Dickens, Reade, and Collins, sensation novelists; a study in the conditions and theories of novel writing in Victorian England

Front matter

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COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY STUDIES IN ENGLISH AND COMPARATIVE LITERATURE

DICKENS, READE, AND COLLINS SENSATION NOVELISTS

Preface

Dickens once condemned a doctrinaire preface by his friend Collins on the principle that a book of all things ought to stand by itself. Such admirable sense, it seems, ought to be heeded generally, especially by those who from time to time with great labor perpetrate books about better books. But the temerity apparent in writing about Dickens at all nowadays will probably seem equal to a preface in the true Victorian manner. If such an attempt is not to need apology, it certainly requires definition.

Hitherto the study of Victorian letters has been confined almost entirely to biography and esthetics. Yet as a matter of common knowledge that which distinguishes Victorian from other times, and chiefly explains the problems in its esthetics, is the social and intellectual change which made the many arbiters of taste. It is common knowledge that this revolution made novel and periodical the favorite literary forms. But the specific ways in which it affected the writer of fiction — the opportunities and ideals it encouraged, the changes it wrought in narrative form, the interaction of periodical and novel upon each other — have never been stated connectedly. The object of this study is an outline statement of these new forces as they affected Dickens and his followers. It aims primarily to present the problems and opportunities of fiction-writing as the Victorians saw them sixty years ago. The book purports to be nothing more than a beginning upon a broad subject. To blaze a trail through the wilderness of trade conditions from 1800 to 1850 is difficult, for in the present state of

vii viii PREFACE

bibliography the results depend somewhat upon diligence, more upon chance. Moreover, the narrative is incomplete without reference to the French, who had earlier experimented in low prices and periodical publications. Twenty-five years hence, when this chaotic period is better known, the generaUzations in this study will have been reinforced and elaborated, I hope, not changed. Likewise, leaving aside natural inclination of the Dickensians to the theatrical, the tradition of diabolism in English prose romance does not entirely account for their sensationalism. There are obscure, intangible influences from the French here also. These are by no means exhausted by Reade's known appropriation of French narrative. After Scott, say in Ains worth, English prose romance was experimenting; and how much or in what manner Dickens's followers later were affected by Victor Hugo and Eugene Sue there is little means of saying. At the end of the task it is pleasant to acknowledge kindnesses encountered in its course. I owe thanks to the staff at the Columbia University Library and to that of the John Hay Library in Providence for pains in making available obscure novels and obscurer magazines, especially to Mr. T. P. Ayer, while he was reference librarian at Brown, and later to Miss E. R. Blanchard, his successor. Mr. Crawford of The Toronto Globe enabled me to obtain some controversial papers of Reade which have not been reprinted. Dr. Robert S. Forsythe of Adelbert College kindly called my attention to some obscure but significant facts which I had missed. Some years ago a preceptor of my undergraduate study, Professor G. W. Benedict of Brown, stimulated my interest in Reade, and to him I am indebted for various useful hints during the writing. Professor G. P. Krapp of Columbia also aided in the formation of several chapters. My chief debt is to Professor A. H. Thorndike, whose interest in the study and whose helpfulness have been invaluable. For judicious

PREFACE IX

help in the difficult places, which have been numerous, for unfailing counsel and pains in the formation of the manuscript, I have reason to thank him generously. The nature of such debt students of English at Columbia can best

appreciate.

