Fagin runs a gang of boy thieves who pick the pockets of rich gentlemen for watches and handkerchiefs; he is also the agent for a burglar, Sikes, and a prostitute, Nancy. He is part uncle to the boys, part pimp, part fence – and all Jew. Fagin in his cell. By Cruickshank

This last aspect of him is the oddest. Dickens’s conception of Fagin as a Jew seems impulsive, almost random. Perhaps it sounded exotic or colourful; maybe it stood as a contrast to the older London of Bill Sikes. The odd thing is that it adds nothing to Fagin; his religious and cultural background is probably the only part of him that has no bearing on how he behaves.

My sense of it is that Dickens was not interested in Fagin’s Jewishness, and that to become obsessed by it is like entering into a long debate about the breed of Sikes’s dog. It doesn’t matter. Dickens couldn’t even be bothered (as later he would with Riah in Our Mutual Friend) to give him a Jewish name. Fagin is an Irish name. It was also the name of a boy Dickens had known when working in his famous blacking factory.

The important thing – and, I think, the only thing that mattered to Dickens – is that the name works so well for the character; it pulls together all the disparate parts of him.

Dickens’s usual way with villains was to present them as long-distance plotters who deceive the upright characters. He elicits our moral condemnation by first mobilising our anger.

Fagin is not like that. His opening words constitute the first civility ever shown to Oliver Twist – “We are very glad to see you” – and, still better, his first actions are to provide Oliver with sausages, hot gin and coffee. He is also the first person in the child’s life actually to play with him, and, while it’s only a game of steal-the-handkerchief, it’s hard to overstate how touching this scene is. By its presence, it suggests a previous world of absence: the workhouse full of children with no games, ever.

The reason Fagin works so well for Dickens is that he is unstable and unpredictable. There is something warm in him – he, not the “good” characters, is the only provider of real laughter in Oliver’s life – but he is a coward.

The evidence mounts against Fagin. He gives a sly kick to the sleeping Sikes. He has a plan to “own” Oliver – “Once fill his mind with the idea that he has been a thief, and he’s ours – ours for his life!”

Worst of all, Fagin inflames Bill Sikes to do what is necessary to keep Nancy quiet after she has been heard interceding on Oliver’s behalf. His half-hearted plea as the enraged Sikes stalks off murderously into the night only makes matters worse. “‘You won’t be – too – violent, Bill?’ … ‘I mean,’ said Fagin, showing that he felt all disguise was now useless – ‘not too violent for safety. Be crafty, Bill, and not too bold.’”

He is like a version of the apparition who tells Macbeth to be “bloody, bold and resolute” – but a cowardly one. Fagin is a bad man, though there is not much effort by Dickens to understand why or how he is bad.

Dickens seems to have had trouble when he came to terminate Fagin’s story: “The Jew is such an out and outer”, he wrote, “that I don’t know what to make of him.”

He therefore did what he always did when in a difficult corner: he summoned up an extra effort, he rose to the occasion – and the results of it are in the remarkable chapter “The Jew’s Last Night Alive”.

For the first time in the book, Dickens uses Fagin’s point of view as we witness the scene in court, the details of which Fagin, with hours to live, picks out with hallucinatory sharpness of detail. What charge he is guilty of is not quite clear, and the critic John Sutherland has pointed out that none of his crimes carried the death sentence.

But Dickens takes the law into his own hands, so when Fagin is taken down, his fellow convicts treat him not as a sad old fence, but as evil incarnate, rattling their bars as he passes, screeching and hissing at him.

Alone in the condemned cell (a scene unforgettably depicted by Cruikshank), Fagin thinks of those he has seen hanged. Their ghostly presence oppresses him and he beats the door and walls with his hands. Wounded in the head by a missile thrown by the mob, he passes an interminable day on his wooden bed, while Dickens turns the rhetorical screw.

People come to the gates of Newgate prison, not to demand a reprieve but to make sure there will be none! Mr Brownlow and Oliver visit him in his cell. Oliver asks him to say a prayer, but we already know that Fagin has no religious belief because “venerable men of his own persuasion had come to pray beside him, but he had driven them away with curses. They renewed their charitable efforts, and he beat them off.” Angrily disowning his own faith, he is not much of a Jew in the end.

The book closes with the revelation that the local church of Oliver’s new home with his foster-father Mr Brownlow has a simple tablet on the wall that bears the name of Oliver’s mother, Agnes. The closing lines take the novelist’s traditional view of morality in the case of Oliver’s mother – that human love and goodness override social norms and religiously determined ethics.

The comforting liberal glow of the words is somewhat diminished by the ruthless dispatch with which the novel’s largest character has just been sent to meet his maker on the Newgate scaffold.

* Faulks on Fiction is published by BBC Books at £20 T £18 Telegraph Books

* The four-part documentary starts on the 5th February 2011 at 9pm on BBC Two Telegraph Book Shop

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