Scholars have discussed the topic of racism in the works of 19th-century English author Charles Dickens, with increased focus in the 20th and 21st centuries. While Dickens was known to be highly sympathetic to the plight of the poor and disadvantaged in British society, like many other authors of the period he expressed attitudes in his journalism and works which have been interpreted as racist and xenophobic. Dickens frequently defended the privileges held by Europeans in overseas colonies and was dismissive of what he termed "primitive" cultures. The Oxford Dictionary of English Literature describes Dickens as a nationalist who frequently stigmatised non-European cultures.[1]
Some scholars have disputed the charge that Dickens was racist. Dickens scholar Priti Joshi, for example, maintains that he never advocated any form of scientific racism in his works, but held extreme antipathy for non-European peoples, and steadfastly believed in their assimilation into Western culture.[2] Other scholars, such as Grace Moore, claim that Dickens' racism abated in his later years, while historian Patrick Brantlinger and journalist William Oddie have instead claimed that his racism intensified during that period. Moore contends that while in his later years Dickens became more aware of the mistreatment of non-European peoples under the system of colonialism, he never lost his antipathy for their culture, consistently maintaining that it was inferior to Western culture.[3]
Controversies over Dickens' racism
Many scholars have commented on the contrast between his support for liberal causes at home and lack of such support for liberal causes abroad. In a private letter to Emily de la Rue, Dickens wrote the following passage on Indians: "You know faces, when they are not brown; you know common experiences when they are not under turbans; Look at the dogs– low, treacherous, murderous, tigerous villains." Dickens also called for the "extermination" of the Indian people and applauded the "mutilation" of the "wretched Hindoo" who were punished by being blown from the guns for the involvement in the Indian Rebellion of 1857.[4] In his 1990 biography, Peter Ackroyd noted Dickens' sympathy for the poor, opposition to child labour, involvement in campaigns for sanitation reform, and opposition to capital punishment. He also asserted that "In modern terminology Dickens was a "racist" of the most egregious kind, a fact that ought to give pause to those who persist in believing that he was necessarily the epitome of all that was decent and benign in the previous century."[5]
According to Ackroyd, Dickens did not believe that the Union in the American Civil War was genuinely interested in the abolition of slavery, and he nearly publicly supported the Confederacy for that reason. Ackroyd twice noted that Dickens' major objection to missionaries was that they were more concerned with the welfare of non-Europeans abroad than with the poor at home in Europe. For example, in Bleak House Dickens mocks Mrs. Jellyby, who neglects her children to care for the inhabitants of a fictional African country. The disjunction between Dickens' criticism of slavery and his stereotypical depiction of other races has also been a topic considered by Patrick Brantlinger in his 2002 A Companion to the Victorian Novel. He cites Dickens' description of an Irish-American settlement in America's Catskill mountains as a mess of pigs, pots, and dunghills. According to Brantlinger, Dickens viewed them as a "racially repellent" group.[6]Jane Smiley, in her Penguin Lives biography of Dickens, writes "we should not interpret him as the kind of left-liberal we know today– he was racist, imperialist, sometimes antisemitic, a believer in harsh prison conditions, and distrustful of trade unions".[7] An opening note to Charles Dickens' Australia, a selection of Dickens' essays from Household Words, noted to the reader that in these essays "Women, the Irish, Chinese and Aborigines are described in biased, racist, stereotypical or otherwise less than flattering terms."[8] The Historical Encyclopedia of Anti-Semitism notes the paradox of Dickens both being a "champion of causes of the oppressed" who abhorred slavery and supported the European liberal revolutions of the 1840s, and his creation of the antisemitic caricature of the character of Fagin.[9]
Scholar Priti Joshi, in her contribution to Dickens in Context examined the contrast between Dickens' racism and his concern with the poor and downcast. Joshi argues that Dicken was a nativist and a "cultural chauvinist" in the sense of being highly ethnocentric and supportive of imperialism, but maintains that he was not a racist in the sense of being a "biological determinist" as was the anthropologist Robert Knox. That is, Dickens did not regard the behaviour of races to be "fixed"; rather his appeal to "civilization" suggests not biological fixity but the possibility of alteration. However, "Dickens's views of racial others, most fully developed in his short fiction, indicate that for him 'savages' functioned as a handy foil against which British national identity could emerge".[2]
The Oxford Encyclopedia of British Literature similarly notes that while Dickens praised middle-class values,[10]
Dickens's militancy about this catalog of virtues had nationalistic implications, since he praised these middle-class moral ideals as English national values. Conversely, he often stigmatized foreign cultures as lacking in these middle-class ideas, representing French, Italian, and American characters, in particular, as slothful and deceitful. His attitudes toward colonized peoples sometimes took these moral aspersions to genocidal extremes. In the wake of the so-called Indian Mutiny of 1857, he wrote, "I should do my utmost to exterminate the Race upon whom the stain of the late cruelties rested ... ." To be fair, Dickens did support the antislavery movement ... . And he excoriated what he saw as English national vices ...
