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Bill Sikes, Fagin, and Nancy from “Oliver Twist”
Felix O. C. Darley
Annin-Loomis
1855, rpt. 1861
12 x 7.9 cm (4 ¾ by 3 ¼ inches) vignetted
Steel engraving
Frontispiece with Bill Sikes, Fagin, and Nancy for Oliver and The Jew Fagin in Dickens' Little Folks, originally published by Clark, Austin & Maynard (New York: 1861): facing title-page.
[Click on illustration to enlarge it.]
Scanned image by Prof. Meg Cronin, St. Anselm College, New Hampshire; text by Philip V. Allingham.
Series: Dickens, Charles, 1812-1870. Dickens' Little Folks: "Oliver and The Jew Fagin from The Oliver Twist of Charles Dickens.
IN this history of Oliver's life, I have wished to show the principle of Good surviving through long adverse circumstances, and triumphing at last.
The story involves the best and worst shadows of our common nature; much of its ugliest lines in the Jew Fagin; and something of its most beautiful in Oliver; and the poor girl who lost her life for the good she tried to do him.
Devonshire
Terrace.}
Since Dickens lived at 1 Devonshire Terrace from December 1839 through November 1851, this excerpt does not have its origins in either the earlier prefaces to the novel or the final (1867) preface that reflects his numerous changes to the text in 1867. Among these were alterations to the ways in which he referred to the criminal fence that employs the street-boys: the 1867 revisions markedly reduced the number of the number of times that the narrator refers to Fagin as merely "The Jew." Logically, then, this excerpt from a Dickens preface should reflect the wording of a passage in "Edition, revised and corrected" issued jointly by Champan and Hall, and by Bradbury and Evans in 1846. His primary intention, as the shortened Dickens' Little Folks version intimates, was to justify his portraying criminals such as Fagin and Bill Sikes to raise public awareness of social issues, such as the Poor Law Amendment Act of 1834, rather than to romanticize criminality as John Gay had done in The Beggar's Opera (1728).
Clearly Darley and his redactor were operating without benefit of Dickens’s 1867 edits of Oliver Twist; or, The Parish Boy's Progress, in which he eliminated a great many references to Fagin as simply “The Jew.” The scene that Darley has provided as the frontispiece and sole illustration still renders Fagin as a physical type, so that Darley’s readers would have responded to the bearded figure as a “type,” as well as an individual.
As Liz Ison remarks in her Dickensian article about the 1867 revisions,
In the 'Charles Dickens edition' of 1867, Dickens cut out more than a quarter (120 occurrences of references to 'the Jew' — bringing their number down to 315, and replacing them with 'Fagin', 'he' or simply an omission. [31]
“When is it to be done?” asked Nancy, stopping some turbulent exclamation on the part of Mr. Sikes, expressive of the disgust with which he received Fagin's affectation of humanity.
“I planned with Toby the night after to-morrow,” rejoined Sikes in a surly voice, “if he heard nothing from me to the contrary.” [Chapter VIII, 74]
This scene, however, cannot be precisely what Darley had in mind because Fagin then returns to his own hideout, and asks the Dodger if Oliver is "a-bed" [75]. However, the illustrator's omission of Oliver from the scene, perhaps implying that Oliver is a spectator and that readers are seeing what Oliver sees, may be significant. After breakfast the next morning, Fagin tells Oliver that he is to be transferred back into Sikes's custody that night, but he leaves it up to Sikes to explain Oliver's role in the forthcoming burglary. When Nancy comes to collect Oliver, Fagin does not join her on the carriage ride. The scene, then, which the Darley plate appears to realise is this in the original novel:
The latter recognition was uttered with just enough of embarrassment to imply a doubt of its reception; for Mr. Fagin and his young friend had not met, since she had interfered in behalf of Oliver. All doubts upon the subject, if he had any, were speedily removed by the young lady’s behaviour. She took her feet off the fender, pushed back her chair, and bade Fagin draw up his, without saying more about it: for it was a cold night, and no mistake.
‘It is cold, Nancy dear,’ said the Jew, as he warmed his skinny hands over the fire. ‘It seems to go right through one,’ added the old man, touching his side.
‘It must be a piercer, if it finds its way through your heart,’ said Mr. Sikes. ‘Give him something to drink, Nancy. Burn my body, make haste! It’s enough to turn a man ill, to see his lean old carcase shivering in that way, like a ugly ghost just rose from the grave.’
