Professor David Peimer
Charles Dickens: Sentimentalist or Social Commentator?
Professor David Peimer - Charles Dickens: Sentimentalist or Social Commentator?
- So we are going to dive into this really interesting, fascinating writer for me, and I’m sure for many, and perplexing and really provoking in terms of conflict of ideas in a way of responding to his works. Charles Dickens, we all know, I’m sure everybody studied with a university school, read everything, you know, watched some of the movies. We know some of the works so well, and what I’m going to do is rather than try and take on, I mean, he wrote 15 novels and, you know, so many other stories and articles. I don’t want to give a taste. I would rather go in much more depth with “Oliver Twist” and then touch a little bit on “Tale of Two Cities” and “Great Expectations” very briefly at the end, but mainly in depth with “Oliver Twist.” I think it throws up so many fascinating questions which resonate for us today so powerfully, and of course, you know, the complexity and the debates around the character, the Jewish character Fagin, probably after Shylock, probably the most iconic Jewish character created in all of English literature. So I think that it’s, and so, you know, echoes with such an important resonance today for us, so a little bit just about Dickens because there are a couple of important things, and just, we’re not talking about Dickens. I’m going to mention George Orwell quite a bit because of everything written about Dickens, I found Orwell’s, he has a brilliant short essay on Dickens, and I think he teases out some of the real complexities and the fascinating ideas about the, about his, about this guy’s writing. The overall umbrella that I want to look at, you know, is, was he a sentimentalist or more social commentator, or a complicated mixture of both really, and that’s, you know, the thrust of the debate which I think affects so many people.
Obviously it’s Dickens, but it’s in our times as well. So this is the times that he’s living. He’s living absolutely during the Victorian times. He knows Disraeli, he knows so many others. You know, he’s mixing with literati, travels to America. He’s regarded as the greatest novelist of the Victorian area, the whole of the 1800s, and he was hugely popular in his own lifetime, and that’s very important ‘cause so many, you know, that we know writers, artists achieve that sort of fame later. His father was incarcerated in a debtor’s prison. That’s important because he, you know, we know so many of his books resound with child poverty, poverty, the workhouse, the industrial big city of Industrial Revolution England and so on. Dickens edited a weekly journal for 20 years, and in addition he wrote 15 novels, hundreds of short stories, and many non-fiction articles for his journal, and he was the editor. So he was so prolific and so much came out, you know, in the old days of just pen and paper. He was famous for his humour, his satire. I’m going to talk a lot about the satire and the character and how the character links to the storytelling techniques and ideas of Dickens and also his way of understanding his Victorian society of his times, mainly, of course through the big city, the dark Satanic mills, which he absolutely is not hesitant to go deep into writing about the horror of it. What’s really important is that his novels are published in monthly or weekly instalments and he almost pioneers this sort of serial publication of narrative fiction, and this is so important. Every week, if we think of obviously soap operas, Netflix, TV today, you know, what’s the next instalment?
What’s the next, how the, how it always ends on a cliffhanger, and then what’s the next, what’s the next? You know, we go on binges with our children, grandchildren, with each other. You know, we need to watch because it always plays with a cliffhanger idea right at the end. So we’ve got to watch the next one, and that’s how the series is made, and Dickens is one of the real pioneers and successful pioneers of this technique, and he’s built his own readership in England and then in America and other parts of Europe and Russia as well with Tolstoy and Dostoevsky and others. So he is really of the writing this weekly or monthly instalment people would buy, wanting to read and see what’s coming next, simple storytelling, what’s going to happen next, and he’s hugely popular because of the serialisation and prefigures so much of what we know today through, as I said, TV, Netflix, internet streaming, et cetera, and even the way the news is done, you know, they leave us on a cliffhanger, what’s the next thing on the the news. It’s a cliffhanger approach to telling stories, which partly goes way back to the ancient Greeks and especially the ancient Romans who loved that as well. He also, he also is one of the main pioneers of reading, of being almost like going on tours to read his stories to large audiences, and they get bigger and bigger as his popularity grows. He also loves putting on voices. So he puts on the voice of different characters. Let’s take one for example. There’s Oliver Twist, Mr. Bumble, who runs the workhouse. There is obviously Bill Sikes, you know, the crook, the thief. There’s Nancy, you know, who’s the prostitute in the story. There are so many, the Artful Dodger, you know, classic.
So there’s Fagin obviously, so he’s putting on accent and voices and he loves theatre. He was obsessed as a child, went to see as much as he could. So he’s acting out and he’s reading his stories, come for the next instalment next week or the week after, and he almost initiates the idea of the touring performer. In a way, he’s the first, because on such a huge scale for the times, the first sort of public performer role. You know, he’s almost celebrity, rockstar kind of image, if you like, way before it all begins in our times, of course. So this is important because he’s writing with that in mind. So the story structure, the character names, the ways of creating these evocative stories has got to keep that, I’m just using the word cliffhanger approach all the way through. It’s “Oliver Twist,” “Great Expectations,” 1859, “Tale of Two Cities” are these reading tours, they were called, and people loved and would flock because also, I guess more and more people were getting educated, could read, but even if not, they could go and listen to the story, ancient storytelling. “Oliver Twist” in 1838 is the first Victorian novel with a child protagonist. Dickens had 10 children. Long complicated story with his wife Catherine, which not going to go into today, so we can get more into the book, but he was not nice to her and he tried to have institutionalised at one point, all sorts of complications there. Queen Victoria read his, read some of his novels and his articles. 1842, he goes on his first trip to America and Canada. It’s a reading, a public reading trip, lectures, all of that, and he go, he went on two trips to America during his lifetime. 1845, he’s the editor of the “Daily News” and he advocates what he calls and I’m quoting, “principles of improvement of education and civil "and religious liberty and equal legislation.” So he’s also a writer activist.