W. C. P.

PROvroENCE, May, 1918

Contents

CHAPTER PAGE

I. Preliminary: The Sensational in Modern English

Prose Fiction 1

Chapter I The Sensational Element In Modern English Fiction

1. The Appeal to Fear in Modern English Prose Fiction

In a Winter Courtship Sarah Orne Jewett relates the manner in which Jefferson Briley, an aged New England mail-driver, was taken on the road, despite his formidable pistol, by a widow as sere and yellow as himself. Eighteen ' years of his seven-mile route daily except Sundays, behind a mare who was not young when she and her master undertook the task together, has driven Jefferson to revolt from a prosy lot. On this chilly winter morning, as he drives along with Widow Tobin for a passenger, he regales her with narratives about the desperadoes of the West. His fancy lingers fondly on the exhilarating dangers to the driver as the coach swings crazily above yawning canons and down mountainous declivities. To the best of descriptive powers, based obviously upon no small acquaintance with the Jesse James style of frontier romance, he pictures ihe robbing of the express car by masked bandits, and speculates naively on the manner of men these terrible fellows are . in their less picturesque hours. That, Jefferson remarks very disingenuously, is the life he would see in his declining years. ''Men folks be brave by nature," sighs the widow, though she knows better, and draws poor tame old Jefferson into her net. Jefferson's wild visions end in a meek surrender a second time to the marital yoke; but his literary leanings are typical of the modern reader. Nowadays, when everybody reads, and there is something for everybody to read, popular literature of necessity is fragmentary, sentimental, and sensational. The millions, like Jefferson Briley, look to it to provide the variety and the adventurous experience which life itself does not bring. When the business of existence is prone to arrange itself into so many hours daily of shop, counter, or desk, popular fiction, whether in form of drama, novel, or moving-picture film, must meet a perennial demand for violent emotional thrills. Whatever sources of appeal may come or go, there is one which from the very structure of modern democratic society seldom bids for applause unheeded — that is, the appeal to fear.

In English fiction this appeal has been notably significant since Walpole's Castle of Otranto. From the preface to the second edition of that novel we learn that the story represented a conscious and deliberate revolt from "a strict adherence to common life" because such adherence had dammed up the resources of fancy. The appeal to fear has been especially insistent in our fiction for slightly less than a century — it may be said to have found more cogent and more popular expression in Dickens than it enjoyed before, partly because Dickens himself was a democrat in a sense that none of his great English contemporary rivals were, and partly because his beginning as a man of letters was coincident with the most notable extension of the reading public and of reading since the Renaissance. In its origin, then, a literary reaction from the canons of the age of prose and reason, the appeal to fear, primarily through this extraordinary enlargement of the circle of readers, becomes a stock appeal of modern popular novels.

The magnitude of this extension of the public can best be suggested by figures. At the end of Chapter 26, volume 8, of his Popular History of England, Charles Knight quotes an estimate by Burke that in the final decade of the eighteenth century habitual readers in England numbered from 80,000 to 90,000.^ In 1832, five years before the appearance of Pickwick in shilling numbers, The Penny Magazine, published by the Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge, attained a circulation of 200,000; and was estimated by its historian, Charles Knight, to have had a million readers. In 1838 The Posthumous Papers of the Pickwick Club, as contrasted with The Penny Magazine, a private venture in entertaining literature, were selling to the extent of about 40,000 copies of the monthly issues. Slightly later, when Dickens embarked upon periodical literature independently, in Master Humphrey's Clock, the public, believing that the title promised a new novel, bought 70,000 copies of the first issue. Twenty years later yet, The Cornhill, a shilling magazine edited by Thackeray, disposed of about 110,000 numbers of its first issue, and then settled back to a permanent subscription list of from 80,000 to 90,000; or, roughly, a subscriber for every reader that had existed sixty or seventy years earlier. The full significance of the sales of Thackeray's magazine does not appear unless we recall that another very popular and able shilling miscellany, Macmillan's Magazine, with Professor Masson as editor, began at almost the same time, with almost equal success.

1 Professor W. P. Trent, an acknowledged authority on minutiae of eighteenth-century bibliography, is of the opinion that the number is too small. Knight quotes the same figures in Passages of a Working Life, vol. 2, ch. 9, p. 184.

How many fold the million readers of the Reform year had increased in these flourishing days of cheap periodicals no one knows. Knight, the best authority, calls the figures from mid-century ''unmanageable."