William Oddie argues that Dickens's racism "grew progressively more illiberal over the course of his career," particularly after the Indian Rebellion.[11] Grace Moore, on the other hand, argues in her 2004 work Dickens and Empire that Dickens, a staunch abolitionist and anti-imperialist, had views on racial matters that were a good deal more complex than previous critics have suggested.[12] She suggests that overemphasising Dickens' racism obscures his continued commitment to the abolition of slavery.[13] Laurence Mazzeno has characterised Moore's approach as depicting Dickens' attitude to race as highly complex, "struggling to differentiate between ideas of race and class in his fiction...sometimes in step with his age, sometimes its fiercest critic."[14] Others have observed that Dickens also opposed granting voting rights to African Americans, writing in a letter "Free of course he must be; but the stupendous absurdity of making him a voter glares out of every roll of his eye".[15] Bernard Porter suggests that Dickens' racism caused him to actually oppose imperialism rather than promote it, citing the character of Mrs. Jellyby in Bleak House and the essay The Noble Savage as evidence.[16] However, Dickens did not join other liberals in condemning the Governor of Jamaica Eyre's declaration of martial law after an attack on the capital's courthouse. In speaking on the controversy, Dickens' attacked "that platform sympathy with the black- or the native or the Devil.."[5]:971
Most of the major writers in the Victorian period can be seen as racist to a greater or lesser degree. According to Edward Said, even Marx and Mill are not immune: 'both of them seemed to have believed that such ideas as liberty, representative government, and individual happiness must not be applied to the Orient for reasons that today we would call racist'. In many of these writers antisemitism was the most obvious form of racism, and this continued beyond the Victorian period, as is evident in such figures as T.S. Eliot and Virginia Woolf.
Fagin and antisemitism in Oliver Twist
An illustration from Oliver Twist, depicting Fagin waiting to be hanged.
One of the most controversial characters created by Dickens is the British JewFagin in the novel Oliver Twist, first published in serial form between 1837 and 1839. The character of Fagin has been seen by many as being stereotypical and containing antisemitic tropes, though others, such as Dickens's biographer G. K. Chesterton have argued against this view. Scholars have noted that the novel refers to Fagin 257 times in the first 38 chapters as "the Jew", while the ethnicity or religion of the other characters is rarely mentioned. Paul Vallely wrote in The Independent that Dickens's Fagin in Oliver Twist—the Jew who runs a school in London for child pickpockets—is regularly seen as one of the most grotesque Jewish characters in English literature.[18] The character is thought to have been partly based on Ikey Solomon, a Jewish criminal in Victorian era-London, who was interviewed by Dickens during the latter's time as a journalist.[19] Nadia Valdman, who specialises in the portrayal of Jewish people in literature, argues that Fagin's representation was drawn from images of Jews created by non-Jews as "inherently evil" as associated with the Devil and beasts.[20]Antisemitism: A Historical Encyclopedia of Prejudice and Persecution argues that the image of Fagin is "drawn from stage melodrama and medieval images". Fagin has also been described by scholars as one who seduces young children into a life of crime, and as someone who can "disorder representational boundaries".[9]
In 1854, The Jewish Chronicle published an article which questioned why "Jews alone should be excluded from the 'sympathizing heart' of this great author and powerful friend of the oppressed". Eliza Davis, whose husband had purchased Dickens's home in 1860 when he had put it up for sale, wrote to Dickens in protest against his portrayal of Jews (specifically Fagin), arguing that he had "encouraged a vile prejudice against the despised Hebrew", and that he had done a great wrong to the Jewish people.[21] Dickens had described her husband at the time of the sale as a "Jewish moneylender" (but also as an "honest gentleman").
