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

Abstract

discussion of the representation of the criminal world in Oliver Twist, stressing the coherence of 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, 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 profes sion in the novel itself, and had indeed left intentionally imprecise the general representation of criminality: