Charles Dickens's Fagin gets rehabilitated, again

Washington Post

08-03-2025

What do you do with a problem like Fagin, the petty-thief ringleader and most indelible character in Charles Dickens's 'Oliver Twist' — and one of the most vicious antisemitic stereotypes ever committed to paper?
Even Dickens himself didn't know. In the years after publishing his famous tale of the impoverished, golden-hearted orphan Oliver, who is bleakly introduced to the London underworld by the leering, greedy Fagin, he came to deeply rue the vitriol that his villain channeled into the world. After Dickens befriended a Jewish couple in the 1860s who told him of the harm the character had done to their community, the author set to work excising mentions of Fagin's Jewishness from subsequent editions of the novel. And, in a final act of penitence, he wrote a Jewish character, Riah, into 'Our Mutual Friend,' who is, in his saintliness, almost as unbelievable as Fagin is in his wickedness.
Over the decades, many have tried to bring more nuance to the character, including the beloved Broadway musical 'Oliver!,' which painted him as comic more than menacing; a turn-of-the-century BBC miniseries adaptation of 'Oliver Twist,' which gave him a backstory as a magician in Prague; and the lauded cartoonist Will Eisner's graphic novel 'Fagin the Jew,' which imagined his early life in London's slums. Now, yet another writer is trying their hand at rescuing Fagin from the depths of iniquity. Allison Epstein's 'Fagin the Thief' is a sorrowful, reflective novel, pockmarked with episodes of real insight and beauty. But it does not ultimately succeed in its efforts to humanize its central figure — in part because it, too, is riddled with stereotypes, of a storytelling kind, in a way that its premise may have made impossible to avoid.
A blurb on the book's cover touts 'Fagin the Thief' as transforming its antihero as 'Wicked' did the Wicked Witch of the West. And as in 'Wicked,' Epstein's novel opens with the reflection that its central character had a mother and a father.
As with Elphaba in 'Wicked,' the tight-knit community into which Fagin is born views him with suspicion from birth. (What sets him apart isn't the color of his skin but rather his parentage: his father — who haunts him through the book — who was hung as a thief before he was born.) Like Elphaba, Epstein's Fagin is tormented by a sense of an unrealized internal power, one that sets him apart from the herd-minded milieu in which he is raised; and he has a drive to care for society's downtrodden, an obscure need to help those who cannot help themselves — even though he knows that in a world as unequal and unforgiving as his own, any civic-minded aspirations are sure to prove delusional, if not to outright backfire.
Why these comparisons? Only to note that entries in the subgenre of character rehabilitation — other examples of which include Madeline Miller's 'Circe,' John Gardner's 'Grendel' and the 'Maleficent' film franchise — tend to follow a familiar path. We see the central character at a time when they had not yet hardened into their final form; when they were subject to the tenderness and vulnerability of childhood; when they had the option, perhaps, to choose a different path. And then we see how the path on which they did infamously end up looked more complicated from their initial perspective, a navigation not between right and wrong but between survival on their own terms and submission.
Jacob Fagin, in Epstein's telling, is obsessed with survival, perhaps because of his start as an outsider among outsiders; he is painfully aware that almost everyone he knows expects him to come to no good. So Fagin commits himself to that mission, despite his beloved mother, Leah's, profound wish for him to choose a different life. He strikes out alone as a teenager and becomes so accustomed to being rebuffed by the world that he cannot accept true affection when it comes his way.
Eventually, in his 30s, Fagin effectively adopts an inept teenage pickpocket named Bill Sikes, setting the tenor for the rest of his life. He will take in other abandoned children to train as thieves; he tells himself it's a smart business choice, but it's obvious that his real motivation is his compassion for their lonesomeness and a desire to help. (Oliver is one of them and, interestingly, portrayed as a creature of real wiliness — not, as Dickens painted him, an ill-fated innocent.) And Fagin will increasingly live in abject terror of Sikes, whose unpredictable violence is the main threat in 'Oliver Twist,' and whom Epstein portrays as the real (wounded) menace.
Literature thrives on familiar plotlines, but there is something about this particular one, the striving to give depth to a character unjustly inscribed in history as pure evil, that tends to thwart itself. The drive to humanize is a drive to make something understandable. But parsing a person as if they were an equation — one part traumatized childhood, one part hardscrabble launch into independence, one part secret soft spot — tends to make them come across as more inscrutable, not less.
We still read 'Oliver Twist' despite the antisemitism — and the fact that it is extraordinarily depressing — because there is life in it. Fagin is horrid, and Oliver is in some ways an idealized blank, but around them is a cast that cannot help but sparkle. Yes, it is an old story — an innocent is taken advantage of, with justice served in the end — but it never truly feels like one, because it is full of fresh views. That freshness is missing from 'Fagin the Thief.' The characters too often feel present because they are useful, rather than real.
'Fagin the Thief' is elegant and, in its own way, moving. It easily held my attention. I slipped straight through it, as its title character might slip through a crowd in London's Haymarket, scoping out an unwitting target. But unlike Fagin, I never quite closed my grasp on my mark. He remained a distant profile, alluring in an off-putting kind of way, perhaps better left uncaught.
Talya Zax is an editor at the Forward.
By Allison Epstein.
Doubleday. 324 pp. $28