Sorry, I’ll be quoting lots of Oliver! the Musical songs now.
Summary
A young woman leaps from a carriage on a rainy night and is descended upon by two men who are beating her. They are stopped by a young man named Dodger, who scares them off. Two more men come upon them and make to help the young lady. They turn out to be Henry Mathew and Charles Dickens, the latter of whom offers Dodger money to accompany them back to Henry’s house in order to learn more from Dodger about what happened. The young woman turns out to have been pregnant, but lost the baby, likely due to all the beatings she received. Charlie wants to employ Dodger to ask around and find out more about her. Dodger asks to stay the night and watch over the girl; she wakes and admits that she ran away to England to be free of her husband and those men who harmed her. She won’t tell anyone her name. The next morning he makes friends with the household cook Mrs. Quickly (and enemies of the housekeeper), and is sent on his way. Dodger heads down into the sewers to do his job; he’s a tosher, looking through the detritus of London to find money and jewelry and valuables that have been knocked away. He comes across Grandad while he’s down there, the oldest tosher in the city.
Grandad got stuck during the storm down in the sewer and is dying. He tells Dodger to get the worst bottle of brandy he can find, so Grandad can drink it before he dies. Dodger does as he’s asked, and Grandad names him the best pupil he ever had and the new king of the toshers before he passes. Dodger runs back to Solomon Cohen’s attic; the older man looks after him and cooks for them both, and he tells Dodger to go to Jacob’s shonky shop and get a better set of clothes for the work he’s going to be doing. Dodger takes Solomon’s dog Onan and gets his new set of clothes. When he gets back, Solomon directs him to the card game Dodger found on the girl he saved—Happy Families. Solomon thinks it’s a terrible game that encourages familial strife. Dodger heads down to the pub to tell his fellow toshers about Grandad’s death and ask them for their help in getting information about the young woman’s attackers. Messy Bessie tells him that she saw the woman jump from the coach on fire, that two men chased her, and that the coach was fancy, with a wheel that squeaked terribly. Dodger pays her for the info and thinks he should go see Charlie about it.
Dodger heads to Fleet Street and the Chronicle’s office as instructed. While he’s waiting for Charlie, another man comes in reeking of gin and tries to hold the place up with a bread knife. Dodger uses one of the spikes on the desk to drag him off into the alley, and knows him to be Stumpy Higgins. He gives the guy a sixpence and sends him off. When he comes back, the police are there, but Charlie insists that Dodger should be rewarded for saving their company and takes him to the nearby coffeehouse to hear his info. He tells Dodger to take as many sugar lumps from the establishment as he likes and asks him about his past, then sends him home. He instructs Dodger to head back to the Mayhew residence the next day to talk to Henry and see the young lady again. Dodger does as he’s instructed, seeing Mrs. Quickly again, and sitting with Mr. Mayhew while he’s asked more questions about his background. Henry seems to know about Solomon, though Dodger doesn’t remember telling Charlie about him. He asks questions for research purposes, wanting to present the government with evidence as to the plight of the poor, asking about Dodger job as a tosher and if he’s happy in the work.
Dodger is brought back to see the woman, who Henry’s wife Jane has taken to calling Simplicity. Dodger asks to be left alone with her, which Henry is reticent to do, but agrees to. Simplicity tells him that she’s not sure of the Mayhews because she has to be certain no one will send her back to her husband. Dodger asks the couple if he could take Simplicity for a walk outside, but Jane is against the idea for propriety’s sake. Dodger tells them he’ll come back tomorrow if they change their mind. Mrs. Quickly gives him a pack of leftovers and asks for a kiss, which he gives her. He heads out and starts planting questions in heads to get more information. Marie Jo, who runs a good soup stall, tells him that a gentleman was asking after him, and he seemed like a lawyer. Dodger heads home to give Solomon the leftovers and heads out on the tosh to think with Onan alongside him. Elsewhere in the city, Sharp Bob is talking to a foreign gentleman who has employed him to find Simplicity. Bob explains that Dodger has put feelers out and is told by his employer to have Dodger followed. The gentleman’s colleague asks if they shouldn’t bring in the Outlander, but they decide against it for the political difficulties that might bring.
Commentary
I’ve definitely not read this one before, but in a similar manner to the way Pratchett pooled a lot of randomized knowledge he’d accumulated during his life into Nation, it seems certain that he pooled all the randomized Victorian knowledge he had into this tome. What I’m enjoying most at the moment is the effortless way he introduces the reader into a time period that they may not be familiar with, gets extremely granular with the social hierarchies and linguistic earmarks, but does it with such clarity that you can learn as you follow along. It’s a very particular talent that is needed in much of fiction, but more so in books aimed at teenagers.