He’s not going to storm the barricades, but he’s advocating for greater human rights, social justice and understanding of the, I will use this word thoughtfully, the underbelly that some of the horrors of Victorian industrial revolution, the workhouse, child labour, treatment of little children, orphans, treatment of prostitutes, treatment of so many people, and petty crime being punished so viciously, people being sent off to Australia and so on. So he wants religious, civil, and social equality and justice and is not scared to write about these things in his papers. He travels to Paris. He met Alexander Dumas, Victor Hugo, and others. He believed that the political aristocracy of England and that their incompetence were, as he called it, the death of England. He was obviously accused of fomenting class conflict, and well his reply was that the classes were already in conflict. So not only are these reading tours hugely popular, but hugely remunerative. He’s not, he’s earning a good buck, and these are resounding successes, “Great Expectations,” “Tale of Two Cities,” “Oliver Twist,” and so on. Okay, if we can go onto the next slide, please. So this here on the left is an image of Dickens, these are engravings, obviously, an image of Dickens at one of his readings. Then in the next picture, starting from the left, the second from the left, that’s him in a meeting in New York, which is a, where there was a philanthropist, and he agreed to be part of the philanthropic endeavour in New York City as well. Then the next one is the Nottingham one, and this is an advert for obviously 1869 of a reading of, from, of “The Pickwick Papers.” So these things were advertised all over in newspapers, I suppose what we’d call, you know, posters today or flyers, and then another reading here. The last one is the one, I think this was in New York, if I’m right, Mr. Charles Dickens reading from “Great Expectations.”
So you see, I’m trying to create this, we have to imagine the world of his time and how big it was for his times to be not only a very popular and loved reader, but performer of his reading of his books. Next slide, please. Thanks. So this is the very first cover of “The Adventures of Oliver Twist,” very first one done. The other important thing is that when the serial were published, was published every week or every two, three weeks, it was, he’d have illustrators, not just cartoonists, but illustrators who would often exaggerate, give it a more cartoon, I suppose it’s the forerunner of a comic almost, but it’s not quite just the silly comic or the naive comic rather, it’s a better phrase. You know, they’re trying to show in pictures the story as well. So it’s the first time, really, that so many pictures and engravings are linked to the serial that would’ve been the chapter that would’ve been published every week or every two or three weeks, and this on your right is what the list was for the publication. You can see February 1837, chapters one to two, March, chapter three, et cetera. So this was actually worked out, and you go through the whole two years, the series, you can read it, the one novel over two years by buying your weekly edition, and that’s the first engraving of the first cover. Fascinating that this has worked out from a financial point of view and from increasing the love of reading and popularity of these writers and their stories. Their stories had to be really on the ball, obviously, otherwise people wouldn’t come. Okay, the next slide, please. This is from “Oliver Twist”. This is from one of the very early engravings for his, for the serial publications. On the very left, the left picture first, that’s the image of Fagin, as we all know, the Jewish crook I’m going to deal with quite a bit today, and then the Artful Dodger’s in the middle, and then just on the other side is Oliver, who’s just joined the gang of pickpockets, and then on the right hand side is a more detailed engraving of an image for the Artful Dodger.
Fascinating to see how it was perceived in his own time, and obviously we can look at Fagin in much more detail, which we’re going to. We can look at the next slide please. So on the left hand side are people queuing up to buy tickets and be spectators for the reading in New York City of Dickens reading. In this case, it was for “Great Expectations,” but it, that’s the popularity I want to create this imagined world for us. In the middle is Fagin in his prison cell towards the end of the novel. Of course, end of the story, he’s thrown into prison, and of course he’s hung at the end of the book, and on the right of the, of our picture is Bill Sikes. So we get these images drawn in his time, the very first early images, how the engravers or the illustrators would’ve seen these characters in conjunction with talking to Dickens, of course so, you know, and reading his descriptions of the characters. So we get these stock types very, very clear, which I’m going to come onto and I’ll talk about Orwell’s interpretation. We cannot deny that one of the most powerful ideas of Dickens, not only this idea of cliffhanger in the storytelling, but remarkably evocative characters, these archetypes that he is creating, these social types and archetypes. He’s dealing with debtors and prisons and, you know, the streets and the filth and the poverty of the times, the extreme poverty. People are driven to crime, but he also knows that he’s got to create very popular, almost stock characters in a way to hook an audience and to hook a readership. Think of the, some of the, and he spent a huge amount of time on the names. Think of Scrooge, Ebenezer Scrooge, the very name, the Artful Dodger. Ms. Havisham, Madame Defarge with her knitting in “Tale of Two Cities,” Bill Sikes, whose dog we see in the picture here. You know, the dog’s name is Bullseye, you know, and he’s linked to the dog. He’s meant to be this kind of brutal, aggressive, mindless animal, Bill Sikes as well.
So he’s playing with all these ideas of symbols in the names which become so evocative. I mean, we cannot ever forget the Artful Dodger when we hear it once. So the characters are so important, and he knew. There’s a fantastic contemporary British playwright, Mark Ravenhill, who spent six months just coming up with a title of his play, and it’s basically about drug addicts in New York and young people and why they’re driven to drugs and loneliness and aloneness, alienation. It was a huge hit globally from South Africa to the world, and pardon my language, but it was called “Shopping and Fucking.” That’s it. Whether you shop or whether you fuck is equal in contemporary consumerist society. Everything’s up to be bought and sold. Shopping and sex doesn’t matter, and that title took him six months, and that title is what helped, I think so much that his play was performed globally and was such a huge international success. So Virginia Woolf said about Dickens, “we have to remodel our psychological grave geography "when we read Dickens and hear the character’s names.” T.S. Eliot, “Dickens excelled in character. "It’s his character that is so evocative, in the creation "of characters of greater intensity than human beings.” In other words, Eliot and Virginia Woolf were saying, because the characters are crystallised as a kind of stereotype slash archetype slash social type image, that they become unforgettable, but quite one dimensional, as Orwell would say, and he has this, what’s called in literature, episodic writing, storytelling, cliffhanger idea I mentioned, and then of course soap operas, you know, so many things have used this in our times today.
