Dickens, Judaism, and Cosmopolitanism

Abstract:This essay takes Dickens and Thackeray on Jews in London and in Europe, as contrasts, and it investigates the claims made in his lifetime that Dickens was anti-Semitic, especially in the writing of Fagin in Oliver Twist, though attention is also given to Great Expectations and Our Mutual Friend. The essay discusses the place given to Fagin in Dickens's autobiography relative to the blacking-factory, and also in the imagination of George Cruikshank, Dickens's illustrator for Oliver Twist. It traces also the qualities of grotesquery, excess and diabolism in Fagin, and its conclusion draws in the contrasted meanings of "cosmopolitan," both a citizen of the world, and one who is exiled, a stranger, and argues that Dickens gives place to the Jew as the latter.