Roman Polanski's Oliver Twist

The novelist deals with personality, with characters wearing their ... social masks. He needs the framework of a stable society, and many of our best novelists have been conventional to the verge of fussiness. The romancer deals with individuality, with characters in vacuo idealized by revery, and, however conservative he may be, something nihilistic and untamable is likely to keep breaking out of his pages.

--Northrop Frye, The Anatomy of Criticism

In contrast to Wright's Pride & Prejudice, Roman Polanski's recent adaptation of Charles Dickens's Oliver Twist is an example of attention to naturalistic details where they are least to the point. Polanski approaches the book as if it were a novel and it simply isn't, in any but a superficial sense. The extremes of fiendish darkness and seraphic light, the coincidences and miraculous deliverances, the grotesque humor, the realization that the author has worked out an ingenious demonstration of abstract beliefs, all tell you it's a romance. Readers may be misled by the protest against early 19th-century institutions such as the workhouse in the early portions of the book, and by the graphic depiction of the slumscape once the little hero gets to London. The pitfall of a criminal life was real enough for a poor boy, then as now, but Oliver isn't a naturalistic character, described from the inside out, and capable of further development, as Elizabeth Bennet is, or even as Dickens's own Dick Swiveller in The Old Curiosity Shop and Eugene Wrayburn in Our Mutual Friend are. (Dickens transforms both these men from allegorical vices into plausible young heroes in the course of those books.)

Little Oliver is an allegorical figure, the infant Christian soul, born complete and impervious to degradation, no matter what circumstances it finds itself in. (He's like the kids in How the Grinch Stole Christmas, who don't have to be taught that the holiday isn't about presents, they just feel it naturally and emerge from their burgled houses singing.) Oliver can be forced into crime, but he is proof against corruption. When Bill Sikes does force him, Oliver sinks to his knees and cries, "Oh! pray have mercy on me, and do not make me steal. For the love of all the bright Angels that rest in Heaven, have mercy upon me!"

The anti-Semitism in the depiction of Fagin the Jew, the fence who trains homeless children to pick pockets, makes sense only in this schema. If Oliver is the inherently innocent Christian soul, Fagin is a Jew as that term is meant--by the simultaneous operation of rank prejudice and simple logic--to show that Oliver can withstand the ultimate trial. To triumph in terms that bring out the full nature of this personification, then, Oliver not only has to resist Fagin but forgive him--when Oliver visits Fagin in prison the night before his hanging he begs "the Jew" to kneel and pray with him. Dickens, a survivor of the cracks that unmoneyed children can fall through, was, as an author, a resiliently optimistic Christian. The world could be harsh and even malevolent, but the universe was benign, and good men, i.e., true Christians, absolutely had the power to foil the machinations of evil men. To Dickens, Fagin is not evil because he's Jewish; we read of "venerable men of [Fagin's] own persuasion" who come to pray with him in prison and whom he drives away with curses. That is, Dickens didn't first decide to make Fagin Jewish and then as a necessary consequence make him evil. Dickens makes Fagin Jewish because the corrupter of children must be the opposite of good, which he always casts in Christian terms.