It occurs to me that this book occupies a similar place as stories like Black Sails, being that it’s based on a character or characters from an older famous book and there’s a question as to how we’re meant to take the narrative; it could be an alternate (fictional) history perhaps, or the “real version” of events, or simply a riff on something well-known with no need to consider the original narrative at all. Having said that, there are some key differences here to start, namely that Oliver doesn’t appear to be a character at all, that Dodger is a tosher rather than a pickpocket, and that Fagin has been significantly altered into the character of Solomon Cohen.
The choice to use the name Solomon likely comes from the historical figure that many assumed Fagin was based upon: Isaac “Ikey” Solomon, who was transported to Australia for his infamous crimes. Dickens was accused by many for anti-semitism in his depiction of Fagin, and altered a great deal of his own text due to the criticism (very similarly to how Roald Dahl altered the text of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory due to his initial depiction of the Oompa-Loompas as African pygmies).
However, Pratchett seems determined to do Dickens one better here. Instead of a man who runs a child gang while he selfishly keeps most of their profits for himself, a man who is beloved by the Artful Dodger to the child’s own detriment, this Dodger has a guardian who genuinely looks out for his welfare and urges him toward his better impulses. Solomon is a practical older fellow who plies a trade in fixing things that are broken—fine work for careful hands. He treats him as any good father or grandfather would, telling him to keep clean, letting him known when he needs a better suit, and making sure to fill the boy’s head with ethically sound lessons. The fact that he spots the trouble with the Happy Families game is the most glaring of those lessons so far, noting that children internalize what they’re taught at home.
Some of the best aspects of this relationship come down to a culture clash that Dodger is unaware of entirely. Take for example the exchange between Dodger and Solomon where he asks “Are you trying to save my soul?” and Solomon’s response is that he’s trying to figure out if Dodger has one. Because it’s a sweet exchange on its face, but also has the benefit of being completely accurate to both of their backgrounds and circumstances. Dodger is asking Solomon this because he’s grown up in a Christian country—souls being a thing that must be saved is built into the fabric of his society, not a novelty but a given.
But Solomon is Jewish. The concept of “saving” souls has nothing to do with his faith. In fact, his insistence on Dodger keeping clean—something that Dodger notes being very important in their household—has more to do with Solomon caring for his soul than any idea of saving could. Jewish law dictates that taking care of the body is a spiritual act, the upkeep of the soul’s housing, and those are things that Solomon insists upon. He is taking care of Dodger in a manner that’s entirely indicative of his heritage, while the boy is none the wiser.
Of course, Solomon gives himself a great deal of wiggle room on those laws in the practical sense, such as eating pork because he’s hungry, and knows that those laws don’t mean much if the person meant to practice them is dead. And Solomon also speaks of God as a power that must earn his worship, as he does when admitting that he didn’t believe in God after coming to England following his wife’s death in a Russian pogrom:
“Mmm, God said to me, ‘I understand, Solomon, let me know when you change your mind,’ and I was really pleased with that, because I’d had my say and the world was better, and now I sit in a place that is rather dirty, but I am free. And I am free to eat pork, if God so will it that pork comes my way.”
Again, with Pratchett so often creating characters who handle faith in a manner that feels pragmatic in all the right ways.
There’s a bit where Dodger is wondering about people who have more than himself, and all the items that better-off folks seem to collect, and how much better all those little ornaments could possibly make you feel. I’m curious about whether that will come into the story more because this is a line of thinking that comes up frequently when thinking about how humans handle abundance and plenty. People with money can afford more things, certainly, and people with very little generally don’t have time to consider things in the same way. But it is still true that many people love their collections regardless of how much they have. That it is a human instinct to acquire stuff. So I’m curious about whether the story will have more thoughts down that avenue.
Asides and little thoughts
- Pratchett fudged the timeline slightly, but has said that this book is supposed to take place early in Victoria’s reign, sometime between 1837 and 1853. The main fudging is in using Sir Robert Peel, who was Home Secretary to Victoria’s predecessor.
- Mrs. Quickly has Nanny Ogg vibes, though she’s going too far with the handsy-ness. Leave the poor kid alone.
- Folks call Dodger a shabbas goy, which is the term for folks employed by Jewish people to do the sort of work Jewish law forbids during Shabbat.
- My brain has been on an etymology kick of late, which made me stop dead at the use of the term “kosher” to mean good or legitimate. From a very cursory search, it looks like the use of kosher in that sense didn’t emerge until nearly the turn of the 20th century, which would mean that Solomon is using it ahead of time here. (Granted, things tend to turn up earlier in spoken language, but that’s a pretty sizable gap.)
Pratchettisms:
And there it was; that little word ‘shall’ was a knife, straining to cut away until it hit enlightenment.
It was a surprisingly little thought, one of those that hangs around out of general view until it pops up like a wart. He placed it behind his ear, as it were, for future deliberation.
Of course, there are other events, but everybody liked an ‘orrible murder, didn’t they?
As he grew older he realized that some people would say that was, in fact, the wrong direction; there were two ways of looking at the world, but only one when you are starving.
Next week we’ll read Chapters 7-12!
