Oliver Twist Page 0,3

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. 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 s