15-20 Pages on Dickens

CAPITALISM AND COMPASSION IN "OLIVER TWIST" Author(s): ROBERT L. PATTEN Source: Studies in the Novel, Vol. 1, No. 2, CHARLES DICKENS (summer 1969), pp. 207-221 Published by: The Johns Hopkins University Press Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/29531329 Accessed: 10-12-2018 14:39 UTC

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CAPITALISM AND COMPASSION IN OLIVER TWIST

ROBERT L. PATTEN

"... while it is generally accepted that Dickens did a great deal of good, there is a genial vagueness about what exactly he did and how he did it. It is easy to smile when a foreign propagandist quotes Mr. Squeers as a typical modern English schoolmaster, but it is not so easy to say what was exactly the point of Dickens' satire in the early part of Oliver Twist."1

I

Oliver begins life as an "item of mortality."2 He is surrounded by no "careful grandmothers, anxious aunts, experienced nurses, [or] doctors of profound wisdom" (p. 1); he has no father, no home, no name. When his mother dies, he loses his only source of compassionate nurture. Paradoxically, the tender sympathies and fussy ministrations of solicitous relatives and advisors would have killed him in no time.

"There being nobody by, however, but a pauper old woman . . . and a parish surgeon . . . Oliver and Nature fought out the point between them" (pp. 1-2), and Nature finally induces him to breathe, cry, and live.

The world into which Oliver is born treats him as a thing. The parish surgeon refuses to recognize even his sex, referring to him throughout the scene as "the child" or "it." To the inmates of the workhouse, his cry merely advertizes that a new burden has been imposed upon the parish. The narrator's mock-sophisticated tone and genteel language, while satirizing the euphemistic conventions of New? gate fiction, also sets Oliver's birth at a discreet distance, thereby reinforcing the refusal to accept him as a human being with emotional as well as physical needs.3 "What have paupers to do with soul or spirit?" demands Bumble. "It's quite enough that we let 'em have live bodies" (p. 41).

For the workhouse and parish authorities, Oliver is a statistic or a "miserable little being" (p. 4) to be "farmed" and provided with a

[ 207 ]

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scientifically-calculated minimum diet. His new mother is not maternal at all: her name is Mrs. Mann, and she is a very great experimental philosopher, for by appropriating the greater part of the stipend alloted to purchase that diet, she finds "in the lowest depth a deeper still." Her conception of the needs of children extends only to providing the minimum of food to sustain physical life, and like the experimental philosopher whose horse perversely died just as he was about to prove it could live without eating, Mrs. Mann's charges do unaccountably happen to die, "in eight and a half cases out of ten," just as they are managing "to exist upon the smallest possible portion of the weakest possible food," and are "gathered to the fathers" (p. 4) never known in life.

Everyone who wants Oliver at all wants him as a means to personal gain, and not for his sake. To the parish surgeon, who attends by contract, Oliver's birth is the occasion for a fee. To Mrs. Mann, Oliver, as long as he remains alive, is a source of income. To the beadle, he is an object on which to exercise "porochial" authority, as well as Bumble's invention in names. To the Board of Guardians, he is a responsibility to be educated and taught a useful trade, such as oakum picking. All their collective efforts are towards getting their charges employed or otherwise off the parish rolls; to this end Bumble even transports dying paupers to other parishes, to save the funeral expenses. To Mr. Gamfield, Oliver is a convenient extension of a sweep's broomhandle; knowing the workhouse diet, he is sure that "Oliver would be a nice small pattern; just the very thing for register stoves" (p. 14). Moreover, the reward offered for taking Oliver off the hands of the parish will be a source of immediate cash to pay his pressing bills, making the offer doubly attractive. To Sowerberry, Oli? ver's size and melancholy expression make him a "delightful mute": as he explains to his wife, "I don't mean a regular mute to attend grown-up people, my dear, but only for children's practice. It would be very new to have a mute in proportion, my dear. You may depend upon it, it would have a most superb effect" (p. 29). Sowerberry's ingenious speculation exceeds "even his most sanguine hopes" (p. 34).

