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Oliver knew, perfectly well, that he was in his own little room; that his books were lying on the table before him; that the sweet air was stirring among the creeping plants outside. And yet he was asleep. Suddenly, the scene changed; the air became close and confined; and he thought, with a glow of terror, that he was in the Jew's house again. There sat the hideous old man, in his accustomed corner, pointing at him, and whispering to another man, with his face averted, who sat beside him.

"Hush, my dear!" he thought he heard the Jew say; "it is he, sure enough. Come away."

"He!" the other man seemed to answer; "could I mistake him, think you? If a crowd of ghosts were to put themselves into his exact shape, and he stood amongst them, there is something that would tell me how to point him out. If you buried him fifty feet deep, and took me across his grave, I fancy I should know, if there wasn't a mark above it, that he lay buried there?

The man seemed to say this, with such dreadful hatred, that Oliver awoke with the fear, and started up. [Chapter 34, "Contains Some Introductory Particulars Relative to a Young Gentleman Who now Arrives Upon the Scene; and a New Adventure which Happened to ​ Oliver," 259]

The Charles Dickens Library Edition’s Long Caption

"Hush, my dear!" he thought he heard the Jew say; "it is he, sure enough. Come away." [259]

Commentary: A Sharp Contrast to the Previous Plate

As Joelle Herr explains, after having been left for dead in a ditch Oliverm “comes to” and “goes to the nearest house, which happens to be where the bungled burglary took place. there, Mrs. Maylie and her niece, Rose, take Oliver in and offer him protection. Oliver spends a lovely summer with them in the countryside.” Just as Oliver feels himself safe and completely saved from Fagin, Sikes, and the gang, “Enter the mysterious Monks. He is working with Fagin in a plot to destroy Oliver's chances of happiness and discovering his background” (43-44]). Like the illustration of this scene that Cruikshank published seventy years earlier, this one depicts a mysterious gentleman and his hideous confederate, Fagin, watching while Oliver dozes over his books. Furniss's notion of having Fagin and his unlikely ally, the gentlemanly but equally sinister Monks, watch the sleeping Oliver derived directly from Dickens’s text and George Cruikshank’s illustration of it. The arrival of the shadowy figure of "Monks," the alias of Edward Leeford, transforms the narrative from a Newgate Novel and a potential Bildungsroman to a "lost heir" mystery. At this point in the novel Dickens begins to reveal Fagin's true motives for training the boy to become a thief: Oliver will vanish from middle-class eyes into the murky criminal underworld of East-End London, be incarcerated, transported — executed as a felon —  and therefore never realise that he is the legitimate heir of Edwin Leeford.

Furniss replicated this plot development by foregrounding Oliver while having Fagin seem to reach in through the open window, as if to wake the boy. The slender writing desk surmounted by books and an ink-pot, the books on the shelves, and the leaded-pane garden windows, like Oliver's ornate chair and respectable, upper middle-class schoolboy clothing, all embody the affluent lifestyle of the Maylies. Oliver's serene face and hair blond contrast the dark-faced, dark-haired, grim-visaged Monks and Sikes, evil characters who threaten Oliver's future. John O. Jordan notes that, in contrast to what-skinned, blemishless, blond-haired Oliver, both Fagin and Monks are "marked" characters. Whereas Fagin is marked by his red hair, traditional Jewish features, and toasting fork as a Satanic avatar, the gloomy, epileptic Monks bears a the mark of Cain on his throat. Fagin, contends Jordan, "seeks to inscribe a narrative of crime on Oliver's blankness by telling him exciting stories about robbery and giving him the Newgate Calendar to read. In this way he hopes to "blacken" Oliver's soul — perhaps an echo of Dickens' blacking factory experience. Oliver, who appears a tabula rasa unmarked by experience, is often described as having a face of perfect innocence" (181). The Maylies may clothe, feed, and even educate the workhouse boy as if he were an upper-middle-class child — inscribing, as it were, a middle-class identity upon the parish boy, but the gang may yet recapture the boy, erasing his new-found identity and sense of security by dragging him back into their malignant designs.

