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Dickens' Archetypal Jew

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 December 2020

Lauriat Lane Jr.
Lauriat Lane Jr.*
Affiliation:
Cornell University, Ithaca, N.Y.
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Extract

Fagin, the first of Dickens' great villains, is a Jew. In making Fagin a Jew, Dickens drew on a tradition of villainy that had been in English literature from the beginning. Only in our own time has there been a widespread reaction against this literary injustice. One effect of this reaction has been to introduce into our response to characters such as Barabbas, Shylock, and Fagin problems that are not only insoluble but perhaps irrelevant. No responsible critic has, to my knowledge, ever called Dickens an anti-Semite. If the character of Fagin arouses racial hostility in the reader of Oliver Twist, as some overzealous guardians of the public weal would have us think, it is more because this character, by its archetypal nature, appeals to emotions and prejudices already firmly set by custom and tradition. The main fault is not in Dickens but in his readers. Dickens' only sin was that writing at a very early age his first real novel and writing rapidly under the pressure of serial publication, he drew on a tradition already widespread in English literature and, with Fagin at least, made it powerfully and uniquely his own.

Type
Research Article
Information
PMLA , Volume 73 , Issue 1 , March 1958 , pp. 94 - 100
Copyright
Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 1958

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References

1 See esp. Edward N. Calisch, The Jew in English Literature (Richmond, 1909); Leslie Fiedler, “What Can We Do About Fagin?” Commentary, vii (1949), 411–418; Solomon T. H. Hurwitz, “Jews and Jewesses in English Literature,” Jewish Forum, v (1922); M. J. Landa, The Jew in Drama (New York, 1927); Hijman Michelson, The Jew in Early English Literature (Amsterdam, 1926); Montague F. Modder, The Jew in the Literature of England (Philadelphia, 1944); David Philipson, The Jew in English Fiction (Cincinnati, 1889); Rebecca Schneider, Bibliography of Jewish Life in the Fiction of America and England (Albany, 1916); H. R. S. Van Der Veen, Jewish Characters in 18th-Cenlury English Fiction and Drama (Groningen, 1935).

2 Letter of 10 July 1863. All quotations from Dickens' letters are from the Nonesuch edition, ed. Walter Dexter, and are identified by date and person to whom written.

3 All quotations are from the Everyman's edition of Dickens' works, but for convenient reference to any standard edition of his writings they are identified by chapter rather than page.

4 “Dickens, Fagin, and Mr. Riah,” Commentary, viii (1950), 48.

5 Thus it need not surprise us to note that one of Dickens' best friends, Mark Lemon, was a Jew. Nor that under the early years of Lemon's editorship, Punch frequently poked fun at Jewish characters and customs. See M. Ff. Spielmann, The History of Punch (London, 1895), pp. 103–104; see also Modder (n. 1 above), pp. 168–171.

6 The Charles Dickens Originals (New York, 1912), p. 57.

7 “Shakespeare's Jew,” Univ. of Toronto Quart., viii (1939), 139.

8 To clarify my use of such a slippery term as archetype, I should say that I define it as follows: An archetype is a literary element or construct which, by its traditional and universal validity, may bring certain especially powerful meanings, implications, and overtones to the literary work in which it is used and hence to the reader's response to that work.

9 But not all Dickens' red-headed villains need be taken as Jewish—witness the exclusively diabolic Blandois-Rigaud in Little Dorrit.

10 As Van Der Veen says: “Another proof that the Jew in fiction and drama was kept alive by tradition is the circumstance that the same names are so often repeated. The average novelist or playwright was rather ignorant of things Jewish and mostly chose current names as for instance, Moses, Isaac, Aaron, Solomon” (p. 266).

11 One might suggest certain ways in which Dickens' handling of Jewish characters compares with that of his most important contemporaries. Except for the burlesque figures in Rebecca and Rowena, Thackeray's Jews, into whose hands his characters fall at moments of personal financial crisis, are type figures—an inevitable part of the society Thackeray is realistically portraying, but little more. George Eliot's Daniel Deronda, like Dickens' Riah, is a very consciously favorable portrait, but Deronda, unlike Riah, dominates the story he takes part in and, also unlike Riah, reflects his creator's serious interest in and knowledge of Jews and Judaism. Trollope's Augustus Melmotte, in The Way We Live Now, comes closest to matching Fagin as an embodiment of evil. But where Fagin glides mysteriously through the London underworld, entrapping innocent children, Melmotte parades through the world of high society and high finance, entrapping peers and politicians. Moreover, at the same time as he presents the villainous figure of Melmotte for our condemnation—and Melmotte has always been taken to be a Jew, although Trollope, interestingly, never called him one directly—Trollope enlists our sympathy for the other Jews in the story, such as Breghert, and strongly satirizes British upper-class anti-Semitism.

12 Anglo-Jewish Letters, ed. Cecil Roth (London, 1938), p. 305.

13 “Dickens: The Two Scrooges,” The Wound and the Bow (New York, 1947), p. 32.

14 Anglo-Jewish Letters, p. 307.

15 Quoted in Edgar Johnson, “Dickens, Fagin, and Mr. Riah,” p. 49.

16 For a fuller discussion of this change, see “Oliver Twist: A Revision,” TLS, 20 July 1951.

17 George H. Ford, Dickens and His Readers (Princeton, 1955), p. 13. I am indebted to Professor Ford for several helpful suggestions with respect to this article.