As a social commentator, we cannot forget that with the irony, with the sentimental approach to storytelling of good versus evil, goodies and baddies, you know, we think of “Little Dorrit” and others, we can’t forget that he was a fierce critic of Victorian society, of the poverty, of the social classes, social stratification, horrific, and he shocked the readers in, especially in “Oliver Twist,” 1839, with the images of poverty and child labour, to use the phrase today, and crime, you know, especially at the time when Britain is the major power of the world. He highlighted the forgotten poor, the forgotten downtrodden, the disadvantaged, the inequality, the horror of not only little kids’ lives, but many others, and he used often of course, little, little children to tell the stories, the condemned. Karl Marx interestingly wrote about Dickens. He said that Charles Dickens issued to the world more social truths than have been uttered by all the politicians and moralists of the world put together. George Bernard Shaw, “‘Great Expectations’ was more subversive "than Karl Marx’s ‘Das Kapital.’” Unforgettable characters, yet the readership couldn’t get enough of it. The characters are also idealised. That’s what I mean by, they’re almost two dimensional as opposed to psychologically three dimensional characters we’re much more used to today, and there are many sentimental scenes. There are caricature characters of course, but it’s contrasted with these ugly social truths that he’s not scared to show and describe in almost exhausting detail, far too much at times. Yes, it’s a sentimental novel. There’s a very interesting scholar, Valerie Purton, who wrote a book called “Dickens and the Sentimental Tradition,” and she argues that the sentimental scenes and the characters are crucial to create the overall power of the novels. Fascinating idea.
Have to have the sentimental to have the cliffhanger to attract the audience, the stereotype characters, so that inside you can have the social critique of the underbelly of Victorian society. The “Encyclopaedia Britannica” has a comment that despite, and I’m quoting, “patches of emotional excess, Mr. Dickens cannot really "be treated as a sentimental novelist.” “Oliver Twist,” obviously it’s an idealised portrait of a boy. He is so good that his good values are never subverted, either by the brutal orphanage that Mr. Bumble runs or by the gang of pickpockets or by being arrested by all sorts of things happening in his little boy young life or even or by being hungry and starving. He never loses this idealised good boy image. It’s a stereotype. It’s sentimental, but there’s something about that that is unforgettable, goes into us, and into our hearts. It’s fascinating, this complex contradiction between being sentimental and a social critique. The later novels obviously have idealised characters. Mentioned “Little Dorrit” where the, but the idealism in the argument of a lot of scholars highlights the aim of poignant social commentary. It’s a way to hook your audience in to use the stock characters, certainly the audience of his times. Very popular in theatre of the times as well. Going way back to ancient theatre, ancient Greece and other parts as well use the stock comic types stereotypes, hook them in, and then give the punch with a social critique. Now that’s the debate for you to decide if you agree or not. Dickens is one of the most read authors since he ever started writing over 200 years, nearly 200 years ago. His books have never been out of print ever since they started in the 1830s, 1840s. Studied everywhere as we all know. 200 motion picture films and TV adaptations have been based on his works alone.
Extraordinary, 15 novels. In a way, you know, some people have written of him as the first self-made global media star in the age of the beginning of mass culture, and of course his impersonations of his characters, his readings, the theatricality attached to marketing himself as this performer of his own works. We know of at least 470 readings that he gave between 1853 and 1870. Henry James said that he was a superficial novelist. His characters have no psychological depth. Virginia Woolf, I already mentioned. She said that the, he’s mesmerising because of this character, but they are sentimental. Orwell, George Orwell for me is the first, the most interesting and intelligent insight, I think of all. Orwell talks about in Dickens, the characters have no mental life. There isn’t an inner psychology, an inner life to character. Now this is quite popular in parts of Europe and Russia and elsewhere where characters don’t necessarily have an inner life, inner psychological life. They say things that they have to say but they can’t be conceived as talking about anything else. Can we conceive of Fagin talking about his childhood, his Jewish parents immigrating coming from here, there, whatever, what we call the backstory in literature? Can we imagine Bill Sikes talking about his past and what drove him to crime? Can we imagine Mr. Bumble running the workhouse, talking about how he grew up and his childhood, where he grew, what this was, his family, et cetera. We can’t. We can only imagine them as they are, talking what they say in the novel. They never learn. In Orwell’s phrase, they don’t learn and they don’t speculate. They are who they are. They are two dimensional. They don’t have this inner life. Can we imagine having a conversation with any of these characters? No. Can we imagine meeting the Artful Dodger?
Very hard, even meeting Oliver, eat, meeting Fagin. Can we imagine a real conversation of a cup of coffee? No, and Orwell goes writing about in this way, and I think it’s a brilliant insight that characters have no mental life, but he says yes, they are sentimental for that reason because we are so used to psychologically evolved characters, but having these stock types and having the sentimental quality that it gives rise to makes them eminently unforgettable, mesmerising to use Virginia Wolf’s phrase, and that’s what hooks us so then we can get to the social critique because we are already hooked because of his storytelling technique of cliffhangers, but also because we don’t have to worry about too much, you know, psychological depth and nuance and all the rest of it in character and cut to the chase. Physical theatre uses it a lot as well. Eisenstein, the great Russian film director, wrote an essay on Dickens’ influence on film, especially crosscutting, where you can have two or three stories running alongside each other. He’s part of beginning all of this, Dickens. Okay, if we can go on to the next slide, please. So this is an image from very early on. I’m going to go into more depth of Oliver Twist now and Fagin. The right hand side is that image slightly larger of Fagin in the debtor’s prison or the criminal’s prison just before he is going to be hung at the end of the story, these engravings from his own times, ‘cause I want to concentrate on Fagin as the one complex, fascinating character and important. This is how he described in the first opening couple of sentences as holding this burning pitchfork. You know, this is the image of the devil.
