“A new study by an Australian academic, John Waller, argues that Dickens took his story from the memoirs of a poorhouse boy, Robert Blincoe, published in 1832, five years before Oliver. The Real Oliver Twist (Icon Books, £16.99) may have uncovered a source of Dickensian detail, but no affinity of character.
As for Fagin, there is no telling where he came from. Dickens admitted that he knew no Jews at the time. Yet, like Shakespeare before him, he allowed the villain a certain endearing avuncularity. One feels Fagin’s sorrow as gives up Oliver to the custody of Sikes. Rachel Portman’s attractive score studiously underplays the accompaniment of Jewish music to Jewish misery.
Ben Kingsley endows the villain with tragic inevitability: a lonely old man, scrabbling for trinkets of security and a little human warmth. The story ends in his prison cell, gallows rising in the square outside. Instead of Dickens’ happy ending, showing Oliver’s acceptance into polite society, the apotheosis is cruel and appropriately sanctimonious. In this, and most other ways, the film is true to the spirit of the story and of the author’s ambiguities: for the blurring of anti-semitism is something in which Dickens himself ultimately conspired.
In 1860, Dickens sold his London home to a Jewish banker, James Davis. ‘The purchaser of Tavistock House will be a Jew Money-Lender,’ he told a friend. Some time later he added: ‘I must say that in all things the purchaser has behaved thoroughly well, and that I cannot call to mind any occasion when I have had money-dealings with anyone that have been so satisfactory, considerate and trusting.’
He took quite a shine to the banker’s wife, Eliza Davis, who reproached him in a letter of 1863 for the ‘great wrong’ he had committed in Oliver Twist. Two years later, Dickens created in Our Mutual Friend the noble character of Riah, an elderly Jew who finds jobs for downcast young women in Jewish-owned factories. ‘I think there cannot be kinder people in the world,’ exclaims one of the girls. ‘There is nothing but good will left between me and a People for whom I have a real regard and to whom I would not willfully have given an offense,’ wrote Dickens to Mrs Davis.
He set about revising Oliver Twist in light of her criticisms, removing almost all mention of ‘the Jew’ from the last 15 chapters. In one of his last public readings in 1869, a year before his death, Dickens cleansed Fagin of stereotypical caricature. ‘There is no nasal intonation; a bent back but no shoulder-shrug: the conventional attributes are omitted,’ or so the reports have it.
This attempt to make amends redeems Oliver Twist, for me, from the index of anti-Semitic English literature, a list that stretches from Chaucer through Marlow to Trollope and Belloc, Agatha Christie and T S Eliot. It was certainly Dickens’ final intention that ‘the Jew’ should be incidental in Oliver Twist and in his film Polanski has given the story a personal dimension that renders it irreproachably universal.“