Nancy quickly brought a bottle from a cupboard, in which there were many: which, to judge from the diversity of their appearance, were filled with several kinds of liquids. Sikes pouring out a glass of brandy, bade the Jew drink it off. [Chapter XIX, “In Which a Notable Plan is Discussed and Determined On,” Household Edition, pp. 68-69]
The original 1837 Cruikshank caricatural style of presenting the villains, and stereotypically Jewish shrewd Fagin and brutal Sikes, tended to dominate the style or manner of presenting these figures in illustrated editions right up to Harry Furniss’s Illustrated Library Edition (1910). Darley’s realistic response, then, is all the more remarkable as it anticipates the style of Mahoney and a Barnard, most obviously seen in Mahoney's study of Fagin in the Condemned Cell in Chapter LII, "Fagin's Last Night Alive," He sat down on a stone bench opposite the door in the Household Edition (1872) and Barnard's frontispiece Bill Sikes: 'Keep quiet, you warmint! said Mr. Sikes, suddenly breaking the silence (1884). This realistically drawn ruffian's scruffy physiognomy is a sharp departure from the caricatural images with which Darley would have been familiar from the 1846 edition, notably the early Cruikshank cartoon-like studies for Bentley's Miscellany, especially Oliver claimed by his affectionate friends (September 1837) and Sikes attempting to destroy his dog (January 1839).
What Darley presciently offers as a children's book illustration of the Dickensian villains in Series One (1856), then, is much closer to such later interpretations of Sikes, Fagin, and Nancy as Sikes, Nancy, and Oliver Twist in Character Sketches from Dickens (1888). The 1856 engraving is not as photographically three-dimensional as the 1888 photogravure, and does not offer much informative background detail as context (other than the washing hanging on the line); however, it does offer a theatrical reality that is a stark departure from the earlier, caricatural style of book illustration. Sikes, sharing a confidence with Fagin, is wearing almost dandyish clothing, somewhat soiled, and Fagin a heavy coat appropriate to one who has just come inside after walking through London's mean streets on a winter's day.
Left: Cruikshank's Oliver's Reception by Fagin and the Boys Chapman & Hall (1837). Centre: Cruikshank's May 1837 serial engraving Oliver Introduced to the Respectable Old Gentleman. Right: Fagan [sic] and Oliver Twist in Felix Octavius Carr Darley's photogravure in Character Sketches from Dickens (1888.)
Left: Sol Eytinge, Jr.'s "Fagin" (Diamond Edition, 1867). Centre: Mahoney's Household Edition illustration (1871) "You are on the scent, are you, Nancy?" for the comparable but earlier scene to Darley's here, Ch. XV (1871). Right: Harry Furniss's The Thieves' Kitchen in The Charles Dickens Library Edition (1910).
Barnard, Fred. Character Sketches from Dickens. (16 photogravure illustrations) London, Paris & Melbourne: Cassell, 1885.
Barnard, Fred (illustrator). "Frontispiece." [Bill Sikes and his bull terrier, Bull's-eye, from Chapter 15]. Charles Dickens's The Adventures of Oliver Twist. Illustrated by Charles Pears. London: Waverley, 1912. Rpt. from Character Sketches from Dickens. Series 3. Philadelphia : A. E. Newton, [1888?]. London; New York: Cassell and Co., 1885.
Bentley, Nicolas, Michael Slater, and Nina Burgis. The Dickens Index. New York and Oxford: Oxford U. P., 1990.
Cohen, Jane Rabb. Charles Dickens and His Original Illustrators. Canton: Ohio U. P., 1980.
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. 3-179.
Dickens, Charles. The Adventures of Oliver Twist; or, The Parish Boy's Progress. Illustrated by George Cruikshank. London: Chapman and Hall, 1846.
Dickens, Charles. The Adventures of 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. 2 vols.
Dickens, Charles. Oliver Twist. Works of Charles Dickens. Diamond Edition. 18 vols. Illustrated by Sol Eytinge, Jr. Boston: Ticknor and Fields, 1867.
Dickens, Charles. The Adventures of Oliver Twist. Works of Charles Dickens. Household Edition. 22 vols. Illustrated by James Mahoney. London: Chapman and Hall, 1871. Vol. I.
Dickens, Charles. The Adventures of Oliver Twist. Works of Charles Dickens. Charles Dickens Library Edition. 22 vols. Illustrated by Harry Furniss. London: Educational Book Company, 1910. III.
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 31 May 2025
Last updated 23 June 2025