Beneath these scattered facts lies the essential explanation of the disproportionate esteem of fiction and periodicals — of ''the casual, the trivial, and the sensational" — that marked Victorian literature and that marks our own. A new public with new tastes effected the complete remaking of trade in printed matter and a new and unheard-of scale of remuneration for popular writers. In this readjustment no single figure was more influential than Dickens, both as a story-teller and as a purveyor of novel and cheap miscellany. More than his rivals he adapted his art and the means of disseminating it to the new possibilities that were opening before writers who could at once please and lead the new taste. 1837, the year when Pickwick began in shilling numbers, was a fortunate time. The more pretentious magazines like Blackwood^s, Fraser^s, and Colburn's New Monthly were firmly established with middle-class readers; the reduction of the paper tax, which made possible cheaper and more popular periodicals, like Bentley^s Miscellany and those which Dickens later owned and edited, had just been made. Weekly critical journals like The Literary Gazette (1817), The Athenaeum, and The Spectator (both begun in 1828), combining in a popular way the advantages of the elaborate articles in the quarterlies with those of the daily editorial, were already offering records of current politics, literature, and art. Yet the overwhelming popularity of the novel was still delayed. The number of novels appearing between 1815 and 1850 was by no means disproportionate. According to Knight,^ during those years there had been pubHshed in England 10,300 volumes of divinity; 4900 of 1 Popular History of England, vol. VIII, note to ch. 26.

history and geography; 3500 of fiction; 3400 of drama and poetry; 2500 of scientific works; and 2460 devoted to the arts. Still, if its production had not been excessive, there long had been a growing awareness among writers that the novel could be made to serve serious purposes for readers who were not cultivated. Godwin's preface to Caleb Williams makes clear that the story intended dramatization of some ideas from Political Justice for those who never read philosophy. Bulwer in 1830 had begun the vogue of what Professor Cazamain calls le Roman social with Paul Clifford, an attack upon the penal code. Disraeli, finding his political program unpalatable to the public in pamphlet form, embodied it in his trilogy of purpose novels, Coningshy, Sybil, and Tancred. By the time of Oliver Twist it was well understood that the novel might readily be made to serve a cause or a personal ambition.

Yet a novelist beginning about 1840, though he set his course as skillfully as Dickens ultimately did in the channel of new opportunities, could not escape great indebtedness to the waning romance. Writing professedly with the new elements of the literary audience in mind, and adapting his fiction as well to new methods of publication, he was more indebted to that waning romance than criticism has generally indicated. The reasons for this oversight are obvious and critically correct. Dickens was not only the successor of Scott and Byron, but he was also the delineator of the byways and eccentric folk of mid-century London. And so great was his originality in this province of his art that it has tended to obscure the kind and quality of plot he employed. The customary dicta of critics who look back to Smollett and Ben Jonson for kindred methods and characters describe only one aspect of his fiction. As to the stories he told as such, criticism has varied little; in the novelist's own day, Bagehot, Lewes, and Ruskin recognized and deprecated the qualities that a new school has designated in the same terms — as melodramatic and sensational.

Historically, in so far as this sensational tendency belongs solely to literary history, and forms a narrative tradition, its course can be indicated in few words. From the end of the eighteenth century, when makers of fiction followed the direction of Walpole's revolt, and adopted the appeal to fear as a primary motive, some of the best powers of invention for the next six or seven decades were devoted chiefly to the elaboration of a terrible protagonist, half human, half demoniac. The terror that he inspired was the direct measure of his success. As in all revolt the first manifestations were most violent, and its results are least credible as reflections of conceivable human experience; the favorite figure of such romances was originally supernatural or else was brought into direct encounter with supernatural forces; then, like Lara and the early heroes of Bulwer-Lytton, a frankly human being of ambiguous moral nature, partly admirable, mostly vicious; and finally the stereotyped villain of melodramatic stage and shilling-shocker. In such a revolt the principles upon which it depends originally have only the most general definition; they rest upon the conviction that existing ideals are despicable and intolerable. To trace the influence of this revolt is to indicate the development of the sensational, melodramatic element in modern English prose fiction to its culmination in the novels of Dickens and his chief satellites; for they inherited the results of this experimentation, and formulated it in accordance with the life and taste of their own day.

