ABSTRACT
Face-Maker, Monsieur the (UT) An entertainer at the Fair, who ‘transforms the features that Heaven has bestowed on him into an endless succession of surprising and extraordinary visages’. (‘In the French-Flemish Country’)
Fagin (OT) ‘A very old shrivelled Jew, whose villainous-looking and repulsive face was obscured by a quantity of matted red hair.’ He is a fence, who organises and trains a group of young pickpockets (including the Artful Dodger and Charley Bates), into whose company Oliver Twist innocently falls. Fagin also employs Bill Sikes, a burglar, and Nancy, a prostitute, on criminal activities of various kinds. Monks makes him his accomplice in his unsuccessful endeavours to get Oliver convicted and transported. He indirectly brings about Nancy’s murder by Bill Sikes because he tells the latter that Noah Claypole has seen her talking to Mr Brownlow and Rose Maylie on London Bridge and that he therefore suspects that she is informing on them. Immediately after the murder, Fagin is arrested. Noah Claypole (under the name of Morris Bolter) turns king’s evidence, Fagin is found guilty of being an accessory before the fact, and is condemned to death. On the eve of his execution, he is visited in the condemned cell by Oliver Twist and Mr Brownlow, who makes him tell them the hiding place where Monks had concealed vital papers concerning Oliver. Oliver, bursting into tears, prays God to forgive the wretched Fagin, who is in dreadful torment. Apart from Dickens’s verbal evocations of Fagin’s appearance and
behaviour and of his feelings of horror on his ‘last night alive’, two visual images remain in the reader’s mind: George Cruikshank’s drawings of him and Monks peering through the window at Oliver Twist asleep (‘Monks and the Jew’) and of him in the condemned cell. Fagin is based on Ikey Solomon, a notorious fence of the period. Dickens borrowed the name, Fagin, from Bob Fagin, a youth who worked with him in Warren’s Blacking warehouse. See Riah. (8, 9, 12, 13, 15, 16, 19, 20, 25, 26, 34, 39, 4245, 47, 53)
Fairfax, Mr (SYG) A ‘censorious young gentleman’. (‘The Censorious Young Gentleman’)
Fan (CB) Scrooge’s sister, who comes to bring him home from boarding-school. The Ghost of Christmas Past reminds him that she was ‘delicate’ and ‘had a large heart’. She ‘died a woman’, and had one child, Scrooge’s nephew. (A Christmas Carol)
Fanchette (RP) The ‘charming daughter’ of the hostess of the Swiss inn where ‘Our Bore’ was taken ill. (‘Our Bore’)
Fang, Mr (OT) The choleric and arbitrary police magistrate who hears the charge of theft against Oliver, whom he summarily commits ‘for three months – hard labour of course’, before the fortunate intervention of the bookstall owner clears Oliver of the accusation. When Mr Brownlow admits he had forgotten to pay for the book he was reading when Oliver was supposed to have picked his
Figure 7 Fagin by George Cruikshank
pocket, Fang turns on him as well, much to Brownlow’s indignation. The original of Fang was Allan Stewart Laing, a magistrate at Hatton Garden Police Court. (11)
Fareway, Mr (GSE) Mr Fareway was an idle pupil of George Silverman’s at Cambridge. Lady Fareway, his mother, presents Silverman to a church living,
provided that he acts as tutor to her daughter, Adelina. Although Silverman falls in love with Adelina, he feels that he is unworthy of her and so manages to turn her affections towards Granville Wharton. He marries them in secret, with the consequence that Lady Fareway dismisses him.
