Fagin by J. Clayton Clarke ("Kyd") for the 1910 watercolour series: reproduced on John Player cigarette card no. 2: Ninety-two Characters from Dickens: The Adventures of Oliver Twist. 2 ½ inches high by 1 ¼ inches wide (6.3 cm high by 3.3 cm wide). [Click on the images to enlarge them.]
A villainous old Jewish "fence" and trainer of youthful thieves; a "merry old gentleman" with moments of humour, mainly of a grim, professional kind. Baffled in his attempts to lure Oliver Twist into a life of crime, he incites Sikes to murder Nancy, and thus paves his own way to the scaffold. Chapter LII, "Fagin's last night alive," is terrible in its intensity. Once read, it can never be forgotten. [Verso over Card No. 2]
Commentary: Characters from Dickens
Right: George Cruikshank's initial serial depiction of the receiver of stolen goods and criminal mastermind, Oliver Twist introduced to the respectable old gentleman (May 1837, instalment no. 4).
Of the set of 50 cigarette cards, initially produced in 1910 and reissued in 1923, fully 15 or 30% concern a single novel, The Pickwick Papers, and other five Oliver Twist. That forty per cent of the illustrations concern these early novels attests to the continued popularity of the picaresque comic novels — and also suggests that the later, darker novels such as Our Mutual Friend and The Mystery of Edwin Drood offered little for the caricaturist, the only late characters in the series being the singularly unpleasant Silas Wegg and Rogue Riderhood from Our Mutual Friend, and Turveydrop, Jo, Bucket, and Chadband from Bleak House. Although the popular taste in "characters from Dickens" as well as in "novels from Dickens" has changed markedly over the past century, Fagin, the master criminal, has become something of a cultural icon thanks to numerous film and stage adaptations such as the 1968 film Oliver!
At the end of the century for his Character Sketches from Dickens, the celebrated Dickens illustrator Kyd (J. Clayton Clarke) depicted Fagin not as the boys' instructor or tutor in the criminal arts, but as the boys' provider, toasting fork in hand, in Fagin, an image he reproduced for Player's Cigarette Card No. 2 in a series of fifty: a hideous, red-bearded, red-haired monster in tattered dressing-gown and slippers, with a toothy, atavistic smile. Other illustrators have been kinder to the master-thief, and Furniss's initial illustration of Fagin, in top hat and tailcoat, and striding forward, cane in hand, is more flattering by far than Kyd's as it shows a dynamic, active, bustling teacher rather than a hideous troll with fangs ready to devour incautious children. Dark, menacing, unkempt, Fagin in Eytinge's single Diamond Edition illustration is neither parent, nor tutor, nor yet a monster, but the quintessential miser who neglects even personal hygiene and adequate clothing in his pursuit of "personal property."
The character of Fagin is neither a Dickens or Cruikshank original, for such thief-takers, fences, and master criminals were commonplace in London lore and street gazettes. Dickens may have based Fagin partly upon Peachum in John Gay's The Beggar's Opera (1726) and partly upon such actual nefarious characters such as Ikey Solomon (1787-1850), born in the east end of London and notorious as a receiver of stolen goods. However, unlike Fagin, he was a practising Jew who successfully avoided capture on a number of occasions before sacrificing his freedom in the United States to join his wife, who had been sentenced to transportation to Tasmania (in those days, Van Diemen's Land). Like The Artful Dodger, Fagin is now part of our popular culture, and remains one of Dickens's most frequently illustrated and most recognizable characters, thanks in part to Lionel Bart's West End production (1960), David Merrick's Broadway musical Oliver! (1963), and David Lean's 1948 film with veteran Alec Guinness as Fagin. The most celebrated Fagin is that of the 1968 cinematic adaptation, directed by Carol Reed, with screenplay by Vernon Harris, starring Ron Moody as an entertaining, clowning Fagin, a part he reprised in the 1983 Broadway production.
In the commentary on the verso of the Kyd illustration, Fagin's criminality is still connected to his being "Jewish," despite Dickens's later attempts to modulate that indictment through extensive revisions: his 1867 revisions had markedly reduced the number of times that the narrator refers to Fagin as merely "The Jew." The present pre-WWI card ignores this Dickensian re-thinking of Fagin's Jewishness.
Other Player's Cigarettte Cards based on Oliver Twist
Relevant Darley "Character" (1888), Diamond Edition (1867), Household Edition (1871), and Charles Dickens Library Edition (1910) Illustrations
Left: F. O. C. Darley's Oliver and Fagan [sic] (1888). Centre: James Mahoney's Household Edition illustration (1871) "What's become of the boy" (Fagin, the Dodger, and Charley Bates. Right: Darley's study of Fagin for Dickens' Little Folks (1855). [Click on the images to enlarge them.]
Left: Sol Eytinge, Jr.'s Fagin (1867). Centre: Harry Furniss's The Thieves' Kitchen (1910). Right: F. W. Pailthorpe's illustration depicting Fagin's pickpocketing game with the boys: The merry old Gentleman's pretty little game (1886). [Click on images to enlarge them.]
Related Material
- Oliver Twist as a Triple-Decker
- Oliver untainted by evil
- Like Martin Chuzzlewit, it agitates for social reform
- Oliver Twist Illustrated, 1837-1910
Scanned images and text by Philip V. Allingham. [You may use these images without prior permission for any scholarly or educational purpose as long as you (1) credit the photographer and (2) link your document to this URL in a web document or cite the Victorian Web in a print one.]
Bibliography
Darley, Felix Octavius Carr (illustrator). Bill Sikes, Fagin, and Nancy from in Oliver and the Jew Fagin: from the “Oliver Twist” of Charles Dickens in Dickens' Little Folks (First Series). New York: J. S. Redfield, 1856; rpt. John B. Alden, 1866; John R. Anderson, 1878. Pp. 3-179.
Dickens, Charles. The Adventures of Oliver Twist; or, The Parish Boy's Progress. Illustrated by George Cruikshank. London: Chapman & Hall: 1846.
Dickens, Charles. The Adventures of Oliver Twist. Frontispieces by Felix Octavius Carr Darley and Sir John Gilbert. The Household Edition. 55 vols. New York: Sheldon & Co., 1861. 2 vols.
Dickens, Charles. The Adventures of Oliver Twist. Illustrated by Sol Eytinge, Jr. The Diamond Edition. 14 vols. Boston: Ticknor & Fields, 1867. Vol. XI.
Dickens, Charles. The Adventures of Oliver Twist. Illustrated by James Mahoney. The Household Edition. 22 vols. London: Chapman and Hall, 1871. Vol. I.
Dickens, Charles. Oliver Twist. Illustrated by Harry Furniss. The Charles Dickens Library Edition. 18 vols. London: Educational Book, 1910. Vol. III.
Hammerton, J. A. "Chapter 11: Oliver Twist." The Dickens Picture-Book. The Charles Dickens Library Edition. Illustrated by Harry Furniss. 18 vols. London: Educational Book Co., 1910. Vol. 17. Pp. 129-146.
Ison, Liz. "'All looks were fixed upon one man': 'Fagin' or 'The Jew'? Assessing Dickens's 1867 Textual Revisions of Oliver Twist." The Dickensian No. 525, Vol. 121, Part 1 (Spring 2025): 28-42.
Created 5 January 2015
Last modified 2 July 2025