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.

Thus, Oliver is at the center of a melodramatic romance about the perils of existence, conceived not just as a day-to-day struggle but as the grand struggle, for the life of the soul. Oliver is not a likely little boy of his age or condition of any era; Fagin himself notes that Oliver "was not like other boys in the same circumstances." He's the embodiment of Dickens's hope that there is something inborn in humans that enables them to rise above the real social problems he saw around him and that he describes more than realistically, with thunderstruck, nightmarish emphasis. Richard Wright's Bigger Thomas, the Native Son of the ghettos that African-Americans were penned in, is also an allegorical figure, but since he serves as a warning of the depravity that his condition can lead to, he's a far more plausible figure than Oliver who represents a profession of faith on Dickens's part. Oliver Twist is a devout fantasy that blooms straight from the seedbed of allegory.

Article Author: Alan Dale

Alan Dale earned a Ph.D. in Comparative Literature from Princeton University and a J.D. from Yale Law School. He currently works as a corporate tax attorney in Portland, Oregon.

He is the author of What We Do Best: American Movie Comedies …

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