The mysterious apparition of Fagin and Monks at the window outside the room where Oliver is dozing in the supposed safety of his country retreat with the Maylie family furnishes one of Cruikshank’s memorable illustrations to Oliver Twist:

The circumstances surrounding this episode have been much worried over by commentators on the novel. The convalescent Oliver is described as being in his own little room, on the ground-floor; at the back of the house. The situation is Edenic:

It was quite a cottage-room, with a lattice-window: around which were clusters of jessamine and honeysuckle, that crept over the casement, and filled the place with their delicious perfume. It looked into a garden, whence a wicket-gate opened into a small paddock; all beyond was fine meadow-land and wood. There was no other dwelling near, in that direction; and the prospect it commanded was very extensive.

One beautiful evening, when the first shades of twilight were beginning to settle upon the earth, Oliver sat at this window, intent upon his books. He had been poring over them for some time; and as the day had been uncommonly sultry, and he had exerted himself a great deal, it is no disparagement to the authors: whoever they may have been, to say, that gradually and by slow degrees, he fell asleep.

Monks and the Jew

There is a kind of sleep that steals upon us sometimes, which, while it holds the body prisoner, does not free the mind from a sense of things about it, and enable it to ramble at its pleasure. So far as an overpowering heaviness, a prostration of strength, and an utter inability to control our thoughts or power of motion, can be called sleep, this is it; and yet we have a consciousness of all that is going on about us, and if we dream at such a time, words which are really spoken, or sounds which really exist at the moment, accommodate themselves with surprising readiness to our visions, until reality and imagination become so strangely blended that it is afterwards almost a matter of impossibility to separate the two. Nor is this, the most striking phenomenon incidental to such a state. It is an undoubted fact, that although our senses of touch and sight be for the time dead, yet our sleeping thoughts, and the visionary scenes that pass before us, will be influenced, and materially influenced, by the mere silent presence of some external object; which may not have been near us when we closed our eyes: and of whose vicinity we have had no waking consciousness.

Oliver knew, perfectly well, that he was in his own little room; that his books were lying on the table before him; and 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 should know, if there wasn’t a mark above it, that he lay buried there. I should!’

The man seemed to say this, with such dreadful hatred, that Oliver awoke with the fear, and started up.

Good Heaven! what was that, which sent the blood tingling to his heart, and deprived him of his voice, and of power to move! There – there – at the window; close before him; so close, that he could have almost touched him before he started back: with his eyes peering into the room, and meeting his: there stood the Jew! And beside him, white with rage, or fear, or both, were the scowling features of the man who had accosted him at the inn-yard.

It was but an instant, a glance, a flash, before his eyes; and they were gone. But they had recognised him, and he them; and their look was as firmly impressed upon his memory, as if it had been deeply carved in stone, and set before him from his birth. He stood transfixed for a moment; and then, leaping from the window into the garden, called loudly for help. (Chapter 33)

Chapter 33 breaks off at this point. The next chapter opens with a general alarm at Oliver’s cry (‘The Jew! The Jew!’).1 Oliver points out the ‘course the men had taken’. But, despite everyone’s vigorous efforts, ‘the search was all in vain. There were not even the traces of recent footsteps, to be seen’ (Ch. 34). The physical improbability of the two men having been in the area is pondered:

They stood, now, on the summit of a little hill, commanding the open fields in every direction for three or four miles. There was the village in the hollow on the left; but, in order to gain that, after pursuing the track Oliver had pointed out, the men must have made a circuit of open ground, which it was impossible they could have accomplished in so short a time. A thick wood skirted the meadow-land in another direction; but they could not have gained that covert for the same reason. (Ch. 34)

But when Harry Maylie tells Oliver ‘it must have been a dream’, the boy protests: ‘Oh no … I saw him too plainly for that. I saw them both, as plainly as I see you now’ (Ch. 34). Inquiries are pursued, servants are dispatched to ask questions at all the ale-houses in the area, but nothing is turned up. Monks and Fagin have not been seen by another human eye in the neighbourhood, going or coming, although the appearance of two such low-life aliens would surely have attracted the notice of suspicious locals (as Monks immediately attracted Oliver’s attention when he earlier ran into him at the nearby market town). Nor is the fact that the two men were actually at Oliver’s window confirmed later in the story. Has Oliver imagined the whole thing? Was it a dream? By commissioning an illustration of the scene by Cruikshank, Dickens seems to support Oliver’s insisted declaration – that it visibly and actually happened. The men were there at the window. Moreover, the conversation (particularly Monks’s characteristically melodramatic expressions of hatred) rings very true in the reader’s ear.