In the Household Edition illustrator James Mahoney focusses on a much earlier part in the narrative-pictorial sequence. In Chapter 34, in which Dickens re-introduces the "gentleman" with the vicious streak, the illustrator does not realize the highly dramatic moment in which the stranger in the marketplace curses Oliver when the boy goes to the market-town to mail a letter to the Maylies' physician, Mr. Losberne, about Rose's deteriorating health. At The George Inn, where Oliver has just posted the letter, he encounters the peculiar stranger, who swears at him, then inexplicably falls to the ground in the throes of an epileptic seizure, "writhing and foaming" (Household Edition, Ch. 34, 121). Instead, Mahoney introduces the shadowy half-brother at the outset in the novel's frontispiece, The Evidence Destroyed, and then re-introduces him as Fagin's confederate in Chapter 26, in the wood-engraving "Fagin!" whispered a voice close to his ear (see below), at the very mid-point in his 1871 narrative-pictorial sequence. The Mahoney scene is mysterious, even inexplicable, but lacks the dramatic force of the Cruikshank illustration. Furniss chosen Cruikshank's strategy rather than Mahoney's in introducing the Monks subplot. Archly, too, Furniss alludes to the previous idyllic bedside scene in its sinister parallel here, which is the very next illustration:

Above: The companion illustrations of Oliver watched in his sleep by very different observers with very different intentions: The wounded Oliver smiles in his Sleep, and Monks and Fagin watching Oliver sleep. [Click on the images to enlarge them.]

Either the editor, J. A. Hammerton, or the artist positioned the illustration for Chapter 34 just a few pages prior to the passage realised on 259, so that the reader is left in doubt as to the outcome of their surveillance. That he is a victim caught unawares in some sort of snare carefully laid by Fagin and Monks is implied by the web-like design in Oliver's oversized chair. The sleeping boy, now absorbed into the Maylie household, is surrounded by tomes suggestive of middle-class education (not merely the open books over which Oliver dozes, but the books on the shelves just visible in the darkness behind him), but his unsavoury past has come back to haunt him. The nature of the plot against Oliver will become apparent in Chapter 37, where Mahoney had introduced Monks in league with Bumble, in "Were you looking for me," he said, "when you peered in at the window?", whereas Furniss builds anticipation towards the return of Monks to the narrative-pictorial sequence, and next shows him at another highly dramatic moment, The Evidence Destroyed in Chapter 38. Mahoney's visualisation of Monks' clandestine meeting with Fagin at Saffron Hill past eleven o'clock at night accords well with the gothic figure's surreptitious nature, similarly presented in Mahoney's Household Edition frontispiece. In his signature top-hat and cloak, plotting behind the scenes against his virtuous youngerbrother, Cain-like Monks looks and acts like a villain straight out of the contemporary melodrama. From the outset in the first volume of the Household Edition by virtue of the frontispiece, the artist telegraphs that black-cloaked Monks will prove a significant figure in the plot — but then, Mahoney, like Furniss, had read the entire novel before receiving the Chapman and Hall commission in 1870, and he would have known the entire story, whereas Cruikshank knew only as much as he had read in the monthly instalments up to that point and as much as Dickens himself was prepared to reveal.

The legitimate heir of Edwin Leeford who plots against his illegitimate half-brother because he covets Oliver's portion of the patrimony — a Cain to Oliver's Abel — is the subject of Sol Eytinge, Junior's character 1867 small-scale character study of the caped Monks. Whereas Mahoney, like Eytinge, was well aware of Monks's importance to the "missing heir" plot, Cruikshank may have had no inkling of there even being such a character as Oliver's evil half-brother until Dickens proposed (as he undoubtedly did) that Cruikshank show Monks in company with Fagin at Oliver's window in the garden at Chertsey. Cruikshank's and Furniss's identifying the villains with the green world may at first strike the reader as odd, but Oliver is inside, part of the constructed, civilised world, and both the gentleman plotter and the criminal fence are outside those bounds. Eytinge shows the melodramatic villain by himself, alienated, brooding, and malevolent, the egocentric child of privilege who considers nobody's welfare but his own. The cape in which the various illustrators clothe him is the outward and visible sign of his attempt to act in secret, so that he consorts with his criminal associates under an assumed identity, and often under the cover of night. The cloak, then, is the outward visible sign of his alias. His manner and speech, however, betray his true background. His association with Fagin in Cruikshank's, Mahoney's, and Furniss's illustrations show that he is prepared to violate the barriers of class and propriety in order to advance his fortunes, even​at the cost of Oliver's life. The Victorian illustrators consistently depict the venomous older brother as "a tall man wrapped in a cloak" (Ch. 34), "his face averted," his height consistently exaggerated by his respectable top-hat. Tellingly, in the text Fagin apparently fears even uttering his name.