Dickens protested that he was merely being factual about the realities of street crime in London in his depiction of criminals in their "squalid misery", yet he took Mrs Davis's complaint seriously; he halted the printing of Oliver Twist, and changed the text for the parts of the book that had not been set, which is why Fagin is called "the Jew" 257 times in the first 38 chapters, but barely at all in the next 179 references to him. In his later novel Our Mutual Friend, he created the character of Riah (meaning "friend" in Hebrew), whose goodness, Vallely writes, is almost as complete as Fagin's evil. Riah says in the novel: "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 best ..." Davis sent Dickens a copy of the Hebrew bible in gratitude.[18] Dickens not only toned down Fagin's Jewishness in revised editions of Oliver Twist, but he removed Jewish elements from his depiction of Fagin in his public readings from the novel, omitting nasal voice mannerisms and body language he had included in earlier readings.[22]
Stage and screen adaptations
Joel Berkowitz reports that the earliest stage adaptations of Oliver Twist "followed by an almost unrelieved procession of Jewish stage distortions, and even helped to popularize a lisp for stage Jewish characters that lasted until 1914".[23] It is widely believed that the most antisemitic adaptation of Oliver Twist is David Lean's film of 1948, with Alec Guinness as Fagin. Guinness was made-up to look like the illustrations from the novel's first edition. The film's release in the US was delayed until 1951 due to Jewish protests, and was initially released with several of Fagin's scenes cut. This particular adaptation of the novel was banned in Israel.[24] Contrastingly, the film was banned in Egypt for portraying Fagin too sympathetically.[25] When George Lucas's film Star Wars: Episode I – The Phantom Menace was released, he denied the claim made by some critics that the unscrupulous trader Watto (who has a hooked nose) was a Faginesque Jewish stereotype. Animator Rob Coleman later admitted that he had viewed footage of Alec Guinness as Fagin in Oliver Twist to inspire his animators in creating Watto.[26]
The role of Fagin in Oliver Twist continues to be a challenge for actors who struggle with questions as to how to interpret the role in a post-Holocaust era. Various Jewish writers, directors, and actors have searched for ways to "salvage" Fagin. In recent years, Jewish performers and writers have attempted to 'reclaim' Fagin as has been done with Shakespeare's Shylock in The Merchant of Venice. The composer of the 1960s musical Oliver!, Lionel Bart, was Jewish, and he wrote songs for the character with a Jewish rhythm and Jewish orchestration.[24] In spite of the musical's Jewish provenance, Jewish playwright Julia Pascal believes that performing the show today is still inappropriate, an example of a minority acting out on a stereotype to please a host society. Pascal claimed that "U.S. Jews are not exposed to the constant low-level anti-Semitism that filters through British society". In contrast to Pascal, The actor David Schneider, who studied for a PhD on Yiddish, found the Dickens novel, wherein Fagin is simply "the Jew," a difficult read, but saw Fagin in the musical as "a complex character" who was not "the baddie."[24] Stage producer Menachem Golan also created a less well-known Hebrew musical of Oliver Twist.[27]
Some more recent actors who have portrayed Fagin have tried to downplay Fagin's Jewishness, but actor Timothy Spall emphasised it while also making Fagin sympathetic. For Spall, Fagin is the first adult character in the story with actual warmth. He is a criminal, but is at least looking out for children more than the managers of Twist's workhouse. Spall says "The fact is, even if you were to turn Fagin into a Nazi portrayal of a Jew, there is something inherently sympathetic in Dickens's writing. I defy anyone to come away with anything other than warmth and pity for him."[28] Jewish actors who have portrayed Fagin on stage include Richard Kline,[29]Ron Moody in the Oscar-winning film of the musical Oliver!, and Richard Dreyfuss in a Disney live-action TV production.