This is the image of Satan, the image of the Jew as Satan. If Dickens ever met a Jewish person, it might have been extraordinary. I’m going to come to the one or two people that he did meet very briefly, very important in his life, but these are the images that were seen in his own times, and after, you know, the first one on the right is the first engraving of Fagin, and the next one is later Kyd, who did it later, but this is what is described in the book, the nose, the beard, everything. It’s all there, it’s in English and European culture. It’s in the psyche so deep of western culture, the image of the greedy, avaricious, cunning Jewish man who has Satan in his heart. It’s all there, and this is way before the Nazis or anything like that’s. There’s a context to everything. Okay, I’m going to show the first one, the, sorry, go on to the next slide, please. So this is a much, if you go closer to the engravings that were done, these are the first engravings. Look at that image of Fagin in the prison again. Remember, these are pictures being drawn all the time to go with the writing and publication of his stories and chapters. It speaks for itself, everything I’ve said about the image, the stereotype of the Jewish character. Go on the next slide please. Now, Fagin was probably based on, most likely based on this guy Isaac Solomons, and this is from, he was a petty thief, what we call today a petty thief. He basically was caught. He, there was, it was hugely written about in Dickens’ time. It was in the newspapers, it was sensationalised that Isaac or Ikey Solomons, he ran a group of young boys and he used to get people to go out, steal, bring him the stuff, was called the fence or the receiver of stolen goods, basically hoard them and sell them for his benefit and pay the actual little boy robbers a bit as well.
He most likely, this was the image of, because it was so sensationalist in the press at the time that Dickens used for Fagin and the character, and this is the police drawing from Lambeth in London. Look at obviously immediately the image of the same Satanic Jew, the nose, everything else. We can just imagine they want to draw even more of that image. Okay, the next slide please. Now I’m going to show the very contentious and provocative 1948 film. I’m going to show a clip. 1948, David Lean, the great film director makes a version of Oliver, and he has Alec Guinness, who you know, there you can see, this is in the makeup room. Alec Guinness, that’s who he is, he’s playing Fagin. Now let’s look at the makeup. The next image, you can see the makeup starting. The nose is first the prosthetic nose, prominent, the makeup, the darkening of the facial features. We can go onto the next slide, please, Emily. Now let’s look what happens from Alec Guinness there. Then the makeup goes to the next and the next. This is 1948, an image of Fagin, the Jewish character. Three years after the end of the second World War, two and a half, two years after the horror, all the images, the pictures have come out already of the camps and what obviously became known as the Holocaust, and yet 1948, a British filmmaker with a British audience in mind and a British set of actors does this with the Jewish character of Fagin, and it’s a very, very successful in England. Arthur Rank is the producer and it is successful in England as a film. Okay, I’m going to come back to this in a moment. Just hold this image in your mind. Now we go to 19, this is 1948, three years after the war. Now we go to 1968, Lionel Bart and the great musical everybody loves, “Oliver!” The great scene. We can play it please, Emily, thank you.
Please, sir, I want some more.
What?
Please, sir, I want some more.
More? ♪ Catch him ♪ ♪ Snatch him ♪ ♪ Hold him ♪ ♪ Scold him ♪ ♪ Pounce him ♪ ♪ Trounce him ♪ ♪ Pick him up and bounce him ♪
Wait! ♪ Before we take the lad to task ♪ ♪ May I be so curious as to ask his name ♪ ♪ Oliver ♪
Oliver Twist, Mr. Bumble. You named him so yourself.
So that’s who he is. ♪ Oliver Oliver ♪ ♪ Never before has a boy wanted more ♪ ♪ Oliver Oliver ♪ ♪ Won’t ask for more when he knows what’s in store ♪ ♪ There’s a dark thin winding stairway ♪ ♪ Without any bannister ♪ ♪ Which we’ll throw him down and ♪ ♪ Feed him on cockroaches served in a canister ♪ ♪ Oliver Oliver ♪ ♪ What will he do when he’s turned black and blue ♪ ♪ He will rue the day ♪ ♪ Somebody named him Oliver ♪ ♪ Oliver Oliver ♪ ♪ Never before has a boy wanted more ♪ ♪ Oliver Oliver ♪ ♪ Won’t ask for more when he knows what’s in store ♪ ♪ There’s a long thin winding stairway ♪ ♪ Without any bannister ♪ ♪ Which we’ll throw him down and ♪ ♪ Feed him on cockroaches served in a canister ♪ ♪ Oliver Oliver ♪ ♪ What heavens pray will the governors say ♪ ♪ They will lay the blame on the one who named him ♪ ♪ Oliver ♪
What?