Monks and Fagin Watching Oliver Asleep

That the 1910 illustrator gives the black-cloaked figure who travels under an alias amongst the lowest elements of society a place of prominence (the lower left-hand corner) in Characters in the Story, the ornamental border for the title-page of the volume, suggests that the fin de siecle artist felt that his destruction of the evidence was a pivotal moment in the narrative, even if he felt it necessary to depict Monks with his signature hat on in both the vignette and the full-page lithograph, which we encounter immediately after Dickens's economical but telling description in the text. Furniss, also guided by the author's and original illustrator's choice of scenes for the monthly engravings, introduces Monks in a scene precisely paralleling Cruikshank's in Chapter 34, Monks and the Jew (June 1838) with Monks and Fagin watching Oliver sleep. However, Furniss makes several significant changes in that he designates Fagin by name (rather than as "The Jew" in the 1838 serial illustration) in the caption, and places the emphasis on the figure of Oliver who, though asleep, dominates the scene physically as he dominates Monks's thoughts. The boy, in contrast to plotting visitors like black crows at his window, dozes over his school book's on a summer evening, mistakenly believing himself safe at last and well out of Fagin's diabolical clutches. The surreptitious adults, barely visible as black silhouettes in the background, are more threatening in that they are present but not clearly discernible. The Kyd and Pailthorpe sequences, in contrast to those of Cruikshank, Eytinge, Mahoney, and Furniss neglect the figure of Monks, whose function in the plot the 1910 cigarette card only implies in the following line: Fain is "Baffled in his attempts to lure Oliver Twist into a life of crime" (Card No. 2, verso).

Relevant Illustrations from the initial serial edition (1837-39), Diamond Edition (1867), and Household Edition (1871)

Left: Cruikshank's Monks and the Jew, the basis for Furniss's illustration. Centre: Sol Eytinge, Junior's Monks . Right: Kyd's Fagin, Card No. 2 in the Player's Cigarette series (1910).

Above: Mahoney's 1871 engraving of Oliver's tranquil life at the Maylies', "Fagin!" whispered a voice close to his ear.

Bibliography

Darley, Felix Octavius Carr. Character Sketches from Dickens. Philadelphia: Porter and Coates, 1888.

Davis, Paul. Charles Dickens A to Z: The Essential Reference to His Life and Work. New York: Facts On File, 1998.

Dickens, Charles. The Adventures of Oliver Twist; or, The Parish Boy's Progress. Illustrated by George Cruikshank. London: Bradbury and Evans; Chapman and Hall, 1838; rpt. with revisions 1846.

_____. Oliver Twist. Works of Charles Dickens. Household Edition. 55 vols. Illustrated by F. O. C. Darley and John Gilbert. New York: Sheldon and Co., 1865.

_____. Oliver Twist. Works of Charles Dickens. Diamond Edition. 14 vols. Illustrated by Sol Eytinge, Jr. Boston: Ticknor and Fields, 1867.

_____. Oliver Twist. Works of Charles Dickens. Household Edition. 22 vols. Illustrated by James Mahoney. London: Chapman and Hall, 1871. Vol. I.

_____. The Adventures of Oliver Twist. Works of Charles Dickens. Charles Dickens Library Edition. 18 vols. Illustrated by Harry Furniss. London: Educational Book Company, 1910. Vol. III.

_____. The Adventures of Oliver Twist. Works of Charles Dickens. The Waverley​ Edition. Illustrated by Charles Pears. London: Waverley, 1912.

_____.The Letters of Charles Dickens. Ed. Graham Storey, Kathleen Tillotson, and Angus Eassone. The Pilgrim Edition. Oxford: Clarendon, 1965. Vol. I (1820-1839).

Forster, John. "Oliver Twist 1838." The Life of Charles Dickens. Ed. B. W. Matz. The Memorial Edition. 2 vols. Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott, 1911. Vol. I, Book 2, Chapter 3.

Herr, Joelle. "Oliver Twist." Charles Dickens: The Complete Novels in One Sitting. Philadelphia and London: Running Press, 2012, 34-46.

Jordan, John O. "The Purloined Hankerchief." Chapter 3, "A Critical Selection." Readings on Charles Dickens "Oliver Twist.". Greenhaven Press Literary Companion to British Literature. Originally in Dickens Studies Annual, 1989. San Diego, CA: Greenhaven, 2001, 167-83.

Kyd (Clayton J. Clarke). Characters from Dickens. Nottingham: John Player & Sons, 1910.

Pailthorpe, Frderick W. (Illustrator). Charles Dickens's Oliver Twist. London: Robson & Kerslake, 1886. Set No. 118 (coloured) of 200 sets of proof impressions.

Vann, J. Don. "Oliver Twist." Victorian Novels in Serial. New York: The Modern Language Association, 1985, 62-63.

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Created 25 February 2015

Last modified 15 February 2020