Will Eisner's 2003 graphic novel Fagin the Jew retells the story of Oliver Twist from Fagin's perspective, both humanising Fagin and making him authentically Jewish.[30]
It's still a Jewish stereotype but without going overboard. He is not a Hassidic Jew. But his accent and looks are Jewish of the period. Ben said a very interesting thing. He said that with all his amoral approach to life, Fagin still provides a living for these kids. Of course, you can't condone pickpocketing. But what else could they do?
In the same interview, Polanski described elements of Oliver Twist which echo his own childhood as an orphan in Nazi-occupied Poland. In his review of the film, Norman Lebrecht argues that many previous adaptations of Oliver Twist have merely avoided the problem, but that Polanski found a solution "several degrees more original and convincing than previous fudges", noting that "Rachel Portman's attractive score studiously underplays the accompaniment of Jewish music to Jewish misery" and also that "Ben Kingsley endows the villain with tragic inevitability: a lonely old man, scrabbling for trinkets of security and a little human warmth", concluding that "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."[22]
African Americans in American Notes
Dickens's attitudes towards African Americans were also complex. In American Notes he fiercely opposed the inhumanity of slavery in the United States, and expressed a desire for the abolition of American slavery. However, Grace Moore has commented that in the same work, Dickens includes a comic episode with an African-American coachman, presenting a grotesque description focused on the man's dark complexion and manner of movement, which to Dickens amounted to an "insane imitation of an English coachman".[32] After the Civil War ended and the Thirteenth Amendment abolishing slavery was passed, Dickens wrote a letter in 1868 which alluded to the lack of education amongst newly emancipated African Americans, criticising "the melancholy absurdity of giving these people votes", which "at any rate at present, would glare out of every roll of their eyes, chuckle in their mouths, and bump in their heads".[32]
Native Americans in The Noble Savage
George Catlin's painting Savage and Tragically Civil contrast an unassimilated Native American favourably to his assimilated counterpart, a notion which incensed Dickens, prompting his Noble Savage essay
In his 1853 essay The Noble Savage, Dickens' expressed an attitude of "condescending pity" towards Native Americans, which Moore has contended is counterbalanced by a critical view of the attitude of whites in their dealing with them.[33] The term "noble savage", referring to a stereotype of Native Americans as being superior in some form due to "lack of civilisation", was in circulation since the 17th century. Dickens regarded the term as an absurd oxymoron, advocating that savages be civilised "off the face of the earth". In the essay, Dickens ridiculed the philosophical exaltation of an idyllic primitive man living in greater harmony with nature, an idea prevalent in what is called "romantic primitivism" (often attributed to Rousseau). Dickens instead touted the superiority of Western culture, while denouncing Native Americans as "murderous". Dickens‘s essay was a response to painter George Catlin's exhibit of paintings of Native Americans (Catlin and Dickens both used the word "Indians") when it went on display in England. Dickens's expressed scorn for those unnamed individuals, who, like Catlin, he alleged, misguidedly exalted the so-called "noble savage". Dickens maintained that Native Americans and other "primitives" were dirty, cruel, and constantly fighting. Dickens's satire on Catlin and others like him who might find something to admire in the Native Americans or African tribesmen is considered by some to be a notable turning point in the history of the use of the phrase.[34] At the conclusion of the essay, note as he argues that although the virtues of the savage are mythical and his way of life inferior and doomed, he still "deserves to be treated no differently than if he were an Englishman of genius, such as Newton or Shakespeare."
