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"The Boys are Pickpockets, and the Girl is a Prostitute": Gender and Juvenile Criminality in Early Victorian England from Oliver Twist to London Labour

1996; Johns Hopkins University Press; Volume: 27; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1353/nlh.1996.0029

1080-661X

Larry Wolff,

Literature: history, themes, analysis

"The Boys are Pickpockets, and the Girl is a Prostitute": Gender and Juvenile Criminality in Early Victorian England from Oliver Twist to London Labour Larry Wolff (bio) DA. Miller begins his book The Novel and the Police with a discussion of the representation of the criminal world in Oliver Twist, stressing the "coherence of delinquency, as a structured milieu or network," the "systematic nature of delinquency," the "closed-circuit character of delinquency" in Dickens's novel. 1 Miller suggests more generally that nineteenth-century omniscient narration allows the author and reader to participate in the detective surveillance of the enclosed criminal world. Yet not everything can be known, at least until the very end, for the detective play of the reader must lose its interest when the secrets of the underworld stand fully revealed. The literary consequence in Oliver Twist is a sphere of coherent, but cryptic, delinquency, whose structures are open not only to investigation but also to interpretation. In fact, ever since the first serial installments of the novel in 1837, an interpretive structuring of criminality has imposed itself upon the mysteries of early Victorian vice which Dickens only vaguely described. In the preface of 1841 Dickens met the moral objections of readers with a defiant statement of his characters' precise criminal roles: "It is, it seems, a very coarse and shocking circumstance, that some of the characters in these pages are chosen from the most criminal and degraded of London's population; that Sikes is a thief, and Fagin a receiver of stolen goods; that the boys are pickpockets, and the girl is a prostitute." This last identification—"the girl is a prostitute"—was hardly news, but it was nevertheless something new, for Dickens, as he went on to explain in the preface of 1841, had avoided naming Nancy's profession in the novel itself, and had indeed left intentionally imprecise the general representation of criminality: No less consulting my own taste, than the manners of the age, I endeavoured, while I painted it in all its fallen and degraded aspect, to banish from the lips of the lowest character I introduced, any expression that could by possibility [End Page 227] offend; and rather to lead to the unavoidable inference that its existence was of the most debased and vicious kind, than to prove it elaborately by words and deeds. In the case of the girl, in particular, I kept this intention constantly in view. Whether it is apparent in the narrative, and how it is executed, I leave my readers to determine. 2 Dickens leaves a lot for his readers to determine—by "inference"—especially concerning what exactly is "most debased and vicious" in the world of his criminal characters. The game of guessing the crime becomes a detective joke between Dickens and the reader, from the first time that Fagin plays his own game of picking pockets with the boys—and only Oliver is innocent enough not to understand that they are practicing theft. This contrived collusion with the detective readers, underlined by Oliver's innocence and ignorance, allows Dickens to help them to the unavoidable inferences, "that the boys are pickpockets, and the girl is a prostitute." This precision of the preface of 1841, however, with its specific structuring of criminality, also distracts the detective from other possible inferences and structures, most notably in its implicit presumption that the boys are not prostitutes. The gendering of prostitution, which structures the purposeful vagueness of the novel on the nature of vice, has long governed the reading of its cryptic criminal underworld. There is certainly some sociological plausibility to the idea that runaway boys, living in a big city under the guardianship of an unscrupulous old criminal, may end up being sold, or selling themselves, for sex. There is also important textual evidence for considering Oliver Twist in the light of this hypothesis, the boys not only as pickpockets, but also as prostitutes, Fagin not only a fence, but also a pimp. In fact, although one cannot definitely conclude that the boys are prostitutes, not as definitely as Dickens declares that "the girl is a prostitute," one can establish the radical indeterminacy of the novel in...