From birth to funerals, then, all facets of life that Oliver has experienced, up to his ninth year, seem to be regulated by the same impulse, devoid of compassion, to use him as a means, a thing. No

wonder he conceives of human beings in an equally dehumanized form, and is startled to hear a board speak. All the more remarkable, there? fore, are the occasional moments when violent emotion asserts the underground presence of a common humanity that seems everywhere else to be denied: when Oliver successfully appeals to the magistrate

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against his apprenticeship to Gamfield, or by his "tears of agony" arouses Bumble's "troublesome cough" (p. 23).

II

The "principle of Good" that Dickens wished to show "surviving through every adverse circumstance, and triumphing at last" (p. lxii) is closely related to the spirit of compassion. Compassion, however, is wholly lacking in the abstract theorizing and planning of Mrs. Mann or the board, whose Parish Seal, reproduced in the gold buttons of the beadle's coat, is, ironically, of "the Good Samaritan healing the sick and bruised man" (p. 21). Christ's parable answering the question "Who is my neighbor?" unfavorably contrasts the social brotherhood of priest, Levite, and traveller to the spiritual brotherhood of Samaritan and traveller. Though outcast, heretic, and enemy, it is the Good Samaritan who was "moved with compassion" at the traveller's plight; it is the Good Samaritan who "came to him, and bound up his wounds, pouring on them oil and wine; and he set him on his own beast, and brought him to an inn, and took care of him" (Luke X: 33-34).

For Dickens, instinctive compassion and selfless benevolence are natural to man; abstract Benthamite and Malthusian theories and practices distortions. He quarrels less with the specific programs adopted under such philosophical systems than with the point of view that engenders them; as Steven Marcus says, "The wrong that Dickens recognizes in what he attacks?the Benthamite ideology, legislation, and administration, and the workhouse administration and attitude? lies simply, irreducibly, undeniably in its violation of humanity, in its offense against life."4

Even where the impulse towards compassion is manifest, however, circumstances may threaten to vitiate its force. When Oliver, having "fallen among robbers" through the aid of a bad Samaritan, is rescued by Mr. Brownlow, who has a picture of the Good Samaritan over the fireplace, he fears more than anything else that his new friend will turn him out of doors to wander again, or worse, send him back to the "wretched place" (p. 85) from which he came. (For Oliver, home and homelessness have been equally dismal.)

"Have mercy upon a poor boy, sir!" "My dear child," said the old gentleman, moved by the

warmth of Oliver's sudden appeal; "you need not be afraid of my deserting you, unless you give me cause."

"I never, never will, sir," interposed Oliver. "I hope not," rejoined the old gentleman. "I do not think

you ever will. I have been deceived, before, in the objects

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whom I have endeavoured to benefit; but I feel strongly disposed to trust you, nevertheless; and I am more interested in your behalf than I can well account for, even to myself. The persons on whom I have bestowed my dearest love, lie deep in their graves; but, although the happiness and delight of my life lie buried there too, I have not made a coffin of my heart, and sealed it up, for ever, on my best affections.

. Deep affliction has but strengthened and refined them" (p. 85).

Though Mr. Brownlow has so far escaped these dangers, Oliver is well acquainted with those who have made coffins of their hearts. Indeed, he has lived amongst them, as he has lived amongst the coffins of Sowerberry's shop. As an undertaker's mute, whose figure and mien are intended to serve as a symbol of and focus for grief, he has "had many opportunities of observing the beautiful resignation and fortitude with which some strong-minded people bear their trials and losses" (p. 35). But like Brownlow and Dick, deep affliction has but strength? ened and refined Oliver's best affections; it is not meat, but its very lack, that has sustained his goodness.

When Oliver, recaptured by the thieves, does not return from his errand to the bookseller, however, Mr. Brownlow begins to think himself deceived once again. His suspicion is strengthened by Bumble's report, which assails his faith. Eventually, in despair, he seals his heart, apparently proof against Mrs. Bedwin's instinctive conviction, nurtured by "lying books," that Oliver is true. To salve his wounds, he too turns Philosopher.