One of the paintings by George Catlin of Native Americans
Grace Moore in Dickens and Empire has argued that this essay served as a transitional piece for Dickens. Moore sees Dickens' earlier writings as marked by a swing between conflicting opinions on race. The essay Noble Savage itself has an aggressive beginning, but concludes with a plea for kindness, while at the same time Dickens settles into a more stereotyped form of thinking, engaging in sweeping generalisations about peoples he had never encountered, in a way he avoided doing in earlier writings such as in his review of Narrative of the Niger Expedition. Moore notes that, in the same essay, Dickens is critical of many aspects of British society, and indirectly suggests that these issues must be fixed before Britons can start criticising others.[12]:68–70
Professor Sian Griffiths has noted that Dickens' essay exhibits many of the same "uncivil" qualities he attributes to "primitives" and writes:[35]
Dickens over-simplified defamation of Native American and African tribes seems largely prompted by what he saw as the over-simplified praise of the same people, evidenced in Caitlin's portraits...But by embracing the extreme opposing opinion, Dickens ultimately commits the same fault of failing to see the complexity of each individual human's character.
Dickens, in collaboration with Wilkie Collins, wrote The Frozen Deep, which premiered in 1856, an allegorical play about the missing Arctic Franklin expedition, and which attacked the character of the Inuit as covetous and cruel. The purpose of the play was to discredit explorer John Rae's report on the fate of the expedition, which concluded that the crew had turned to cannibalism, and was based largely on Inuit testimonies. Dickens initially had a positive assessment of the Inuit, writing in "Our Phantom Ship on an Antediluvian Cruise" of the Inuit as "gentle loving savages", but after The Times published a report by Rae of the Inuit discovery of the remains of the lost Franklin expedition with evidence that the crew resorted to cannibalism, Dickens reversed his stand. Dickens, in addition to Franklin's widow, refused to accept the report and accused the Inuit of being liars, getting involved on Lady Franklin's side in an extended conflict with John Rae over the exact cause of the demise of the expedition. Lady Franklin maintained that the ship's crew, being Englishmen, could not possibly make a mistake during their expedition and were considered able to "survive anywhere" and "to triumph over any adversity through faith, scientific objectivity, and superior spirit".[36] Dickens not only tried to discredit Rae and the Inuit, but accused the Inuit of being actively involved in the expedition's disaster. In "The Lost Arctic Voyagers", he wrote "It is impossible to form an estimate of the character of any race of savages from their deferential behaviour to the white man while he is strong. The mistake has been made again and again; and the moment the white man has appeared in the new aspect of being weaker than the savage, the savage has changed and sprung upon him." Explorer John Rae disputed with Dickens in two rebuttals (also published in Household Words). Rae defended the Inuit as "a bright example to civilized people" and compared them favourably to the undisciplined crew of Franklin. Keal writes that Rae was no match for "Dickens the story teller", one of Lady Franklin's "powerful friends",[37] to many in England he was a Scotsman who was not "pledged to the patriotic, empire-building aims of the military."[38] Rae was shunned by the English establishment as a result of his writing the report. Modern historians have vindicated Rae's belief that the Franklin crew resorted to cannibalism,[39][40] having already been decimated by scurvy and starvation; furthermore they were poorly prepared for wilderness survival, contrary to Lady Hamilton's prejudices. In the play the Rae character was turned into a suspicious, power-hungry nursemaid, who predicted the expedition's doom in her effort to ruin the happiness of the delicate heroine.[36]
During the filming of the 2008 Canadian documentary Passage, Gerald Dickens, Charles' great-great-grandson was introduced to explain "why such a great champion of the underdog had sided with the establishment". Dickens' negative portrayal of the Inuit was a hurt they carried from generation to generation, Tagak Curley an Inuit statesman, said to Gerald: "Your grandfather insulted my people. We have had to live with the pain of this for 150 years. This really harmed my people and is still harming them". Orkney historian Tom Muir is reported to have described Curley as "furious" and "properly upset". Gerald then apologised on behalf of the Dickens family, which Curley accepted on behalf of the Inuit. Muir describes this as a "historic moment".[37]
Related Research Articles
In Western anthropology, philosophy, and literature, the Myth of the Noble savage refers to a stock character who is uncorrupted by civilization. As such, the "noble" savage symbolizes the innate goodness and moral superiority of a primitive people living in harmony with Nature. In the heroic drama of the stageplay The Conquest of Granada by the Spaniards (1672), John Dryden represents the noble savage as an archetype of Man-as-Creature-of-Nature.
