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WHEN SIKES AND NANCY RECAPTURE OLIVER , in Dickens's Oliver Twist , intending to return him to the gang of thieves, Sikes warns Oliver against crying out to passersby, announcing that his dog will go for Oliver's throat if he so much as speaks one word. Looking at the dog, who is eyeing Oliver and growling and licking his lips, "with a kind of grim and ferocious approval," Sikes tells Oliver, "He's as willing as a Christian, strike me blind if he isn't!" (109; ch. 16). Sikes of course simply intends to say that his dog is as good as human, but Dickens's joke, in the context of the novel, is a chilling one. Sikes's bloodthirsty dog is as willing as the novel has shown many a professed Christian to be to exercise brute power over the weak and helpless, to drive Oliver into a life of crime, and to commit physical violence against him. In the course of the novel, Dickens shows what professed Christians have been willing to do to the poor and invites his readers to contemplate what they as Christians should instead be willing to do. Oliver Twist is of course deeply concerned with the condition of England's poor, and Dickens invokes the idea of Christianity as a rhetorical tool through which to make the social commentary that is at the novel's moral center.
Yet given the sympathy that Dickens expresses in Oliver Twist for the poor and the socially marginal, the portrayal of the Jewish underclass villain, Fagin, has perturbed some readers almost since the novel's first publication. Oliver at first sees Fagin as a benevolent gentleman, sheltering, feeding, and training homeless children-but of course he is a thief, a pimp, and a fence for stolen goods. Though Fagin proffers himself as a surrogate parent to Oliver, he is also villainous and corrupt, and his hideousness is made specifically Jewish. Not only does Dickens pointedly and repeatedly term him "the Jew," but he emphasizes aspects of his character familiar from the antisemitic tradition, namely his miserliness, his greed, his exotic and strange appearance, his effeminacy, his obsequiousness, his cowardliness-and the size of his nose. In 1863, Mrs. Davis, a Jewish acquaintance of Dickens's, wrote to complain politely about...