Ill

For Dickens, the portmanteau term "philosopher" stands in Oliver Twist for all those who calculate, who predicate their actions on the assumption that human life can be dealt with quantitatively. Bumble's heart is "waterproof"?tears, mere tokens of weakness, scarcely ever penetrate his stern soul, which is moved to propose marriage by the convincing testimony of teaspoons, sugar-tongs, and a genuine silver milk-pot. The Poor Law Boards use the same kind of calculus in administering their institutions; for them charity is a matter of pounds, shillings, pence, dietaries, and allowances, not of spontaneous, freely given compassion and care.5 Paradoxically, their charity is dispensed on laissez-faire Malthusian and Benthamite capitalist principles.

Though ostensibly at war with this system, in reality the thieves to whom Oliver falls captive are exponents of it, nighttime or under? world petty capitalists. Fagin's familiar instruction to Noah Claypole

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on the true identity of "number one" rests on Hobbesian assumptions about human nature extensively employed in Adam Smith's Wealth of

Nations, where the entire economic system depends on the unfettered exercise of self-interest, interpreted as a psychological as well as an economic law. As an extension of this assumption, Benthamite utilitar? ians insisted that a rational calculation of self-interest could be made;

Noah, disguised as Morris Bolter, finds Fagin's careful logic wholly persuasive:

"Some conjurers say that number three is the magic number, and some say number seven. It's neither, my friend, neither. It's number one."

"Ha, ha!" cried Mr. Bolter. "Number one for ever." "In a little community like ours, my dear," said the Jew,

who felt it necessary to qualify this position, "we have a general number one; that is, you can't consider yourself as number one, without considering me too as the same, and all the other young people."

"Oh, the devil!" exclaimed Mr. Bolter. "You see," pursued the Jew, affecting to disregard this

interruption, "we are so mixed up together, and identified in our interests, that it must be so. For instance, it's your object to take care of number one?meaning yourself."

"Certainly," replied Mr. Bolter. "Yer about right there." "Well! You can't take care of yourself, number one,

without taking care of me, number one." "Number two, you mean," said Mr. Bolter, who was

largely endowed with the quality of selfishness. "No, I don't!" retorted the Jew. "I'm of the same impor?

tance to you, as you are to yourself." "I say," interrupted Mr. Bolter, "yer a very nice man, and

I'm very fond of yer; but we ain't quite so thick together, as all that comes to."

"Only think," said the Jew, shrugging his shoulders, and stretching out his hands; "only consider. You've done what's a very pretty thing, and what I love you for doing; but what at the same time would put the cravat round your throat, that's so very easily tied and so very difficult to unloose?in plain English, the halter!"

Mr. Bolter put his hand to his neckerchief, as if he felt it inconveniently tight; and murmured an assent, qualified in tone but not in substance.

"The gallows," continued Fagin, "the gallows, my dear, is an ugly finger-post, which points out a very short and sharp turning that has stopped many a bold fellow's career on the broad highway. To keep in the easy road, and keep it at a distance, is object number one with you."

"Of course it is," replied Mr. Bolter. "What do yer talk about such things for?"

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"Only to shew you my meaning clearly," said the Jew, raising his eyebrows. "To be able to do that, you depend upon me. To keep my little business all snug, I depend upon you. The first is your number one, the second my number one. The more you value your number one, the more careful you must be of mine; so we come at last to what I told you at first?that a regard for number one holds us all together, and must do so, unless we would all go to pieces in company."

"That's true," rejoined Mr. Bolter, thoughtfully. "Oh! yer a cunning old codger!" (pp. 293-94).

Fortunately, "Although Oliver had been brought up by philosophers, he was not theoretically acquainted with the beautiful axiom that self preservation is the first law of nature" (p. 58).