But, if one accepts the actuality of what Oliver saw, three problems follow: (1) How did Fagin and Monks discover where Oliver was staying? (2) How did the two men, neither of whom is notably agile, disappear so suddenly – before Oliver, who is agile and has jumped out of the window, can see where they have made off to? (3) Why did the interlopers leave no physical trace of their presence?

A number of explanations have been put forward. That Dickens was less careful in writing the novel than we are in reading it is the most primitive. Humphry House, in his introduction to the 1949 Oxford Illustrated edition of Oliver Twist, notes that Dickens wrote and published the work in a huge hurry, and that it ‘was Dickens’s first attempt at a novel proper. The sequence of the external events which befall Oliver [are] complicated and careless.’ John Bayley elsewhere notes that Dickens repeats in this window scene material which is to be found earlier in the novel, at the beginning of Chapter 9 (‘There is a drowsy state, between sleeping and waking…’). This recycling of material would support the view that Dickens was under severe pressure.2 Another primitive explanation is that in the window episode Dickens is resorting to the crude tricks of the Gothic ghost story. There is, for instance, a parallel instance earlier when, as he conspires at midnight with Fagin, Monks sees ‘the shadow of a woman, in a cloak and bonnet, pass along the wainscot like a breath!’ (Ch. 26). The two men search the whole house and find nothing – the woman, we apprehend, is the wraith of Oliver’s mother, his protective angel.

Many critics prefer more ingenious readings. Steven Marcus, for example, in Dickens: From Pickwick to Dombey (London, 1965) examines the scene and its ‘hypnagogic’ references for Freudian clues that can be tracked back to Dickens’s primal experiences in the blacking factory. J. Hillis Miller reads the scene for its demonstration of ‘the total insecurity of Oliver’s precarious happy state’. The vision of evil at the window is proof that his ‘past is permanently part of him’. The absence of prints suggests that Fagin is to be equated with the similarly lightfooted devil.3

Colin Williamson, reviewing these and other hypotheses, offers what he calls a more ‘mundane’ explanation.4 He advocates reading Oliver Twist as one would a detective story or crime thriller. Williamson notes as significant a perplexing earlier episode in Chapter 32 in which Oliver is travelling to London with Mr Losberne to find the house of Mr Brownlow (Oliver can recall the street and the general aspect of the building, but not the number). Suddenly, at Chertsey Bridge, the excited boy turns very pale when he ‘recognises’ another house – that in which he and Sikes’s gang hid before the attempted burglary. They stop the carriage and the impulsive Losberne bursts his way in. They encounter ‘a little, ugly hump-backed man’, who is understandably furious at the invasion of his property by these two strangers and vociferates horrific but comically impotent threats. There is, as it turns out, absolutely nothing to prove that the burglars were ever in the house. The furniture and interior decoration are entirely different from what Oliver remembers and has told his friends about: ‘not even the position of the cupboards; answered Oliver’s description!’. Oliver and the doctor leave with the little man’s curses ringing in their ears. Losberne is embarrassed by the whole episode, and evidently sees it as evidence of Oliver’s extraordinary nervousness. None the less, the good-hearted doctor trusts the boy sufficiently to go looking for Brownlow’s house, which they discover after a little trial and error. Oliver remembers the way to the street and recognizes the house immediately by its white colour.

As Williamson points out, the odd thing about the business with the little ugly hump-backed man’s house ‘is its apparent pointlessness’ (p. 226). But, Williamson suggests,

if we approach Oliver Twist as a crime thriller, the obvious explanation of the confusion over the house is that the hunchback is an associate of Sikes who allows him the use of the house for his nefarious purposes, and that Dickens had planned that Losberne’s action in entering the house should give its occupant a chance to see and identify Oliver … All the members of the gang would doubtless have been alerted to Oliver’s disappearance in the district and the threat he constituted to their safety; and it would be easy enough for an astute hunchback to track Oliver down through his companion and the carriage he occupied. (pp. 227–8)

It is an attractive hypothesis – except that a bona fide thriller-writer would surely have alerted the reader to the significance of the event later in the story. Williamson implies that pressure of serialization may have prevented Dickens from working out this detail of the plot satisfactorily.

