Everybody loves Fagin (nearly)

All right, so claiming that Fagin in the latest BBC adaptation was portrayed as an Orthodox Jew was a bit of an exaggeration. He didn't have corkscrew locks or anything. Practising Jew is probably more correct. The point being, though, that Fagin in the book wasn't. Which leads me almost seamlessly to the much-debated Fagin Question. Much has been said on the subject, but I might as well add my tuppenny-worth to the discussion.

The Fagin Question is of course "Was making Fagin a Jew anti-Semitic on Dickens's part?" I used to think it was a complete non-question for a long time. Yes, Fagin is a villain, but he's an interesting villain, an intelligent villain, a charismatic villain - in short, a Dickensian villain. I should think any ethnic group would be glad to have him. So what is the fuss about? We don't hear red-heads (who are over-represented among Dickens's villains - Fagin is one too) complaining, do we?

What complicates matters, I've come to accept, is that Dickens's depiction of Fagin was thought to be offensive in his own time, so one really can't blame modern thin-skinned Political Correctness for all the hue and cry. And yes, the fact that Dickens refers to Fagin as "the Jew" in every second sentence does grate. Much as I love Nicholas Bulstrode in "Middlemarch", I wouldn't have liked it if Eliot kept referring to him as "the Christian", as if his religion was somehow a major explanation for his bad behaviour. Dickens might not have meant anything by it: he often uses tags like this instead of characters' names, as a means, one supposes, of varying and enlivening the prose. Daniel Quilp in "The Old Curiosity Shop" is called "the dwarf", though it's not completely clear whether he technically is one (he is first introduced as "so low in stature to be quite a dwarf"), and scrumptious James Carker in "Dombey and Son" is "the manager". Nevertheless, I suspect Dickens did have some lazy prejudice of the "well, we all know how greedy Jews are" kind (it can't have passed him by that the word "Jew" in his day was often used as a synonym for a greedy man, so applying it incessantly to Fagin was hardly helpful). But it was probably no more intensely felt than prejudices like "women can't read maps" and "Germans have no sense of humour" are nowadays. Dickens was perturbed enough by people's reactions to Fagin to include a noble and venerable Jew in "Our Mutual Friend" called Riah, just to show he had nothing against Jews in general. Ever heard of Riah? I'm not surprised: the irony is he's not one tenth as fun as Fagin.

A phenomenon most discussions of Fagin skirt around is that he is so well-liked by readers. He must easily be the most popular of Dickens's villains, which in itself seems to indicate that he wasn't conceived with the wicked intent to incite religious hatred. To be fair, though, one reason for Fagin's popularity is the way he is portrayed in film versions and the musical "Oliver!". There, as often as not, his most heinous misdeeds are excluded: because the Monks plot is often cut, we don't see him wilfully trying to corrupt Oliver's innocence and make him a criminal so as to rob him of his inheritance. Most adaptations are also too squeamish to show how responsible Fagin is for Nancy's death: in the book, he very cunningly and deliberately provokes Sikes's anger towards Nancy. The intent may have been that Sikes should give Nancy a good beating, not kill her (Fagin urges Sikes not to be "too violent for safety"), but it certainly isn't pretty. With both his involvement with Monks and the Sikes-baiting cut, Fagin simply remains a king of pickpockets, which isn't that bad. And one reason the edges of the Fagin figure have been softened in this manner so often is, without doubt, that he happens to be of Jewish origin.

I don't think this is the only reason, though: I believe people like the real, un-reconstructed Fagin as well. After all, Alec Guinness's far-from-cuddly Fagin is many viewers' favourite interpretation of the role. (Me, I prefer Eric Porter: for one thing, he didn't have a prosthetic nose the size of Mont Blanc.) It's a good example of that it's not what you do that's important if you are a villain, it's how you do it. Fagin's crimes are far worse than, for example, a little boss-swindling, but ask anyone who's the most black-hearted and scary villain, Fagin or Uriah Heep, and they will in all probability say the latter. Rooting for Uriah is something eccentric villain-lovers like me do: rooting for Fagin is a general pastime. He's such a "merry old gentleman" after all, and he suffers so terribly before his death.

So no, I don't think Fagin is an anti-Semitic caricature of a character. If Dickens had cut a few "the Jew" mentions along the way, though, I'm sure we would all have been happier.