Okay, we can hold it there. Thank you. Okay, and then I want to go onto the next scene. We can see the images obviously of the workhouse and you know, all the images we know so well, and I’m going to come to what the music and what the musical is doing with “Oliver Twist,” this is 1968. You know, it wins a whole lot of Oscars as we know, many awards for, in terms of theatre and film also. Now I want to show the next one. I want to go straight one to showing Ron Moody’s portrayal. He was the actor, his original name was Ron Moodnick, Jewish. Donald Bart, who composed the music and lyrics, Jewish, and what did they make of Fagin? And this was scene of what Ron Moody was doing, and in this classic scene, “Pick a Pocket or Two,” okay, thank you, Emily. Go ahead and play it. ♪ In this life one thing counts ♪ ♪ In the bank large amounts ♪ ♪ I’m afraid these don’t grow on trees ♪ ♪ You’ve got to pick a pocket or two ♪ ♪ You’ve got to pick a pocket or two boys ♪ ♪ You’ve got to pick a pocket or two ♪ ♪ Large amounts don’t grow on trees ♪ ♪ You’ve got to pick a pocket or two ♪
Let’s show Oliver how to do it, my dears. Just a game, Oliver, just a game. ♪ Why should we break our backs ♪ ♪ Stupidly paying tax ♪ ♪ Better get some untaxed income ♪ ♪ Better pick a pocket or two ♪ ♪ You’ve got to pick a pocket or two boys ♪ ♪ You’ve got to pick a pocket or two ♪ ♪ Why should we all break our backs ♪ ♪ Better pick a pocket or two ♪ ♪ Robin Hood what a crook ♪ ♪ Gave away what he took ♪ ♪ Charity’s fine ♪ ♪ Subscribe to mine ♪ ♪ Get out and pick a pocket or two ♪ ♪ You’ve got to pick a pocket or two boys ♪ ♪ Robin Hood was far too good ♪ ♪ He had to pick a pocket or two ♪ ♪ Take a tip from Bill Sikes ♪ ♪ He can whip what he likes ♪ ♪ I recall he started small ♪ ♪ He had to pick a pocket or two ♪ ♪ You’ve got to pick a pocket or two boys ♪ ♪ You’ve got to pick a pocket or two ♪ ♪ We could be like old Bill Sikes ♪ ♪ If we pick a pocket or two ♪
And we can hold that there. Thanks, thanks Emily. So this just gives us an image of 1968 version of the musical. Ron Moody, Ron Moodnick, who played, plays Fagin, he said, at first I never wanted to do it. I went to see the Alec Guinness film, which I’m going to show the clip of in a second. I found it to be so antisemitic. It was unbearable and it was made in 1948, but Lionel Bart is as Jewish as I am and we both felt an obligation to get Fagin away from the vicious stereotype and instead make him what he really is, a crazy old Father Christmas gone wrong, to focus more on the comedy than him being a villain. Lionel Bart, just out of interest, was born Lionel Begleiter. He was the youngest of seven children in the family. His father was a tailor and the family had escaped the pogroms of the Ukrainian Cossacks, and Lionel is the son, you know, who wrote and composed, wrote the libretto and composed. Six Academy Awards, including Best Picture and so on. Now, the next clip I’m going to show is the 1948 film, David Lean. First, Oliver meets the Artful Dodger and then takes Oliver to meet the Alec Guinness Fagin. Yeah, thanks.
Staying in London?
Yes.
Got any lodgings?
No.
Money?
No.
Hungry?
Yes.
Follow me.
It’s an image from Fritz Lang’s “Metropolis,” somewhat.
[Artful Dodger] Come here.
Who’s the other one?
[Artful Dodger] A new pal.
Come in.
Wait here. Do you want him? Come on in.
The Artful Dodger, Fagin, and Oliver Twist coming in.
[Artful Dodger] Here he is, Fagin, my friend Oliver Twist.
Are they glad to see you, Oliver, they? Aren’t we, my dears?
[Pickpockets] Yeah, yeah.
Hey, how far have you come?
I’ve been walking for seven days.
Walking for seven days?
Beak’s order, eh?
Do you know what the beak is, my dear?
A bird’s mouth, sir.
Sit down, all of you. A beak is a magistrate, my dear. Dodger, take off the sausages. Sit down, Oliver. A great many of them, ain’t there, my dear?
Yes sir.
We just knocked them out already with the wash. I hope you’ve been at work, Dodger.
Oh.
Good boy, good boy.
And three wipes.
Genius worker, ain’t he, Oliver?
Very indeed, sir.
You’d like to make pocket handkerchiefs as easily as the Artful Dodger, wouldn’t you, my dear?
Yes, if you teach me, sir.
We will, my dear, we will. To work, hey, hey.
Yeah, we can hold it there, Emily. Thank you. So this is the Alec Guinness version, 1948, with David Lean, great director. It was attacked for being very antisemitic, obviously, and it was also but done three years after the war. What’s fascinating about this is when, I’m going to go jump now in time for a moment, back to when after Dickens had written “Oliver Twist” and he sold his house in London to a Jewish gentleman, and the Jewish man, his wife Eliza Davis, years later wrote Dickens a letter, and in the letter she said that he had perpetuated one of the worst stereotypes of the Jewish people imaginable, on and on and on and so on, and first Dickens got the letter, and because it was the wife of the man who had just, who had bought his house a few years before he read, and he first got defensive about the letter. Had he ever met a Jewish man, had he ever not? Shakespeare, I’m sure had never met a Jewish man when he wrote Shylock. It’s, remember the Jews were banned, were, you know, were kicked out of England for 300 years so, and not there during Shakespeare’s times. So was he ever friendly, did he know a Jewish man? Dickens, never mind Shakespeare. So he has an image in his head, which comes from the Western society, the history, the memory, the trope we all know about, and Judy and many others discussed it much better than me, and this is the image that perpetuates greed, avarice, cowardice, selfishness, the money of course, the Satanic look, the nose, the beard, you know, everything the costume is, it’s all there. Couldn’t get him more steered up. What’s shocking though is that it’s three years after the war and David Lean says, no, we’re going to go for it, we’re going to do it.
What the hell? Because the make makeup artist that you saw in that first, one of the earliest slides said, whoa, maybe this is going too far. We shouldn’t, and Lean, the director said, no, push it all the way, and Alec Guinness did as well. He’s just the actor, of course. Anyway, she writes this letter to Dickens, Mrs. Eliza Davis, and Dickens, after being defensive initially then wrote back and said, my God, I never intended to. Some of my best friends are Jewish, you know, all the classic lines. What he did was he halted the reprinting of the novel. It was halfway through and he altered the text. The second half of the novel, which hadn’t yet been typeset, and Fagin is called the Jew 257 times in the first 38 chapters, but very few times in the remaining nearly 50% of the novel, 257 times he’s called the Jew. Bill Sikes, Mr. Bumble, Oliver, whoever, all the other characters, none of ‘em are called by their religious or ethnic name or racial name. They’re just called by their name. This one is the only one. Same as if you look at Shylock in “The Merchant of Venice,” the number of times he’s called the Jew is so many times, I forget the number offhand but, whereas nobody else is called the Christian, the Catholic, the Protestant, the Venetian, whatever. You know, they’re called by their first name or by their public role, the Duke, et cetera. So this is happening, this is three years after the Holocaust that this is done. This film was also showed in Berlin in 1948, '49, and there was a small protest of about 50, 80 people outside the cinema who objected, and they went and wrote to the British military authorities, but because of the financial dealings they had with Mr. Arthur Rank, because nevermind all the details, the film went ahead, but the American authorities refused to let it go to America because there was serious objection by rabbis and other Jewish organisations in America.
