Probably the best known part of the book is the first half, which focuses on poor little orphaned Oliver Twist and all of the terrible things that happen to him as he’s shuffled off from the poor cold arms of his dead mother to a horrible branch-workhouse/foster home, to an even worse workhouse—scene of the pathetic “Please, sir, I want some more,” scene, to various hellish job training programs, to a terrible home with an undertaker, to a den of young thieves in London, run by the sinister Fagin, where Oliver is briefly forced to become a thief.
With his creepy habit of saying “My dear” to absolutely everyone, including those he clearly does not have kind thoughts about whatsoever, Fagin is one of Dickens’ most memorable characters, and also one of his most controversial. Fagin is continually described in demonic terms—to the point where, just like a vampire, he seems to have a horror of sunlight and even regular light. That’s not exactly unusual for the villain of a novel, especially a deeply melodramatic Victorian novel like this one, but what is unusual is that the original edition of Oliver Twist (the one currently up on Gutenberg) continually refers to Fagin as “The Jew” or “That Jew”—more often, indeed, than the text uses his name. This, combined with Fagin’s greed and miserly behavior, has led many critics to call Oliver Twist anti-Semitic. These critics included acquaintances of Dickens who reportedly objected to the characterization and the language used to describe Fagin. The second half of the book (written after the reactions to the first half of the book) uses the phrase “The Jew” a little less, and subsequent editions edited out several instances from the novel’s first half, but the charges of anti-Semitism remained, even when Dickens created positive portrayals of Jewish characters in his later novel, Our Mutual Friend.