In the thieves' world, as in that of the classical economists, this calculus of self-interest extends to acts of charity as well. After Oliver's recapture Fagin loses no time in beginning Oliver's instruction by lecturing to him on "the crying sin of ingratitude" in "wilfully absenting himself from the society of his anxious friends":

Mr. Fagin laid great stress on the fact of his having taken Oliver in, and cherished him, when, without his timely aid, he might have perished with hunger; and he related the dismal and affecting history of a young lad whom, in his philanthropy, he had succoured under parallel circumstances, but who, proving unworthy of his confidence, and evincing a desire to communicate with the police, had unfortunately come to be hanged at the Old Bailey one morning. Mr. Fagin did not seek to conceal his share in the catastrophe, but lamented with tears in his eyes that the wrong-headed and treacherous behaviour of the young person in question, had rendered it necessary that he should become the victim of certain evidence for the crown ... (p. 114).

The language of sentimental benevolence, and the motive of calculated self-interest, are skillfully intertwined in Fagin's subtle account.

Like the respectable daylight world, the thieves organize their activities and express their occupations in capitalist terms. Fagin's gang works on the apprentice system; Oliver, as the newest and least trained member, is set to "work" on the most menial of tasks, picking the marks out of pocket handkerchiefs. Meanwhile, he tries, through pocket-picking games, to become as proficient as his models, Charley Bates and the Dodger, who instruct Oliver in what Fagin describes as "the catechism of his trade." The thieves all have special lines of work, less repetitive but no less refined than the jobs on an assembly line, and they go about their "business" in earnest, mastering the necessary

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skills, studying each "job" beforehand, assembling the necessary tools and articles of dress. But though they implicitly accept the economic and psychological bases of capitalism, they reject its bourgeois social forms. Charley Bates, while urging Oliver to join the gang and make a fortune, cannot help laughing at middle-class aspirations: "And so be able to retire on your property, and do the gen-teel: as I mean to, in the very next leap-year but four that ever comes, and the forty-second Tuesday in Trinity-week" (p. 117). But Fagin continues to use the language of laissez-faire capitalism for two reasons: because the system, as a set of economic and psychological assumptions, is useful to him, and because Oliver is more likely to be seduced if the criminal activity is described in "respectable" terms. Oliver, indeed, is much impressed by the stern morality of the respectable old gentleman, who, "whenever the Dodger or Charley Bates came home at night, empty-handed, . . . would expatiate with great vehemence on the misery of idle and lazy habits, and would enforce upon them the necessity of an active life, by sending them supperless to bed" (p. 56).

Fagin and his gang even have their own center of trade, Field Lane, which emulates the commercial world of the City or the West End:

Near to the spot on which Snow Hill and Holborn Hill meet, there opens: upon the right hand as you come out of the city: a narrow and dismal alley leading to Saffron Hill. In its filthy shops are exposed for sale, huge bunches of second? hand silk handkerchiefs, of all sizes and patterns; for here reside the traders who purchase them from pickpockets.

Hundreds of these handkerchiefs hang dangling from pegs outside the windows, or flaunting from the door-posts; and the shelves, within, are piled with them. Confined as the limits of Field Lane are, it has its barber, its coffee-shop, its beer-shop, and its fried-fish warehouse. It is a commercial colony of itself: the emporium of petty larceny: visited at early morn? ing, and setting-in of dusk, by silent merchants, who traffic in dark back-parlours; and who go as strangely as they come.

Here, the clothesman, the shoe-vamper, and the rag-merchant, display their goods, as sign-boards to the petty thief; here, stores of old iron and bones, and heaps of mildewy fragments of woollen-stuff and linen, rust and rot in the grimy cellars (p. 162).

Contrasting to the daytime capitalist world, the thieves' world is one of shadows, of early morning, of dusk, and of darkness. Graham Greene, commenting on the "Manichean world" of the novel, observes that "Fagin never appears on the daylight streets."6 The house in which

Oliver is incarcerated is the grave of former life: from its mouldering

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shutters, its panelled walls and cornices black with neglect and dust, Oliver concludes "that a long time ago, before the old Jew was born, it had belonged to better people, and had perhaps been quite gay and handsome" (p. 115). At Sowerberry's, the hard-hearted caused Oliver to repose among the coffins; at Fagin's, he lives in an "infernal den," which Monks terms "as dark as the grave" (p. 169).