There are other logical objections. It would hardly be necessary for the gang to use accidental sources of information and all the complicated business of trailing carriages many miles into the countryside – assuming that the little man could set the operation up before Losberne’s carriage was on its way into the maelstrom of the London streets. Since the wounded Oliver was taken into the same house that was set up for the burglary (an establishment that had been thoroughly ‘cased’ in advance), and had remained there several weeks convalescing from his bullet-wound, he could have been effortlessly tracked by Sikes, who could have found his way to the scene of the crime blindfolded. It is true that the Maylies have moved for the summer to the country; but they have left servants in the house who know the other address and have no reason for keeping it secret. It would be the work of minutes for the Artful Dodger to invent some ruse for being told where the Maylie household and their little invalid guest are now residing. If there is a larger significance in the episode of the little hump-backed man it is, surely, that despite this evidence of Oliver’s unreliability (and his whole story strains credulity to breaking-point) the good doctor and his friends persist in believing him. Although he clearly is in error about the gang’s house, they trust that he can locate Brownlow’s house. And, by implication, they believe his whole incredible story.

Yet another explanation of the window episode is offered by Fred Kaplan in Dickens and Mesmerism (Princeton, 1975). Kaplan notes that Oliver Twist was written at the height of ‘The Mesmeric Mania’, when Dickens was closely associated with the arch apostle of this new science, Dr John Elliotson. The long disquisition about Oliver’s half-sleeping sensory awareness seems a clear pointer to the author’s current fascination with mesmerism and ‘animal magnetism’. As Kaplan records, it was one of Elliotson’s claims that ‘the mesmerized subject can see with his eyes closed’ (p. 152). This would seem to be how Oliver becomes aware of the criminals at the window before he has woken from his sleep – which may more truly be described as a trance, or what the mesmerists called ‘sleepwaking’. One could go one step further (as Kaplan does not) and suggest that the whole episode is a mesmeric phenomenon. This would explain the lack of any footprints or visible signs of Fagin’s and Monks’s preternaturally sudden disappearance (‘It was but an instant, a glance, a flash, before his eyes; and they were gone’).

There is, as it happens, strong supporting evidence for the hypothesis that the whole episode is an example of what the practitioners of mesmerism called ‘mental travelling’. It is not the case that Monks and Fagin visit Oliver; he visits them, borne on the wings of mesmeric trance. As Alison Winter has recorded, from August 1837 to May 1838 Elliotson carried out private experiments on many of his patients, and in particular the domestic servant, Elizabeth O’Key, in the wards of University College Hospital. In the spring and summer of 1838 he put on a series of public demonstrations at UCH. According to Kaplan, Dickens attended the first O’Key demonstration on 10 May 1838, or the second on 2 June, or ‘perhaps even both’ (p. 36). As Winter describes the experiments: ‘Elliotson did things such as mesmerizing her through walls from various distances; she had visions in which she represented herself as if she felt that various personages were around her – these individuals told her things which became personal prophecies.’5 There is also a notable similarity between the language of Dickens’s remarks about Oliver’s tranced sensitivity to absent personages, and what commentators were saying about O’Key in 1838.

Probably no explanation of this episode will convince everyone and some will convince no one. I would like, however; to offer an explanation of my own. Oliver Twist was first published as a serial in Bentley’s Miscellany, from February 1837 to April 1839. It was an amazingly busy period in Dickens’s early career. He had outstanding contracts for new novels and editorial commitments to no less than three different publishers, and felt that he was in danger of ‘busting the boiler’.

