“I say,” said the other (the landlord of the Cripple), “what a time this would be for a sell. I’ve got Phil Barker here: so drunk that a boy might take him.” “Aha! but it’s not Phil Barker’s time,” said the Jew, looking up. “Phil has something more to do, before we can afford to part with him, so go back to the company, my dear, and tell them to lead merry lives—while they last, ha! ha! ha!”
And again:
“Change it,” exclaimed the Jew (to Nancy).... “I will change it! Listen to me, you drab. Listen to me, who with six words can strangle Sykes, as surely as if I had his bull’s throat between my fingers now. If he comes back and leaves that boy behind him,—if he gets off free, and dead or alive fails to restore him to me—murder him yourself if you would have him escape Jack Ketch: and do it the moment he sets foot in this room, or mind me, it will be too late!”
These were no empty boasts. Fagin had literally the lives of all who thieved for him in his pocket, and this is the motive of the plot of the story. The object of Fagin is to get Oliver Twist to commit some crime and thus be able to hand him over to the police as soon as it was convenient to do so. Let us see how this could be managed. There were practically no police. London was protected by a horse patrol in the suburbs and a small foot patrol in the streets. Each parish had its own watchman, who might not under any circumstances leave his beat, not even to prevent a felony. The parish constable or headborough was paid a ridiculous wage: in the great parish of Shoreditch he received £4.10.0 ($22.50) a year. Yet it was, what with blackmail and fees, a lucrative office. If the headborough prosecuted, he could get expenses at the rate of $6 a day and more, and he could bring in any other friend who held the same office as a witness—expenses paid.
Crime was prevented by encouraging informers. A man could get £40 ($200) for information which led to a capital conviction, and he could sell the exemption which he also gained from serving in a public office in the parish for a similar sum. It became actually in the interest of the thief takers to allow young persons and even children to commit minor crimes in the hope that sooner or later they would be guilty of worse offences. It was naturally the prime object of the informer to obtain a conviction. Fagin combined the work of a receiver of stolen goods with that of a thief taker.
The administration of the workhouse system was equally bad. The humour with which Dickens describes Mr. Bumble the beadle, his pomposity, his courtship of the matron, and his fall, is delightful; but Mr. Bumble, the visiting magistrates, and the overseers of the poor represented a state of things almost unthinkable in its brutality. Oliver himself was nearly being apprenticed to a sweep who would certainly have treated him much as Crabbe’s “Peter Grimes” treated his apprentice, and this dialogue between Mr. Bumble and Mrs. Mann, the nurse of the pauper children, reveals the spirit with which the indigent poor were treated.
“Mrs. Mann, I am going to London.”
“Lawk, Mr. Bumble,” said Mrs. Mann, starting back.
“To London, ma’am,” resumed the inflexible beadle, “by coach. I and two paupers, Mrs. Mann! A legal action is a-coming on, and the board has appointed me—me, Mrs. Mann—to depose to the matter at Clerkenwell....”
“You are going by coach, Sir? I thought it was always usual to send them paupers in carts.”