All the locales associated with the thieves are dilapidated, ruinous buildings deserted by their former owners, left to the infestation of the vermin that ply their trades by dark. In their nocturnal interview with Monks, Mr. and Mrs. Bumble are entertained in a collapsing building, "formerly used as a manufactory of some kind," which has already partly succumbed to "the rat, the worm, and the action of the damp," and "sunk down into the water beneath" (p. 249). And Jacob's Island (a prototype of Tom-all-Alone's), once a thriving place, has been reduced by losses and chancery suits to a "desolate island indeed," with roofless warehouses and ownerless houses that stand as skeletal remains of a flourishing past.

Thus the principles and settings of the daylight world are reflected by the thieves' nighttime, nightmare world. The same attitude towards human beings implicit in laissez-faire capitalism is implicit in the Malthusian Poor Laws, and in the hearts of Bumble and Mrs. Mann, Gamfield and the Sowerberrys and Mr. Fang, Bill Sikes and Noah. In this novel, the only means of avoiding the metamorphosis into a "philosopher," of which one terrible example is Monks, is to abandon altogether the pursuit of wealth. Mr. Brownlow, Mrs. Maylie, and Rose are not concerned with making money; Harry Maylie must renounce all his wordly achievements and ambitions before he can marry Rose. Oliver must inherit money; he cannot seek it through commerce. Those who do establish their life on the basis of a "practical humanist kind of Christianity"7 can extend to their fellow men free acts of charity and compassion, and so come to be regarded as almost Providential figures.

IV

As leader of the gang, Fagin plays a complex role. He is decked out in the trappings of a stereotyped stage-Jew?"red hair and whiskers, hooked nose, shuffling gait, and long gabardine coat and broadbrimmed hat"?and as a dealer in second hand clothes and trinkets pursues "the Jewish occupation par excellence."8 But Professor Harry Stone finds that despite a number of points of similarity between Fagin and contemporary stereotypes of the Jew, he does not share in most of the "traits of the literary Jew. He has no lisp, dialect, or nasal intona

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tion. . . . And Fagin goes through no act, ritual, or pattern which identifies him as a Jew. ... It seems fair to assume that Fagin was a Jew because for Dickens and his readers he made a picturesque and believable villain."9

Indeed, Fagin is much more than a stereotype. As we have already seen, in some respects he mirrors the values and activities of that English bourgeois petty capitalist society which had declared him a legal and social outcast and heretic, as the Jews had the Samaritans two thousand years earlier.

But his alienation extends even further. Bill Sikes complains that Fagin looks "like a ugly ghost just rose from the grave" (p. 121), an image with profound implications, for in Fagin Dickens also portrays the resurrection of the arch tempter. Professor Lauriat Lane, Jr. has assembled most of the pervasive references to Fagin as the devil?his red hair, his association with fire and toasting forks, his demoniacal expressions, his nicknames of "the old gentleman" (also applied, in a different context, to Mr. Brownlow) and "the devil," his power to leave no footprints behind him?and concludes that the "plot-relation between Fagin and Oliver exactly parallels that traditionally existing between Satan and mankind."10

So Fagin is at once stereotype Jew, nighttime or underworld capitalist, and devil. What makes him so consummately dangerous to Oliver, in addition to his devilish luck, is his unequalled knowledge of human nature. Like most of the others who have taken Oliver under

their protection, Fagin wants the boy for the material gain to be made from him. But his desire to cause Oliver to fall into crime for Monks'

sake seems at times much less important than his desire to corrupt Oliver for his own. Oliver's instinctive goodness challenges Fagin, who by a judicious alternation of virtuous homily and pious, example, of solitude and fellowship, of threat and unctuous affection, assails Oliver's spirit mightily:

In short, the wily old Jew had the boy in his toils; and, having prepared his mind, by solitude and gloom, to prefer any society to the companionship of his own sad thoughts in such a dreary place, was now slowly instilling into his soul the poison which he hoped would blacken it, and change its hue for ever (p. 120).