Oliver Twist; or, The Parish Boy's Progress, is the second novel by English author Charles Dickens. It was originally published as a serial from 1837 to 1839 and as a three-volume book in 1838. The story follows the titular orphan, who, after being raised in a workhouse, escapes to London, where he meets a gang of juvenile pickpockets led by the elderly criminal Fagin, discovers the secrets of his parentage, and reconnects with his remaining family.
Jack Dawkins, better known as the Artful Dodger, is a character in Charles Dickens's 1838 novel Oliver Twist. The Dodger is a pickpocket and his nickname refers to his skill and cunning in that occupation. In the novel, he is the leader of the gang of child criminals on the streets of London trained and overseen by the elderly Fagin. The term has become an idiom describing a person who engages in skillful deception.
Oliver Twist is a 1948 British film and the second of David Lean's two film adaptations of Charles Dickens novels. Following his 1946 version of Great Expectations, Lean re-assembled much of the same team for his adaptation of Dickens' 1838 novel, including producers Ronald Neame and Anthony Havelock-Allan, cinematographer Guy Green, designer John Bryan and editor Jack Harris. Lean's then-wife, Kay Walsh, who had collaborated on the screenplay for Great Expectations, played the role of Nancy. John Howard Davies was cast as Oliver, while Alec Guinness portrayed Fagin and Robert Newton played Bill Sykes.
William "Bill" Sikes is a fictional character and one of the main antagonists in the 1838 novel Oliver Twist by Charles Dickens. Sikes is a malicious criminal in Fagin's gang, and a vicious robber and murderer. Throughout much of the novel Sikes is shadowed by his “bull-terrier” dog Bull's-eye.
Nancy is a fictional character in the 1838 novel Oliver Twist by Charles Dickens and its several adaptations for theatre, television and films. She is a member of Fagin's gang and the lover, and eventual victim, of Bill Sikes.
Oliver Twist is a 2005 drama film directed by Roman Polanski. The screenplay by Ronald Harwood adapts Charles Dickens's 1838 novel of the same name. It is an international co-production of the United Kingdom, the Czech Republic and France.
Fagin the Jew is a graphic novel by American cartoonist Will Eisner.
Mr Brownlow is a character from the 1838 novel Oliver Twist by Charles Dickens. Brownlow is a bookish and kindly middle-aged bachelor who helps Oliver escape the clutches of Fagin. He later adopts Oliver Twist by the end of the novel.
Oliver Twist is a 1922 American silent drama film adaptation of Charles Dickens' 1838 novel Oliver Twist, featuring Lon Chaney as Fagin and Jackie Coogan as Oliver Twist. The film was directed by Frank Lloyd. It was selected as one of the best pictures of 1922 by New York Times, Chicago Tribune and the Los Angeles Times. Walter J. Israel handled the costuming. Studio interiors were filmed at the Robert Brunton Studios in Hollywood. The film's tagline was "8 Great Reels that make you ask for more. Will Hays says Jackie Coogan Films are the sort the World needs." A still exists showing Fagin training his wards to be pickpockets.
Charley Bates is a supporting character in the Charles Dickens's 1838 novel Oliver Twist. He is a young boy and a member of Fagin's gang of pickpockets. Bates serves as a sidekick to the Artful Dodger, whose skills he admires unreservedly. Bill Sikes's murder of Nancy shocks him so much that at the end of the novel he leaves London to become an agricultural labourer.
