`…it is not drawn with the free lines of a free man; it has the half-witted secrecies of a hunted thief. It does not look merely like a picture of Fagin; it looks like a picture by Fagin.‘ (G. K. Chesterton Charles Dickens, 1906)
‘Do you hear me, some of you? He has been the- the- somehow the cause of all this…’
‘Fagin, Fagin! Are you a man?’
I shan’t be one for long,’ he replied, looking up with a face retaining no human epression but rage and terror. ‘Strike them dead! What right have they to butcher me?’
The metaphysical question, ‘Are you are man?’ renders Fagin a problematic abject. His unnnerving and broken acknowledgement that Oliver has beeen the ’cause of all this’ complicates the ethics of judgement. It is not to extreme to liken Fagin’s dislocated predicament at the end of Oliver Twist to King lear on the Heath. Fagin’s racial marginality has brought him to the final scene of this Victorian Freak Show.
Thus Dickens uncovers far more here than he is prepared to say. The tension between the relentless (and unnatural) even pathological innocence of Oliver, and the grotesque degradation of Fagin is almost ‘beyond’ comprehension. They exist in two exclusive worlds. The barbarism of the condemned cell is reinforced by the unanswerable plea: ‘what right have they to butcher me?’ The world of gentility pursues its victims as viciously as those it villifies.
We read and ‘watch’ this scene and recognise that Fagin’s terror is our own. We cannot ‘be’ Oliver here; he exists in a fairytale ‘beyond’ that breaks with credibility. We have to be Fagin, and inhabit a hellish nightmare impending personal extinction.