There is, then, no want of continuity between the romance that Walpole and the Terrorists wrote at the end of the eighteenth century, and that which Dickens and his followers wrote in the middle of the nineteenth. Its pathway lies through the domain of Byron and of Scott, and its goal is melodrama which approaches the stage variety. Scott, a keen student of prose romance, saw the direction of the method for which Mrs. Radchffe won respect. Toward the end of his memoir of that lady, he remarked: ''The species of romance which Mrs. Radcliffe introduced bears nearly the same relation to the novel that the modern anomaly entitled a 'melo-drama' does to the proper drama. It does not appeal to the judgment by a deep delineation of human feeling, or stir the passions by scenes of deep pathos, or awaken the fancy by tracing out with spirit and vivacity the lighter traces of life and manners, or excite mirth by strong representations of the ludicrous or humorous. In other words it attains its interest neither by the path of comedy nor of tragedy; and yet it has a deep, decided, and powerful effect, gained by means independent of both — by an appeal, in one word, to fear, whether excited by natural dangers or by the suggestions of superstition. The force, therefore, of the production lies in the delineation of external incident, while the characters of the agents . . . are entirely subordinate to the scenes in which they are placed. . . . The persons introduced — and here also the correspondence holds betwixt the melo-drama and the romantic novel — bear the features, not of individuals, but of the class to which they belong." Now when the force of the production depends upon external incident, there is a new emphasis upon artificial plot. Moreover, when the novelist works with the Faust motive and with personages half human, half demoniac, like Maturin's Melmoth, solutions of the plot such as those in The Monk, where Satan comes in person to claim the false priest Ambrosio, or in Melmoih, where the protagonist disappears in thin air over the Irish Sea, are inevitable and appropriate. The conditions of the story are unintelligible, humanly speaking, and so is the conclusion. When the crime is the sale of a soul, the hangman is impotent. But when supernatural themes are discredited, as they were by the twenties, the narrator was unwilUng to forego the advantages he had derived from superstition and theology. If the fiend could no longer carry off Ambrosio in 1840, the novelist could invoke opportune shipwreck or bolt of lightning to achieve the same result.

The contribution of Byron and of Scott to the sensational tradition consists essentially in rationalizing and rendering more credible the characteristically supernatural melodrama of the Terrorists. From it Byron borrowed the ruffianly hero whom he celebrated under half a dozen names. The villain of The Castle of Udolpho, elaborated into Schedoni, the false monk in The Italian, becomes the hero of The Giaour and Lara. Mrs. Rad cliff e had progressively diminished suggestions of the supernatural through her novels, so that Schedoni, when Byron appropriated him, was almost entirely divested of it. Byron made his melodrama frankly mundane, and successfully substituted a more or less genuine oriental atmosphere for haunted Gothic castle, monastery, and other machinery of crude terror. In neither Byron nor Scott does the melodrama exist for its own sake. In Lara and the companion pieces it provides an appropriate narrative framework for exploitation of Byron's '' Satanic" ego. Yet if it is, strictly speaking, subordinate in Byron's design, its value, from the conception of the character the stories illustrate, is directly dependent upon its luridity and violence. The more terrific the incidents of the intrigue, the greater the likelihood of vividly impressing the ruffianly hero. Immediately, indeed, Byron's influence upon fiction was not less than Scott's; in the tradition with which this study is concerned it was indubitably far stronger. Its narrative methods and values, which more than others determined the character of Victorian ''sensation fiction," are detailed in a later chapter.