Fagin is a fictional character and the secondary antagonist in Charles Dickens's 1838 novel Oliver Twist. In the preface to the novel, he is described as a "receiver of stolen goods". He is the leader of a group of children whom he teaches to make their livings by pickpocketing and other criminal activities, in exchange for shelter. A distinguishing trait is his constant and insincere use of the phrase "my dear" when addressing others. At the time of the novel, he is said by another character, Monks, to have already made criminals out of "scores" of children. Nancy, who is the lover of Bill Sikes, is confirmed to be Fagin's former pupil.
The Frozen Deep is an 1856 play, originally staged as an amateur theatrical, written by Wilkie Collins under the substantial guidance of Charles Dickens. Dickens's hand was so prominent—beside acting in the play for several performances, he added a preface, altered lines, and attended to most of the props and sets—that the principal edition of the play is entitled "Under the Management of Charles Dickens". John C. Eckel wrote: "As usual with a play which passed into rehearsal under Dickens' auspices it came out improved. This was the case with The Frozen Deep. The changes were so numerous that the drama almost may be ascribed to Dickens". Dickens himself took the part of Richard Wardour and was stage-manager during its modest original staging in Dickens's home Tavistock House. The play, however, grew in influence through a series of outside performances, including one before Queen Victoria at the Royal Gallery of Illustration, and a three-performance run at the Manchester Free Trade Hall for the benefit of the Douglas Jerrold Fund to benefit the widow of Dickens's old friend, Douglas Jerrold. There, night after night, everyone—including, by some accounts, the carpenters and the stage-hands—was moved to tears by the play. It also brought Dickens together with Ellen Ternan, an actress he hired to play one of the parts, and for whom he would later leave his wife Catherine. The play remained unpublished until a private printing appeared sometime in 1866.
Oliver Twist is the title character and protagonist of the 1838 novel Oliver Twist by Charles Dickens. He was the first child protagonist in an English novel.
Edward "Monks" Leeford is a fictional character and one of the main antagonists in the 1838 novel Oliver Twist by Charles Dickens. He is actually the criminally-inclined half-brother of Oliver Twist, but he hides his identity. Monks' parents separated when he was a child, and his father had a relationship with a young woman, Agnes Fleming. This resulted in Agnes' pregnancy. She died in childbirth after giving birth to the baby that would be named Oliver Twist.
Stereotypes of Jews are generalized representations of Jews, often caricatured and of a prejudiced and antisemitic nature.
Stereotypes of Jews in literature have evolved over the centuries. According to Louis Harap, nearly all European writers prior to the twentieth century projected the Jewish stereotypes in their works. Harap cites Gotthold Lessing's Nathan the Wise (1779) as the first time that Jews were portrayed in the arts as "human beings, with human possibilities and characteristics." Harap writes that, the persistence of the Jewish stereotype over the centuries suggests to some that "the treatment of the Jew in literature was completely static and was essentially unaffected by the changes in the Jewish situation in society as that society itself changed." He contrasts the opposing views presented in the two most comprehensive studies of the Jew in English literature, one by Montagu Frank Modder and the other by Edgar Rosenberg. Modder asserts that writers invariably "reflect the attitude of contemporary society in their presentation of the Jewish character, and that the portrayal changes with the economic and social changes of each decade." In opposition to Modder's "historical rationale", Rosenberg warns that such a perspective "is apt to slight the massive durability of a stereotype". Harap suggests that the recurrence of the Jewish stereotype in literature is itself one indicator of the continued presence of anti-Semitism among the readers of that literature.
Cineguild Productions was a production company formed by director David Lean, cinematographer Ronald Neame and producer Anthony Havelock-Allan in 1944. The company produced some of the major British films of the 1940s.
