ABSTRACT
One year after the publication of Oliver Twist in 1839, William Makepeace Thackeray castigated Dickens for his presentation of its criminal elements. Thackeray’s view was that Dickens’s novel romanticised and popularised crime:
The power of the writer is so amazing, that the reader at once becomes his captive, and must follow him whithersoever he leads; and to what are we led? Breathless to watch all the crimes of Fagin, tenderly to deplore the errors of Nancy, to have for Bill Sikes a kind of pity and admiration, and an absolute love for the society of the Dodger. All these heroes stepped from the novel onto the stage; and the whole London public, from peers to chimney-sweeps, were interested about a set of ruffians whose occupations are thievery, murder and prostitution. A most agree able set of rascals, indeed, who have their virtues, too, but not good company for any man . . .