Under the pressures of this treatment Oliver weakens. Life, which at the very moment of his birth was signalled by struggle and crying, tests his inherent merit severely. Oliver's progress is no easier than Christian's; his innocent soul seems to shrink from further contamina

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tion, and to be trying to leave the body altogether, though in a different way from that of the coffin-hearted:

The boy was lying, fast asleep, on a rude bed upon the floor; so pale with anxiety, and sadness, and the closeness of his prison, that he looked like death; not death as it shews in shroud and coffin, but in the guise it wears when life has just departed; when a young and gentle spirit has, but an instant, fled to Heaven: and the gross air of the world has not had time to breathe upon the changing dust it hallowed (p. 128).

Fagin's consummate villainy, then, lies in his capacity to recognize Oliver's need for compassion. He treats his prey as a human being with psychological as well as physical wants, perverting the very texts of benevolism and natural human compassion to his own diabolic ends, just as he exploits the most un-Christian aspects of capitalism. He is therefore the focus of the several attitudes the novel sees as anti-human

and dehumanizing. Rather than ignoring Oliver's humanity, Fagin attempts instead to enlist to his own side Oliver's best instincts, his desire to please, his eagerness for friendship, his sense of humor, his loyalty. Fagin remarks to Bill: "Once let him feel that he is one of us; once fill his mind with the idea that he has been a thief, and he's ours!" (p. 126).

Though his techniques are less crude than those of others, Fagin is one of many hunters in this novel. "There is a passion for hunting something deeply implanted in the human breast," Dickens remarks when the crowd takes off after Oliver. And the first requisite for most hunters is that the object of pursuit be denied any human attributes: the passion is for hunting something. In Oliver Twist Dickens sympa? thizes with any human being subjected to this dehumanizing process; his genius for investigating the psychology of the hunted human being provides a literary parallel to the earlier artistic exploration of the psychology of the hunted animal by Stubbs and Ward. It is for this reason that Dickens' attitude towards Sikes shifts towards the close of

the novel, when he, like Oliver before him, is the dehumanized object of mob pursuit. Similarly, when Fagin is finally trapped, Dickens explores with extraordinary intensity his psychology as he becomes aware of the implacable and unremitting hatred of the trial audience: "in no one face?not even among the women, of whom there were many there?could be read the faintest sympathy with himself, or any feeling but one of all-absorbing interest that he should be condemned" (p. 358).

Two further points remain to be made about Fagin. The first is that he, like Monks and Sikes, is strangely self-consuming. All three

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are frequently on fire with inner passion and the tortures of an evil conscience. Monks has desperate fits, sometimes biting his hands and covering them with wounds; it is from one of these seizures that he dies. Fagin in the condemned cell, haggard, feverish, bloodless, seems to be similarly engaged in biting his hand. A comic parallel to this

motif is provided by Grimwig's reiterated threat to "eat his head," though it is comic only because the misanthropy which occasions this threat is tempered by considerable hidden benevolence.

In a scene which brilliantly externalizes this inner fire, Bill Sikes during his flight after murdering Nancy pauses to work like a demon to help extinguish the raging fire at a country farm:

Hither and thither he dived that night: now working at the pumps, and now hurrying through the smoke and flame, but never ceasing to engage himself wherever noise and men were thickest. Up and down the ladders, upon the roofs of buildings, over floors that quaked and trembled with his weight, under the lee of falling bricks and stones, in every part of that great fire was he; but he bore a charmed life, and had neither scratch nor bruise, nor weariness nor thought, till morning dawned again, and only smoke and blackened ruins remained (pp. 328-29).

But no amount of physical exertion can extinguish his inner fire, nor expiate his terrible crime; not for him the peaceful countryside that Oliver escapes to, but a raging inferno instead that travels with him wherever he goes.

The second point about Fagin's last days is that he drives away with curses the venerable men of his own faith who offer "their chari?

table efforts." As he has lived without mercy, so he dies without any expectation or hope of it; indeed, Fagin is already enduring the torments of the hell he sought to propagate in life. In this sense, he does enact "a pattern which identifies him as a Jew"; he is, as he repeats and repeats, "an old man," unable to conceive of any but a retributive and punitive justice, or of any life beyond mortality.