Mr Sowerberry is a fictional character who appears as a supporting antagonist in Charles Dickens' 1838 novel Oliver Twist. He is an undertaker and coffin maker who owns and operates a small dark shop in a small town some 75 miles (121 km) from London. This shop also serves as a dwelling for himself, his wife, a maidservant named Charlotte, an assistant named Noah Claypole. For a short period it's also the dwelling of the protagonist of the novel, a young boy named Oliver Twist who has been "purchased" from the local parish workhouse to serve as an apprentice.
Eliza Davis (1817–1903) was a Jewish English woman who is remembered for her correspondence with the novelist Charles Dickens about his depiction of Jewish characters in his novels.
References
↑ Kastan, David Scott (2006). Oxford Encyclopedia of English Literature, vol 1. Oxford University Press. p. 157. ISBN0-19-516921-2, 9780195169218
1 2 Joshi, Priti (2011). ‘Race.’ In Dickens in Context, edited by Sally Ledger and Holly Furneaux, Cambridge University Press. pp. 297–299. ISBN0-521-88700-3, 9780521887007.
↑ Grace Moore, Dickens and Empire: Discourses Of Class, Race And Colonialism In The Works Of Charles Dickens (Nineteenth Century Series) (Ashgate: 2004).
↑ ["The Speeches of Charles Dickens", K.J. Fielding, Ed., Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1960, p.284]
1 2 Ackroyd, Peter (1990). Dickens. Harper Collins. p.544. ISBN0-06-016602-9. This is not the abridged edition published by Vintage as a tie-in to the BBC documentary
↑ Mendelawitz, Margaret (2011). Charles Dickens' Australia: Selected Essays from Household Words 1850–1859 ... Sydney University Press. p.vi. ISBN9781920898687.
1 2 Levy, Richard (2005). Antisemitism: A Historical Encyclopedia of Prejudice and Persecution, Volume 1. ABC-CLIO. pp.176–177 (Entry on "Dickens, Charles"). ISBN9781851094394.
↑ Kastan, David Scott (2006). Oxford Encyclopedia of English Literature, vol 1. Oxford University Press. p.157. ISBN9780195169218.
↑ Dickens and Carlyle: the Question of Influence (London: Centenary) pp. 135–42, and “Dickens and the Indian Mutiny”, Dickensian 68 (January 1972), 3–15;
1 2 Dickens and Empire: Discourses Of Class, Race And Colonialism In The Works Of Charles Dickens (Nineteenth Century Series) (Ashgate: 2004).
↑ "Reappraising Dickens' Noble Savage" Dickensian 98.3 2002 p. 236-44
↑ Mazzeno, Laurence W. (2008). The Dickens industry: critical perspectives 1836–2005. Camden House. p.247. ISBN9781571133175.
↑ Colander, David; Robert E. Prasch; Falguni A. Sheth (2006). Race, Liberalism, and Economics. University of Michigan Press. p.87. ISBN9780472032242.
↑ Porter, Bernard (2007). Critics of Empire: British Radicals and the Imperial Challenge. I.B.Tauris. p.xxxii. ISBN9781845115067.
↑ Rutland, Suzanne D. The Jews in Australia. Cambridge University Press, 2005, p. 19. ISBN978-0-521-61285-2; Newey, Vincent. The Scriptures of Charles Dickens.
↑ Valdman, Nadia. Antisemitism, A Historical Encyclopedia of Prejudice and Persecution. ISBN1-85109-439-3
↑ For an account of Dickens's article see Grace Moore, "Reappraising Dickens's 'Noble Savage'", The Dickensian 98:458 (2002): 236–243. Moore speculates that Dickens, although himself an abolitionist, was motivated by a wish to differentiate himself from what he believed was the feminine sentimentality and bad writing of Harriet Beecher Stowe, with whom he, as a reformist writer, was often associated.
↑ Sian Griffiths (11 January 2010). "Confronting a Prejudiced Dickens". Borrowed Horses- blog of published author and professor. Retrieved 13 March 2012.
↑ Robert Douglas-Fairhurst, "The Arctic heart of darkness: How heroic lies replaced hideous reality after the grim death of John Franklin", Times Literary Supplement, 11 November 2009.
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