Scott, it has appeared, was a keen analyst of Terrorism. Being no less a shrewd judge of what the readers of his novels wanted, he perceived much in Gothicism that was highly useful, and sought material analogous to that of the Terrorists for similar effects. He was constantly dressing up his historical dramas with the kind of melodramatic incident that delighted Dickens and Reade. Working mainly in the dramatic stories of history, Scott freely employed the romancer's license in favor of sensationalism. He carried on the popular taste for terror in a series of studies based upon Scotch superstition. In Guy Mannering, the prophecy and curse of Meg Merrilies, the ruin where she protects Harry Bertram from the smugglers and gypsies while Hatteraick's mate is dying, the Kaim of Derncleugh, the only place where Meg's spirit can free itself from the flesh, and the strange fulfillment of Mannering's horoscope for young Ellangowan are peculiarly Gothic effects. Guy Mannering indeed might be styled a Gothic novel as written by a man of sense. But Scott knew that popular superstition as a source of sensational appeal was becoming stale and unprofitable. He records his dubiety about later experiments in the preface to The Monastery, dated November, 1830. Here, he says, ''From the discredit attached to the vulgar and more common modes in which Scotch superstition displays itself, the Author was induced to have recourse to the beautiful, though almost forgotten, theory of astral spirits"; but the result. The White Lady of Avenel, was, he realizes, a failure. ''Either the Author executed his purpose badly, or the public did not approve of it." Scott thought both explanations true. He admits that The Monastery is a badly constructed story. For the rest, he very significantly remarks : " Machinery remained — the introduction of the supernatural and marvelous, the resort of distressed authors since the days of Horace, but whose privileges as a sanctuary have been disputed in the present age and well-nigh exploded."

As has been intimated, Scott's chief contribution to sensational narrative as it persisted into Victorian times Ues elsewhere. He had no scruples about altering specific historical fact if he could thereby achieve a narrative effect. He extends the life of the villainous De la Marck in Quentin Durward four years beyond the time history assigns in order to kill him off dramatically. In Kenilworth, he bases the account of the Countess Amy's death upon a chronicle quite at variance with the findings of the court which tried Leicester. Furthermore, he grafted episodes originally unconnected with his story upon it for sensational effect. There is a striking example in Old Mortality in young Morton's escape from the fanatical Cameronians. After the Covenanters were routed at Bothwell Bridge, Morton accidentally asked shelter in a house where ten of the fanatics had taken refuge. The young man had already roused their hatred by refusal to assent to their extreme measures; and now that Providence had given him into their hands, the Cameronians felt that the best service they could do their cause in the day of defeat was to rid it of a lukewarm adherent. As it is Sunday evening, however, they resolve not to carry out the butchery until after midnight, though their zeal brooks the delay very ill. The most militant of the captors is already hastening the hands of the timepiece toward twelve, when Cuddie Headrigg breaks in, accompanied by a band of Claverhouse's redcoats. This deferring the execution until the close of the Sabbath was appropriated, according to Scott's note, from the contemporary experience of a Scotch exciseman with the smugglers.

Scott, then, as he affects sensational methods of narrative, though not immediately more potent than Byron, was, like him, a rationalizing force. Byron discarded supernaturalism in favor of sentimental villainy in an oriental setting; Scott experimented with substitutes for supernaturalism.

and ultimately left models shorn alike of diabolism and of sentimental villainy. It is this use of the romancer's license with reservation that constitutes Scott's great contribution to the method of narrative we are considering. Before broken health brought the Waverley series to a close, he had indicated in Kenilworth, Old Mortality, Quentin Durward, Redgauntlet a self-respecting road for the appeal to fear. Still, no more than in Byron was melodrama the end and aim of the narrative; with Scott it is the spice intended to give additional zest to the historical dramas in which he generally works. Both romancers perceived its great utiUty — both employed and developed it ; neither gave it code or formulas.