V

Newgate fiction in general, and Oliver Twist in particular, extends the Godwinian debate on the origin of human evil. The discussion between Mr. Losberne and Rose Maylie concerning Oliver's probable character, while he lies unconscious from his bullet wound, is resolved by Mrs. Maylie, who, ignorant of his true nature, nevertheless decides to try to save him: "my days are drawing to their close; and may mercy be shewn to me [God have mercy upon me MS] as I shew it to

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others!" (p. 192). Her faith is amply rewarded, for in this novel Dickens postulates the invincibility of the human soul, no matter how hard the hearts, how niggardly the food, how subtle the evil, that it meets.

Thus Oliver is rescued from a world of darkness, enclosure, deprivation, and bondage, associated with London, and restored to his rightful world of light, fields, nourishment, and freedom, associated with the country. The possibility of such a transformation of world, and with it of soul, obtains for others as well: Charley Bates, after reflecting on Fagin's example, resolves to turn his back upon scenes of the past and reform. He succeeds in the end, after hard work and steady application, and "is now the merriest young grazier in all Northampton? shire" (p. 367).

The most intense presentation of this possibility for transformation occurs when Rose Maylie and Mr. Brownlow meet Nancy (and Noah) on London Bridge. The hour, midnight, the place, the bridge, the symmetrically-constructed parties, all suggest a meeting in time and space of these two worlds, a crossing-point from night to day, and from city to country. The elements conspire to encourage reformation: a heavy mist obscures most of the buildings, warehouses, ships, and steeples, but reveals the tower of St. Saviour's and the spire of St.

Magnus, while the heavy bell of St. Peter's tolls "for the death of another day" (p. 310). Nancy's spirit prompts her too, seemingly in league with almost supernatural forces that dimly image to her, in the guise of a "coffin," what the reader can interpret as emblematic both of her past sins against humanity, rectified by her compassion for Oliver, and of her fast-approaching fate:

"... I have such a fear and dread upon me to-night that I can hardly stand."

" A fear of what?" asked the gentleman, who seemed to pity her.

"I scarcely know of what," replied the girl. "I wish I did. Horrible thoughts of death, and shrouds with blood upon them, and a fear that has made me burn as if I was on fire, have been upon me all day. I was reading a book to-night, to wile the time away, and the same things came into the print."

"Imagination," said the gentleman, soothing her. "No imagination," replied the girl in a hoarse voice.

"I'll swear I saw 'coffin' written in every page of the book in large black letters,?aye, and they carried one close to me, in the streets to-night."

"There is nothing unusual in that," said the gentleman. "They have passed me often."

"Real ones/' rejoined the girl. "This was not" (p. 312).

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OLIVER TWIST [ 219

But nothing can persuade her to cross the bridge, to renounce her companions, to betray Bill. The only thing she will take from the encounter is Rose Maylie's handkerchief, a token of her fleeting contact with the realms of light.

The significance of this token is developed throughout the novel: handkerchiefs serve as indices to the antagonistic principles, capitalistic or compassionate, that guide the action of Oliver Twist. A survey of the motif provides a convenient summary of the novel's development.

Under the careful administration of the board, Oliver is deprived not only of adequate food, but also of handkerchiefs, an inadvertently benevolent dispensation, since according to the narrator's speculation Oliver would no doubt have done away with himself if he had possessed the article in question,

by tying one end of his pocket-handerkerchief to a hook in the wall, and attaching himself to the other. To the perform? ance of this feat, however, there was one obstacle: namely, that pocket-handkerchiefs being decided articles of luxury, had been, for all future times and ages, removed from the noses of paupers by the express order of the board, in council assembled: solemnly given and pronounced under their hands and seals (p. 12).

