Abstract
Dickens’s presentation of Fagin as a villainous Jew remains a major source of controversy about Oliver Twist. In David Vital’s 1999 book A People Apart: The Jews in Europe 1789–1939, for instance, he links Dickens and his portrayal of ‘the Jew Fagin as a monster of criminality’ to Cobbett, whose view Vital quotes as being that ‘Jew has always been synonymous with sharper, cheat, rogue. This has been the case with no other race of mankind’, and who denounced Jews as the murderers of Christ, blasphemers of his Gospel, and parasites.1
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Notes
David Vital, A People Apart: The Jews in Europe 1789–1939 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), pp. 186–7.
Graham Storey (ed.), The Pilgrim Edition of the Letters of Charles Dickens Volume Ten: 1862–1864 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1998), p. 270.
David Englander, ‘Anglicised not Anglican: The Jews and Judaism in Victorian Britain’ in Gerald Parsons (ed.) Religion in Victorian Britain Volume I: Traditions (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1988), p. 239.
Henry Mayhew, Mayhew’s London, Being Selections from ‘London Labour and the London Poor’ (London: Spring Books, 1957), pp. 275–6.
Anne Aresty Naman, The Jew in the Victorian Novel: Some Relationships between Prejudice and Art (New York: AMS Press, Inc., 1980), p. 54.
V.D. Lipman, ‘The Age of Emancipation, 1815–1880’ in V.D. Lipman (ed.) Three Centuries of Anglo-Jewish History: A Volume of Essays (Cambridge: Heffer and Sons, Ltd., 1961), pp. 78–9.
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© 2016 Robert D. Butterworth
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Butterworth, R. (2016). Oliver Twist and Fagin’s Jewishness. In: Dickens, Religion and Society. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137558718_3
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137558718_3
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