As acurrency of cultural and political exchange, ‘antisemitism’ is now probably completelyworthless – coined, clipped, counterfeited, devalued and Greshamed to buggery& back – able to mean absolutely anything and nothing, a function of the cynicismof its users.  Which is not to say thatthe history of 1900 years of hatred and violence to which it was the mealy-mouthed pseudo-scientific climax, isn’t coming back to bite our enshittified society soonerand nastier than we think. So, in a modest spirit of cultural enquiry, Irecently went back to one of the great unacknowledged disgraces of our nationalliterature and found myself wondering, once again, why on earth I continue togive shelf-space to Charles Dickens’ Oliver Twist.

Because,gentle reader, it absolutely reeks of it.

Those onlyfamiliar with the Bart stage musical (shortly to be revived in the West End, which may make for some interesting reviews) andHarry Secombe’s comic turn as Bumble The Beedle, may find this assertionsurprising.  Is Ron Moody’s Fagin reallyJewish at all?  What about my old mucker RowanAtkinson’s portrayal – all skin-crawling villainy and comic grotesque?  Read the book, and you’re in for a nastysurprise.

In essence,Oliver’s universe starts out conventionally improving – a young boy’s moral characteris a clean slate, contested by the blandly good-humoured beneficence of Mr Brownlowand the repellently fascinating but minutely dissected evil of Bill Sikes’ criminalpsychopath, Nancy’s abusive victimhood and Jack Dawkins’ cheerfully amoralgangsterism that’s the great-grandfather of Bugsy Malone via Marcel Carne’sLacenaire   Then things turn nasty.  The monster in the fictional spaceis Dickens’ portrayal of the various Jewish characters, and specifically Fagin.  Because Dickens extends that conventionalmoral universe with all the tropes of racism at his disposal. And no, it justwon’t wash that Dickens self-edited by removing numerous instances of the word ‘Jew’.  What he left in is a catalogue of every antisemitictrope you’d rather not be thinking about. Dickens’ Jews all talk in comically adenoidal accents, look out for eachother to the cost of their English host-culture, and are perpetually engaged inopaquely nefarious enterprise. 

Allthis is prologue to Fagin, whose portrayal occupies the depths of the antisemiticimagination.  Dickens descends into thismidden in three distinct steps.

Firstly, hedescribes Fagin as a reptilian life-form inhabiting sub-human depths far beneaththe moral landscape occupied by the Anglo characters – good, corruptible orevil as they may be.  So far, so antisemitic.

Secondly, Dickensshows Fagin deliberately encompassing the corruption of the (eminently corruptible) English. When Noah Claypole comes to London, Fagin invites him to pick one of hiscatalogue of criminal rackets – robbing small children of their pennies.  It’s easy money and if persisted in can makeyou a good living.  It’s also worth abrief excursus to understand the position that mugging defenceless infantsoccupies in the moral universe of 19th century fiction. 

Readersonly familiar with the stage-musical reinvention of Les Miserables – a 2-hourgallop through selected narrative highlights of a 1500-page novel – may imaginethat Jean Valjean’s redemption begins directly after his theft of Bishop Myriel’ssilver candlesticks.  Victor Hugo hadother ideas – in the novel, after receiving the bishop’s forgiveness, Valjeanpromptly goes out and mugs a waif for the child’s last sou.  It is the nadir of his depravity and thecrime for which Javert pursues him across decades, aflame with therighteousness of his cause – defender of the defenceless.  Valjean’s crime is something akin to the sinagainst the Holy Ghost, redolent of Matthew 18:6, an act that prevents the possibilityof Christian redemption.  And this is also the crime by which Dickens has Fagin corrupt his new apprentice. 

And finally:  Dickens’ portrayal of Fagin’s last hours ondeath row is a bravura piece of writing. It teases out the creeping minute-by-minute horror of the approach ofpersonal extinction in the mind of the condemned man  And it does so with a care and precision of tonethat permits the reader to experience absolutely no fellow-feeling or sympathy forFagin at the imminence of his death.  Dickenspulls off a sort of novelistic totalitarianism, forbidding the reader to pityFagin because in Dickens’ view he’s simply not human like you or me.  

You cannotclose Oliver Twist without feeling defiled by having touched pitch andlicked it off your fingers every time you turn a page - which is an odd sort ofacknowledgement of Dickens’ implacable brilliance as a writer. Read it by all means,and then ask yourself not should we cancel our national treasure, jolly musicaladaptation and all, rather would you really give this shelf-space if it appearedin any other work by any other writer?