So this was censored for quite a while and only allowed later in the States, but in Britain it was fine and quite a commercial success, and it was shown in Berlin because the British military authorities basically sat on the fence and allowed it to be shown. So, you know, there’s so much more research done around it, the fascinating intersections of politics and culture and history and an iconic image of a stereotype of a character, in this case obviously the Jewish character from “Oliver Twist.” There’d been many others, of course, the Turkish character, there’d been, you know, and so on, but this is the one that, and Dickens wrote in a letter back to Mrs. Davis. He said that I had known, I’m paraphrasing here, but basically he did not want to impugn anything about the Jewish people, and he never mentioned the Jewish religion in the novel hardly, you know, but he said that unfortunately many people of the Jewish race were these petty criminals of the times and received stolen goods and then went on to sell it, and she wrote back and said yes, because they couldn’t get other jobs. They were banned from getting other jobs. Don’t you know this, Mr., I’m paraphrasing these letters here. Anyway, Dickens felt terrible, ashamed, and then he stopped, he basically had half the novel, the second half changed, which is why if we read a more contemporary version, you’ll see that in the second half of the novel, he’s hardly called the Jew, but in the first half he’s called 257 times the Jew Fagin. So this is a fascinating bit of literary history, if you like, to add into this here.
When Ron Moody saw this, he said, I can’t act this, you know, but he and Lionel Bart changed it to this crazy foolish, lovable Father Christmas type figure that I showed you earlier on. Extraordinary how you can change and manipulate, in the best sense of the word, the social iconic image of probably the second most evocative literary image of the Jewish character in all literature in English. There was also, by the way, this film was used by the lawyers for Veit Harlan. Veit Harlan directed Jud Suss, which was the horrific antisemitic film of the Nazi period, and Veit Harlan’s lawyer said, well, if the British can show this, well anybody can show this in Berlin in 1948, how can you possibly accuse Veit Harlan, the director, of making Jud Suss? It helped Veit Harlan’s case and charges against him were dropped. Wasn’t the only thing, of course, but it brings the debate of politics, culture, art, it brings it into a fascinating triangle of which I think still resonates so powerfully for us today. How do we show, what do we do from the original to today, interpretations, you know, do we have, should we allow free speech, shouldn’t we? Are there limits on, all the debates come back of free speech and censorship, and for a fact it influenced Dickens in his final novel, “Our Mutual Friend.” He has a character called Riah, which, you know, everybody will know better than me means friend in Hebrew, and he’s so good. He’s the opposite of Fagin here. He’s such a goody goody. He’s an improbable saint almost, it’s ridiculous. So if Dickens felt so ashamed that he was so sentimental and two dimensional, he creates this character in his last novel, and he has the character Riah in “Our Mutual Friend” say, “men say this is a bad Greek, but there are good Greeks. "This is a bad Turk, but there are good Turks. "Not so with the Jews. "They take the worst of us as samples of the us, "and then they say all Jews are alike.”
So he wrote that into his last novel as part of the speech for Riah character. Mrs. Davis, going back to her, sent Dickens a copy of the Bible in Hebrew and English and expressed her gratitude 'cause she wrote there that he was one of the great supporters of the underdog, of social justice, of improving the lot of orphans, children, poverty, starving people living in these terrible conditions, which David Lean shows, you know, far better than Arnold Bart, but there’s the flip side of it as well. So this is a long line of literary Jewish villains, the mystery play Barabbas, the cutthroat in Chaucer, Marlowe’s terrific character, the Jew of Malta, and of course Shakespeare’s Shylock, but what’s fascinating is that none of this was probably drawn from reality. All these writers probably never met a Jew. Did Dickens, other than a transactional conversation about buying his house and not with Mr. Davis? You know, he hardly ever speaks about it. Just remember, Jews were expelled from England from 1290 to 1664 when Oliver Cromwell lets Jews back. So Fagin is the traditional mediocre Jewish bogeyman. He’s the Jewish man who is a version of Satan in his heart, the grotesque, crafty, greedy, avaricious Jew who’s cunning and selfish, and Dickens introduces the villain in that image I showed, standing with a fork and on fire in his hand. That and red hair, Dickens describes it as villainous, repulsive face with matted red hair. That’s the description in the book, and red hair was worn by the devil in mediaeval mystery plays.
So this myth is so deep in the psyche of the western world. I’ve given this whole, you know, the story of what happened with the novel, you know, and what happened in Berlin interestingly afterwards. It’s fascinating to look at Isaac Solomons’ life, and eventually he was sent to Australia and the penal colony, you know, all of this, and I’m sure Dickens, this is all happening, ‘cause Artful Dodger gets sent to the penal colony in “Oliver Twist”. So what’s interesting is that, again, going back to Orwell, we can’t imagine having a conversation with Fagin. Imagine sitting down, we can’t, it’s too, as Orwell said, there’s no mental inner life for the character, and that’s a sentimentalised creating of a stereotype, in this case, a vicious stereotype. It can be the goody stereotype. Oliver, there isn’t a moment when he thinks anything bad or horrible of anybody. So this is the image of the Jew, of course. What’s interesting is that after he got the letter, Dickens stopped acting out the sort of the cliched East European Jewish accent with Fagin when he read, when he would go on his reading tours. He stopped the nasal accent that he put on for the reading of Fagin, and he risked 'cause people would love it and they’d want it. They want to see the vicious stereotype, but he didn’t. Small gesture, but it did, I suppose, lessen some of the income and some of the audience coming to watch his performances. Okay, I wanted to share this because it captures for me the essence of Dickens in terms of “Oliver Twist,” Fagin is that, it’s a complicated and fascinating combination of what was called the picaresque novel, which is taking the rogue character, the outsider, usually from a lower class, but who is actually the upstart or the parvenu, who upwards many others. There’s that character, there’s the sentimental story of the goodie versus the baddie.
