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1.4 Organization of the study 2
2.Literature Review 3
2.1 Studies of Antisemitism 3
2.1.1 Studies of the history of Antisemitism abroad 3
2.1.2 Studies of the history of Antisemitism at home 3
2.2 Studies of Dickens’ works 3
2.2.1 Studies of Dickens’ antisemitism 4
2.2.2 Dickens’ antisemitism in Oliver Twist 4
2.3 Studies of Jewish Characters in Oliver Twist 4
2.3.1 Studies of Jewish Characters’ traits 4
2.3.2 Ways of characters being portrayed in the novel 5
3.Dickens’ antisemitism 6
3.1 An overview of Antisemitism 6
3.2 The origin of Dickens’ antisemitism 6
3.3 A change of Dickens’ antisemitism embodied in his works 7
3.4. Manifestation of Dickens’ antisemitism in Oliver Twist 7
3.4.1 Category of Characters in Oliver Twist 7
3.4.2 Analysis of ways of characters being portrayed and the archetypal Jewish character Fagin in Oliver Twist 8
4.Antisemitism and Nancy 10
4.1 Analysis of Nancy’ image and ways of characters being portrayed 10
4.2 The effect of Nancy on manifestation of Dickens’ antisemitism 11
5. Conclusions 13
Reference 14
1. Introduction
1.1 A brief introduction to Charles Dickens and Oliver Twist
Charles Dickens (1812-1870) was the most popular English novelist in the Victorian era. Dickens paid great attention to the life experience of the "little people" living in the bottom of the British society. His works reflected complicated social reality at that time, and made a great contribution to the development of the British critical realism literature. The nineteenth century was the golden age of the development of children's literature in Europe. Because of the development of children’s literature and Dickens’ own humanitarian spirit, he focused on the growth and education of children, and pushed children's literature to a new height. Oliver Twist was his novel which told a tragic story of an orphan and what he suffered in London. In his creation, Dickens had a true grasp of the psychology and behavior of the characters in the children's suffering novel, which was a real experience of his childhood. Oliver Twist reflected a thought of benevolence from these people who did Oliver Twist favors in his tortuous life.
1.2 Background of the study
Scholars at home and abroad do researches of Dickens’ novels from different aspects like the thoughts reflected in the novel, the art of writing and so on. They highly appreciate Dickens’ realistic techniques. The researching achievements of Dickens and his works are greatly due to long-term researches conducted by scholars. And the thought and spirit these novels reflected are often the subjects of scholars. Oliver Twist, as the first novel in the English language which takes a child as its hero, draws attention of scholars from a wide variety of critical fields. And more and more attention is attracted to Dickens’ historical limitation which is showed by the Jewish images created in his works. It is antisemitism. To some extent, his bias to the Jew in his work also can be seen as a racial discrimination. Therefore, nowadays many scholars focus on the typical Jewish images such as Fagin, Sikes, Nancy and the like in Oliver Twist. In fact, in terms of the social crime that Dickens exposed and described in the book, Dickens didn’t reflect the phenomenon of crime in the British society truly strictly. When Dickens shifted perspective to social crimes from the bureaucracy "workhouse", he didn’t base on the real situation of the society, but on the racist, to regard the Jews as criminals who disrupting social order in Britain(Qiao Guoqiang, 2004) In this respect, he didn’t follow the principles of objectivity. He didn’t show a true Jew to readers. This does not mean that the Jews in the literary can not be negative images, but that people of any race are likely to commit crimes and can be used as an artistic image in the novel. It is important for the author to treat them with a just attitude. Nevertheless, in the novel, Dickens always referred to the Jews in a sarcastic and contemptuous tone. Jews were equipped with mean, malicious and ill-looking traits in the story. And maybe as a matter of fact, the writer himself did not contact with any Jews at all.