie with spirit and audacity, and who told stories to amuse and entertain his fellows in the warehouse. He went on lying and telling stories until he became one of the world’s great masters of the art, and created those grand imaginative lies which in our perplexed condition somehow approximate the truth. Oliver Twist could never have imagined Fagin, and Dickens could neither have imagined nor created him had Fagin not been part of himself and had he been unable ever to affirm that part of himself with gusto and delight.
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1 See Ernest Jones, On the Nightmare and Norman Cohn, The Pursuit of the Millennium for exhaustive and illuminating interpretations of this subject.