There’s character without an inner life. There’s the cliffhanger in the storytelling of “Oliver Twist,” and many of his stories. All of this together creates a more complex debate, and fascinating for me today of how we read Dickens. I found it very hard as a student I remember, but then I couldn’t put down, I thought, why can’t I put these things down reading them? I just wanted to get to the end, what’s next, what’s next? It’s that story, that binge connection like Netflix today so, or the soap opera. It’s, you know, reading it all those years ago and looking at it again in preparation for today, it’s so hard to put down, so hard to not read, and I think we have to celebrate. There’s, this is a remarkable entertainer writer who’s interested in a different approach to literature, complicated, especially with Fagin, tries to make up for it with a character Riah in his last novel, “Our Mutual Friend,” is aware trying to show the social critique of a horrors of industrialization, of the Industrial Revolution in London with these young boys and others, and maybe there is something in a Virginia Woolf, and all we’ll say is that you almost need this lack of inner life, this lack of a mental real inner life so that you can go accept it as sentimental in order to get the point of the social critiques of poverty and the horrific underbelly of Industrial Revolution England. That’s an argument, it’s a debate. It’s fascinating 'cause how do we play out with these ideas today is what really fascinates me. Whether we are writing about whatever culture in the world, Jewish character or other characters, how do we take on this fascinating grip between history, culture, portrayals of characters, 'cause they are just, they’re fictional characters, but they were based on old, old myths in the Western psyche that go way back and are so powerful, and I’d just like to play out with the last one if we can show the very last, actually no, I think it’s a bit late, so let’s hold it here.
Okay, a little bit on “Great Expectations,” “Tale of Two Cities,” but there was very little. “Tale of Two Cities” really just brings in the idea of history and characters, you know, three characters in love and the massive shifts and changes of history. So, and Dickens is trying to take on in one of the great novels about the French Revolution, the complex ideas and situations of them, you know, through Madame Defarge knitting as the heads fall and, you know, so many others, the guillotine. I don’t think we can just dismiss Dickens as just a sentimental writer or just as a good entertainer, you know, good stories, but there’s nothing really in it or just as antisemitic. I think we need to see him in the context of the, for me, the richness of the ongoing debates that I’ve just wanted to touch on today. Okay, thanks very much, and now we can go to questions.
Q&A and Comments:
Sonya, hi. Oh, that’s very kind. Thank you, take your time and don’t rush them. Thank you. I’ve had a conversation and yeah, I’m going to, those are just meant to be tasters to be frank, but I will come back to some of them, especially Blake and some others to go into more detail, I think a slightly later stage.
I think next week I’m doing Oscar Wilde, if I remember, where we’ll go into much more detail with just one or two things, like today I just really went into, you know, one of his many novels, of Dickens’ novels, and we can get more of a richness with that depth.
Thanks for that, Sonya. I appreciate and others who’ve emailed me, so many wonderful comments, thank you.
Sandra, another great author-performer was Mark Twain. Absolutely. We get onto America, Mark Twain.
Q: Yona, isn’t the form of the epistolary novel, Pamela, already a precursor?
A: Yes, great point, thank you. The suspense structure, what we call today, the cliffhanger. Anne, there’s a wonderful film about Dickens, yes. Oh, a Canadian Ireland one.
Yes, “The Man Who Invented Christmas.” I haven’t seen it, but thank you for reminding me. It’s Christopher Plummer, thanks Anne.
Elliot, thank you very much. Canada Day. Thank you very much. Appreciate your kind comments. Paulette, Dickens one of my favourites. I will get back to Coleridge and Wordsworth, definitely. Thanks Paulette.
Q: Judy, did he write the whole novel before he started serialising or did he write it?
A: He wrote it as he, as far as we know, he wrote it as he went along. He, as far as we know, for some of the novels, he would draw out the basic plot outline, what we’d call in film storyboarding as you know, but a basic, or synopsis rather, a basic synopsis or plot outline, and go, but I think “Oliver Twist” was his second novel and I don’t, I haven’t found that he had a whole storyline worked out. What he was very aware of how you could use serialising for the cliffhanger and the importance of the character’s names and to stretch it out and have a lot of detail, which we might get a bit bored with today, you know, of the physical descriptions of buildings, streets, the city, other things, even characters, you know, cut to the chase a bit more today. So he’d stretch it out obviously to keep the readership interested. I think he wrote more as he went along. The other technique that he was brilliant at, I suppose today we’d called it a pivot, but he would bring in interesting side stories to divert the main story, then come back to it. That’s what Eisenstein spoke about, that he could write two or three stories at the same time, and Eisenstein wanted to take that technique, and Eisenstein’s a fantastic article on Dickens, and put that into filmmaking. You can, you know, Tarantino, many others do it two or three stories, same time.
Q: Hillary, how was “Great Expectations” a person?
A: Great question. I think what some of these writers meant when they said that he was because it refused, the Victorian readership would’ve been middle or upper class educated to read, and they would’ve been, maybe they would’ve been intrigued or fascinated, but shocked from what the evidence that we find in newspapers and other letters that he was not scared to take on this horror of what we call today child labour, extreme poverty, terrible sanitation, terrible education, terrible conditions for, that so many people lived in, and of course the factory, the workhouse. Dickens himself had to work a lot in a workhouse when he was a kid after his father was incarcerated. So it’s subversive in the way of getting away from the middle and upper class image of Great Britain conquering the world, colonising everywhere, the sort of image that was projected of the great civilising nation. In David Livingston’s phrase, England had a mission of the three C’s to go out into the world. Christianize, civilise, colonise, and the exploitation, the sheer exploitation of child labour and many, many other things. Okay, and subversive in that way, I guess. Maxine, Dickens carried out his own social work.
He collaborated, yes, Angela Coutts. She was the one, that image that I showed of him at a meeting, that was a meeting with Angela Coutts, when I say the philanthropist. Second wealthiest woman of her day after the Queen, to run a rehab centre for fallen women, exactly. Fantastic, thanks for that, Maxine, which I had in my notes but left out. Thank you.
