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Opinion

Dickens’s Jew — from evil to delightful

The JC Essay

May 3, 2013 08:40
Ron Moody as Fagin
7 min read

When David Lean directed Oliver Twist 65 years ago, the character of Fagin had already been long established as a popular villain. There was the serialisation and subsequent editions of Charles Dickens's novel, while the celebrated actor-manager Herbert Beerbohm Tree played the part in a successful stage version in 1905. And there had been many film adaptations. Lon Chaney was Fagin in one of several silent versions; Irving Pichel took on the role in a 1933 sound version.The George Cruikshank drawings, which accompanied the original serialisation, provided a model that made Fagin, with his long beard, hat and notorious, beaked nose, as instantly recognisable a villain as Captain Hook or Dracula.

The crude, racist stereotyping went back to the original conception of the character. When Fagin makes his first appearance, he is described as "a very old shrivelled Jew, whose villainous-looking and repulsive face was obscured by a quantity of matted red hair". He is then referred to invariably as "the Jew" as though that were the key to his behaviour.

Dickens came to regret this, explaining that, at the time, the kind of criminal he was describing invariably was a Jew, but he was so uncomfortable that he removed many of the references from a later edition. In practice, however, it was no more than a gesture, offering little practical mitigation of the racial slur. A richly dramatic caricature, Fagin lived on into the 20th century as a negative but often revived archetype of Jewishness.

Lean's 1948 adaptation presents Fagin faithfully as the duplicitous criminal of "evil conscience" that Dickens had created. It does not add racist colour that was not already there, yet at the same time gives full weight to a portrait of rare nastiness. Beneath a surface warmth lies utter viciousness. Fagin grooms his young orphans to steal. He seems to offer them sanctuary but in reality condemns them to ruin. In their joint criminal enterprise, even his accomplice Bill Sikes is the victim of Fagin's superior intellect. Sikes steals, Fagin fences; Sikes provides the brawn, Fagin the brains. Although Sikes kills Nancy, it is Fagin who puts him up to it.