One of the problems for the serialist working at full stretch was providing early enough copy for his illustrator, particularly if his partner (like George Cruikshank) needed to have his designs engraved on steel – a long and difficult procedure. When he had time in hand, Dickens preferred to supply manuscript or proofs to Cruikshank, so that he could portray narrative details accurately. But, as Kathleen Tillotson notes, ‘although Dickens originally promised to let Cruikshank have the manuscript by the fifth of the month, the evidence suggests that after the first month he was always later, sometimes sending an instalment of manuscript, and sometimes conveying instructions for the illustration by a note or by word of mouth’.6

‘Monks and the Jew’ appeared in the Bentley’s instalment for June 1838. Dickens felt himself particularly pressured at this point, because he thought copy was needed early, on account of the Coronation on the 28th of the month. My speculation is that before actually writing this section of the narrative Dickens foresaw an abduction or murder attempt on Oliver; and duly instructed Cruikshank to go ahead with the villains-at-the-window illustration, preparatory to that scenario. But, while writing the episode, Dickens settled on something more complex, bringing the Bumbles, Noah Claypole, and Bill Sikes back into the centre of things. It remains uncertain, if they are real, and not figments of Oliver’s superheated imagination, what Fagin and Monks intend to do with the intelligence that Oliver is now lodged with the Maylies. But once Cruikshank had supplied the illustration, it was impossible, at this short notice, to procure another and Dickens suddenly realized that he could elegantly write himself out of the dilemma by means of the ‘mesmeric enigma’ device, using material gathered at the O’Key demonstrations.7

It would seem that Dickens’s more scientific contemporaries registered the interesting overtones of the window scene in Chapter 34. G.H. Lewes wrote a letter (which has not survived) evidently enquiring exactly what Dickens had intended, and on what scientific authority the scene was devised. Towards the end of November 1838 Elliotson himself responded. Dickens wrote the following note to his illustrator:

My Dear Cruikshank,

Elliotson has written to me to go and see some experiments on Okey [sic] at his house at 3 o’clock tomorrow afternoon. He begs me to invite you. Will you come? Let me know.

Ever Faithfully Yrs.8

Why, one may go on to wonder, did Dickens in later prefaces to the novel not alert the reader to the scientific plausibility of Oliver’s clairvoyance as, for instance, he ferociously defended the ‘spontaneous combustion’ in Bleak House, when G.H. Lewes questioned it? There is a likely explanation. In September 1838 O’Key was denounced as an impostor by Thomas Wakley in the Lancet. In the squabble that followed, Elliotson was forced to resign his position at UCH in late December of the same year. In the judgement of most intelligent lay persons (even those like Dickens who were friendly with Elliotson) the O’Key experiments, if not wholly discredited, had been rendered extremely dubious. In these circumstances, although he saw no reason to change his text, neither did Dickens see any good reason for drawing the reader’s attention to the ‘science’ on which the window scene is based.

Notes

1. Jonathan Grossman, in an article in Dickens Studies Annual (1996), points out that this is the first time Oliver refers to Fagin as ‘The Jew’ – a fact of which he seems previously to have been unaware.

2. Bayley’s essay, ‘Things as they are’, is to be found in John Gross and Gabriel Pearson (eds.), Dickens and the Twentieth Century (London, 1962), 49–64.

3. J. Hillis Miller, Dickens: The World of his Novels (Cambridge: Mass., 1958), p. 73.

4. Colin Williamson, ‘Two Missing Links in Oliver Twist’, Nineteenth-Century Fiction, 22 (Dec. 1967), 225–34.

5. See Alison Winter; ‘Mesmerism and Popular Culture in early Victorian England’, History of Science, 32 (1994), 317–43. Kaplan discusses the O’Key connection at length in Dickens and Mesmerism, 34–44.

6. Kathleen Tillotson (ed.), Oliver Twist (Oxford, 1966), 392. Thackeray, who illustrated his own serial novels, frequently ran into difficulties supplying designs sufficiently ahead of time for the engraver. See the ‘Commentary on Illustrations’ by Nicholas Pickwoad, in Vanity Fair, ed. P.L. Shillingsburg (London and New York, 1989), 643–4. Shillingsburg gives further examples in his companion edition of Pendennis (London and New York, 1990), ‘Writing and Publishing Pendennis’, 375–98.

7. That Dickens altered his plan of Oliver Twist as he went along is convincingly argued by Burton M. Wheeler, ‘The Text and Plan of Oliver Twist’, Dickens Studies Annual, 12 (1983), 41–61. Wheeler notes particularly that ‘the conspiracy between Monks and Fagin does not bear close scrutiny’ (p. 56) and that this section of the novel bears witness of being improvised from one instalment to the next.

8. See The Letters of Charles Dickens, Vol. 1, 1820–39, ed. Madeline House and Graham Storey (Oxford, 1965), 403, 461.