Dickens designed the programme. He ran the centre for 10 years actually. He organised, recruited staff, as you say. He ran the programme, he took an interest in women’s affairs and he was pushing for equality and the vote and equality in the social and legal context. Served his 20 years as editor and writing articles for social justice, what we’d call today broadly social justice.
Sandy, Fagin uses pitchfork, toasting fork to feed the boys in his employ. Yeah, I know, hardly satanic, but that image of the pitchfork is that obviously, you know the Satanic cliche. Sylvia, ah, I hope you’re well in Argentina. Thank you also for your kind emails.
Q: Would you say that his father’s prison experience also had an influence?
A: Yes. I think that he under, because he also was in a workhouse, as I said, he knew these worlds. I don’t think he was glorifying them, but he knew the underbelly of this Victorian industrialised society in the home front. You know, others wrote about, you know, Conrad, but they wrote about England going out conquering the world, but he was writing, well what’s happening in our backyard.
Obviously “Tale of Two Cities” is, you know, the idealism of the French Revolution. Janet, the image of Fagin is still with us. Absolutely the antisemitic mural endorsed by Corbin and many others. That is an iconic image. You have Shylock I think at the, you know, probably the biggest image, but interestingly Shylock is shown how much the other, the aristocrats and the business leaders of Venice and the stock exchange are so cruel to him. You know, we see it and we experience it and at the end everything is taken from Shylock, but here we don’t have any of that. We don’t get the undeserved misfortune that Fagin backstory, his life, where he came from, why, how he’s like this, what happened? There’s none of it. Shakespeare gives that and that’s what all we would call the mental inner life of a character. We would get something of that backstage in Shylock in Shakespeare, but we don’t get it in Dickens, and that’s a major criticism, which leads to the sentimental and the two-dimensional character or stereotype, but it also in part of the debate, it’s the sentimental that allows us to be hooked into the story and the bigger social critique.
Sandy, I remember correctly, Dickens was very disturbed. Yep, and he wrote, yeah, that’s it exactly. It was “Our Mutual Friend,” the last novel that he wrote, and the character was Riah. Exactly. The devil always has the best lines and we always prefer rather a villain than an improbable saint of a character. We always prefer that.
Karen, worth noting that Dickens mixed with Disraeli. Yes, and he was friends and he mixed in salons and club, I guess other meetings, Disraeli and others, other political, business, and intellectual leaders in London of the time.
Fascinating question, Gail, and hope you’re well in Joberg. I haven’t managed to find what Alec Guinness said about the portrayal. He was convinced by David Lean, his interviews with David Lean, where David Lean said he was sticking as truthfully as possible to Dickens’ original description and descriptions of the times, and that’s actually true because it does fit with Dickens’ description. I don’t think Dickens thought very much further than what we see. You know, it is just taken for granted almost by Dickens, and it was only through Mrs. Davis’s letter that he got a shock.
Q: What did Alec Guinness say?
A: I haven’t found, but David Lean wanted to show a kind of gritty realism together with the stock or the sentimental in the two dimensional characters.
Ed, Ron Moody as Fagin would be probably criticised as still antisemitic, yeah. You know, and he was, Ron Moody, but he defended it by saying, look, I’m just, you know, showing like this silly little old Father Christmas character who’s actually a comic relief character, not the villain. It’s a complicated debate. Fascinating.
Q: Sam, what’s the title of the Orwell essays?
A: Oh God, it’s just slipped my mind, but if you Google Orwell and the essay on Dickens, you’ll find it. I forget the exact title name now. It was a bit late the other night when I read it again, but that’s, it’s a brilliant and it’s a short, I think it’s about a four, five page essay, six page.
Ed, Netflix suffers from this, from identical, dangerous defects, powerful tropes appeal to susceptible public and social media. Yes, because I think social media and Netflix and all these others, they tend towards a simplification of character, the two dimensional, sentimental, the cliffhanger, so many similar approaches, but they don’t have the social critique that Dickens has. They just focus, and so they perpetuate so many stereotypes. That for me is how so much of these quick fix versions of social media, TikTok, internet, so many of these other things, Netflix is the same thing, but some do. So on the other hand, I’m hesitant to say it’s all just social. It’s not, ‘cause also they’re building on things that have existed for, you know, centuries before, if we take the example of Fagin and the stereotype. I think it’s really important that one can use these techniques as well. You know, I remember watching “Fauda,” the fantastic Israeli series and it uses the same techniques, but it is so complex with Israeli and Israeli characters who mostly work for the Mossad and their families in relation to Arab characters, and it’s, the writers and the actors are trying to be really complex in “Fauda” for example, but using these techniques that I’ve been talking about. So one can with, you know, depending on how one uses them. Dickens had to rewrite the end of “Great Expectations” 'cause readers were upset with the ending. Thanks.
Q: Janet, didn’t he visit synagogues during Simchat Torah and comment on what he thought was poor behaviour?
A: That’s interesting, Janet. I didn’t, I don’t know about that. I’ll have a look, thank you. Myrna, too short. How about part two? Well, there’s so many others we can look at out of, just see so many others. Let’s see how we go after Oscar Wilde next week, but thank you.
Carol, it was Samuel Pepys who commented on the synagogue.
Ah, Simchat Torah. Okay, thanks. Okay, well thank you very much everybody and Emily, thanks again.
Hope everybody has a great rest of the weekend, and I think that’s it for the questions. Oh no, there’s one or two more.
Ingrid, several Korean series on Netflix, corruption, greed, abuse of power are the major themes. Yep, and I would just add in this idea of, you know, exploitation, which he’s really get to use contemporary language of what he’s really getting at with the workhouse, the orphans kids, and if we really imagine today in a Western society, kids who are orphaned in a workhouse in his own times, it was just, it was swept under the carpet, and you know, if we get to the original, you know, he’s not hesitant to go, you know, to the belly of that beast.
Thanks everybody. Hope you’re well, and have a great rest of the weekend. Thanks, Emily.