Just Finished Reading Oliver Twist by Charles Dickens

Sure, I'm aware of the musical Oliver!, in which little orphaned Oliver Twist pleads for some more bread to the consternation of his adult "benefactors", and I even watched the Disney movie Oliver and Company that adapted Charles Dickens' 1838 novel Oliver Twist to an animated tale about a kitten and some dogs...but I never did get around to reading the original book until just now.  Since the late 1960s I even carried with me the esoteric concept of "Fagin's henchmen" that narrator Frank Baxter promoted in the Bell Science educational film The Strange Case of the Cosmic Ray that I watched several times during elementary school, describing subatomic particles while trying to tie it all in with a novel about the institutional abuse of children and crime in early nineteenth-century England...that's a stretch if I ever heard one.  So when I picked up the actual book, I was already familiar with the general outline...now it was time to get acquainted with the particulars...

Little Oliver's mother dies while giving birth to him, and without a father present he is sent through the bureaucratic channels to which orphans like himself were subject during that era in England...leading to a life of institutionalization, malnutrition, and abuse. After being sold into an apprenticeship with a mortician and being maltreated there, Oliver runs away, encountering the criminal organization run by Fagin, an elderly man that Dickens continually refers to as "the Jew" (much to my irritation).  The rest of the story concerns itself with how Oliver alternately escapes and gets taken back in by Fagin's gang, the little boy's true family origins, and two very sympathetic young people, Rose and Harry.  The author paints a relentlessly brutal picture of how orphans and poor children were treated in 1830s England as well as portraying the criminal element in that society in stark, uncompromising terms.  Overall I liked Oliver Twist for all these reasons...but that constant reference to "the Jew" to describe a character as dastardly as Fagin smacks of anti-Semitism, especially without the presence of a more positive Jewish character to counteract this stereotypical image.  After I finished reading it I discovered that while Dickens was writing and publishing this novel in serial form, he received some angry reaction about this very thing from someone he respected...and apparently cut back on his usage of this epithet toward the story's end.  So this isn't a case of someone in a later, more enlightened era looking back at writing from a bygone period that indicates insensitivity...there were those in Dickens' own time who raised objections...

Since I never actually watched the entire musical Oliver!, I might find it interesting to do so and compare it with what I just read...that Disney cartoon movie as well.  Come to think of it, why not also excavate that old Bell Science movie and watch Dr. Frank Baxter, the kindly old bald professor with glasses, go on about the mysterious world of pi and mu mesons and the like...