Degenerate ‘Innocents’: Childhood, Deviance, and Criminality in Nineteenth-Century Texts

Abstract

Charles Dickens’s depiction of Fagin’s boys in his 1837–38 tale Oliver Twist, or, The Parish Boy’s Progress is perhaps literature’s most enduring representation of the criminal child gang. Moreover, it still resonates in contemporary discourse; in January 2008, The Scotsman reported that police had ‘smashed’ a modern-day ‘Fagin’s Gang’ that had allegedly forced young children into a life of crime (Chris Greenwood n.p.). In both Dickens’s text and The Scotsman’s editorial, the young are presented as seemingly at the mercy of manipulative villains: the children in the news item were apparently sent onto the streets to beg and steal by older crooks, while the anti-Semitic and evocative description of Fagin as ‘shrivelled,’ ‘villanous-looking,’ and ‘repulsive’ hints at his corruptive influence, a perception later validated by Nancy when she denounces Fagin as ‘“the wretch that drove me to ... [the cold, wet, dirty streets] long ago”’ (Oliver Twist 133). Standing in the blackened room, toasting fork in hand, Fagin might be the devil incarnate; as he fries sausages, he is metaphorically preparing his youthful flock for an eternal roasting in the flames of hell. The narrative, however, would seem to suggest that Fagin’s boys are not merely innocent creatures coerced into crime by an older, deviant mentor. The Dodger and his cronies are apparently 10 or 11 years old, the same age as Oliver, but enthusiastically drink spirits and smoke clay pipes ‘with the air of middle-aged men’ (64).