(The Parish Seal, one recalls, is of the Good Samaritan.) In no particular is the plenitude of the thieves' life more graphically

instanced than their wealth of handkerchiefs, which festoon the upper regions of Fagin's rooms, and provide the principal article of commerce to be observed in Field Lane. These handkerchiefs are the gang's stock in trade, their wares, and so Oliver is put to work in their manufactory. But the thieves' material wealth indicates no greater wealth of compas? sion than was Oliver's lot under the Board of Guardians.

Nancy, however, treats handkerchiefs in a less materialistic way. Her motherly concern for Oliver's welfare must be manifested circum? spectly, but before he sets out with Sikes for the "crib at Chertsey,"

Nancy, "scarcely looking at the boy, threw him a handkerchief to tie round his throat" (p. 134). In this instance an expression of compas? sion, a handkerchief around the throat can instead suggest a noose, as Fagin reminds Noah. And Bill Sikes, who sports "a dirty belcher handkerchief round his neck" (p. 76), eventually ties his own halter, after failing to drown Bull's-eye by tying a handkerchief with a stone in it around the dog's neck. In such fitting ways do the villains of the novel destroy themselves, while the hero escapes the fate predicted for him by the smug gentleman in the white waistcoat.

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220 I PATTEN

A handkerchief can also be a manifestation of false gentility, as when Bumble, taking tea with Mrs. Corney, spreads one over his knees "to prevent the crumbs from sullying the splendour of his shorts" (p. 149). Or it can indicate an attempt to cover up the inner soul,

which blazes out nonetheless, as is the case with Monks' neckerchief, partly hiding a "broad red mark, like a burn or scald" (p. 315).

Thus the exchange of the handkerchief at London Bridge betokens the free exchange of charity between Rose Maylie and Nancy, so

markedly in contrast to the essentially commercial exchanges that take place elsewhere in the novel. It signifies also an exchange between two women, who for that moment, and in the sight of God, are equals. And in contrast to the handkerchief-halters that others wear, it becomes an emblem of mercy.

For Rose Maylie's handkerchief appears once again, when Bill accuses Nancy of betraying him. Her entreaty to her lover to spare her life fails, as does her plea to let her appeal to Rose and Mr. Brownlow for mercy to them both. Staggering and bleeding from Bill's savage attack, she makes one more appeal for mercy, but this time her thoughts are turned inward, on her own fate, and on her Maker:

raising herself, with difficulty, on her knees, [she] drew from her bosom a white handkerchief?Rose Maylie's own?and holding it up, in her folded hands, as high towards Heaven as her feeble strength would allow, breathed one prayer for mercy to her Maker.

It was a ghastly figure to look upon. The murderer stag? gering backward to the wall, and shutting out the sight with his hand, seized a heavy club and struck her down (pp. 322-23).

BRYN MAWR COLLEGE

NOTES

1 Humphry House, The Dickens World, 2nd ed. (London, 1942), p. 10.

2 Charles Dickens, Oliver Twist, ed. Kathleen Tillotson (Oxford, 1966), p. 1. All subsequent references are to this edition.

3 From Bentley's to 1841, the second paragraph referred to Oliver as "he," but in 1846 Dickens changed the personal pronoun to the impersonal "it," rein? forcing the similarity in attitude between the surgeon and the narrator, and providing additional support for Professor Steven Marcus's observation that "Dickens's passionate aversion to the doctrines of the political economists took expression in a style which curiously corresponds to their notion of man's relation

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OLIVER TWIST | 221

to other men and to society" (Dickens: From Pickwick to Dombey [London, 1965], pp. 66-67). Readers familiar with Professor Marcus's stimulating book

will note many points of agreement between his essay on Oliver Twist and this one.

4 Ibid., p. 59.

5 However, the converse, acting on impulse, can result in foolish mistakes, as Mr. Losberne shows on several occasions.

6 "The Young Dickens," The Lost Childhood and Other Essays (London, 1951), p. 55.

7 House, p. 131.

s Harry Stone, "Dickens and the Jews," VS, II (1959), 233.

9 Ibid., p. 234.

!0 Lauriat Lane, Jr., "The Devil in Oliver Twist," Dickensian, LII (1956), 134.

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