Commercialism and Middle-Class Innocence: The Story of the Treasure Seekers and The Railway Children

Abstract

In Oliver Twist (1838), Bill Sykes asks Fagin why he wants to use a delicate and sensitive boy like Oliver as a pickpocket when he can easily recruit one of the “fifty boys snoozing about Common Garden every night” (326). Fagin replies, “Because they’re of no use to me. [...] their looks convict ‘em when they get into trouble” (326). Fagin knows that Oliver has a sentimental value not possessed by the other boys. He understands that if he could somehow combine a pitiable figure like Oliver with a cunning figure like the Artful Dodger he might have the perfect pickpocket, one who can continue to steal without ever being convicted. While the sentimentalized child of the workhouse is a figure like Oliver and his friend parochial Dick who is happy to die young before he is ever forced to earn a living as a criminal, the un-sentimentalized street child is a figure like the Artful Dodger who is a perversion of childhood innocence, a boy dressed in adult clothing and wise beyond his years.1 Fagin knows that finding a child who is a combination of these two kinds of children is a virtual impossibility. In the figure of the innocent pickpocket, however, there lies a mythology about a middle-class hero who can be involved in a mercenary enterprise and yet still remain uncorrupted. One of the reasons that the child became such an important figure and that childhood became such an important structure of feeling in the nineteenth century is that middle-class society became increasingly concerned with the erosion of its innocence inside commercial society. By continually portraying itself through children like Oliver Twist, it could see itself as an innocent child put to work in a commercial society by forces ultimately lying beyond its control. It could see itself, in other words, as Fagin’s perfect pickpocket, a child involved in the mercenary pursuit of profit whose looks will never convict him.