When Scott died the old set of romantic motives in fiction were fast breaking down. Simultaneously with the disintegration came the rise of the great uncultivated audience. The resultant uncertainty and ambiguity of purpose in Ainsworth and Bulwer will later be noted as of importance in the development of the sensational method. Dickens, the plot-maker, as opposed to Dickens the delineator of human oddities, brought down to date the essential appeal of The Romance of the Forest, and adapted it to the prejudices, credulity, and taste of the audience for which he wrote. In the work of his 'prentice hand, notably in Oliver Twist and in Barnaby Rudge, this kinship with older patterns of romance lies at the surface. But the charnel-house horrors of Oliver are by no means exceptional in his narrative. From the scene in which Sikes brutally murders his mistress through the opium-tainted atmosphere of Edwin Drood, there is no full-length story of his without its generous reliance upon the most brutal stimulants to fear.

Indeed, reliance upon such material was a canon of art for Dickens and those who followed most ably and most closely in his steps. Together with Wilkie Collins and Charles Reade, who by the early fifties had reinforced him by adoption of his narrative preferences and practices, he gave the sensational tendency in our fiction a creed and definite methods. This creed, however, has no single prolegomena. Still, few or no long inferences are necessary to ascertain their theories of their art, for they left in various incidental pieces, such as letters, controversial pieces, and criticisms of contemporaries or of each other, intelligible enough record. All this incidental criticism is defined by their consistent and unequivocal practice.

Examination of these documents gives a new definiteness to the term The School of Dickens. For such entertainment as they provided they had tolerably definite formulas. These formulas disclose not only an essential unity of ideas among our triumvirate, but also afford a key to much in craftsmanship that seems grotesque, violent, and theatrical, as well as to much that seems strangely vivid and masterly in adroitness of narrative manipulation. They write, as they tell us, the romance of the here and now, not for the cultivated or the sophisticated, but for the public — the w^hole public. No single utterance of theirs is perhaps more significant of their joint aims and preferences than that which Collins prefixed to Basil, his second novel. ''Believing that the novel and the play are twin-sisters in the family of fiction ; and that one is drama narrated as the other is drama acted; and that all the deep . . . strong emotions that the play-writer is privileged to excite, the novel writer is privileged to excite also, I have not thought it necessary ... to adhere to everyday realities only." Strong emotions, unusual incident, dramatic method — such preferences recall perhaps the storm in Copperfield, the execution of Carton, the homecoming of Gerard the monk, and many more, not a few of which ill accord with the standards of present-day taste. CoUins's parallel of the theater, in fact, points to the narrative method which they persistently championed. At bottom their method aimed, by means of adapting to the novel some of the advantages and necessary restraint of play-writing, to impart a vivacity and verisimilitude hitherto insufficiently developed in English prose fiction. Specifically the characters must express themselves by words and act more than had been the custom; they must be expressed by the writer's comments less. Again, the full emotional value of the material was to be stressed as the theater stresses it. Hence climaxes arranged on the stage plan. Whether or not these arose necessarily from the characters in the narrative is secondary with the Dickens group. They and their audience, one suspects, often found the fortuitous more appalling than the logical. If then for Collins's word drama we read melodrama, we have roughly what our trio meant by the parallel, and can understand whj^ they were fond of describing their own novels as dramatic.

Sensationalism, or the sensation novel, as Victorian reviewers dubbed it, had, then, a fairly definite meaning and a long literary tradition. It was romance of the present consciously adapted to new conditions and to new public; and found, like its prototype, material in records of crime and villainy. These in some measure for their own sake it consciously stresses in the adventures of a Lara, Redgauntlet, Fagin, Riderhood, Count Fosco. Its great exponents in Victorian times were Dickens, Reade, and Collins, whose specialized narrative form effected its highest development. Their example found numerous imitators, most of whom lacked their facility and power, some of whom were quite destitute of their sense of the responsibilities of the artist. In the hands of these, sensation writing became the reproach and abomination of Victorian popular literature. Critic and moralist alike descried in it the collapse of taste and truth in the novel, and pointed their finger at Dickens with the accusatory "Thou art the man."

With this outhne of the rise and nature of Victorian sensational narrative in mind, we may proceed to a more extended account of the form it took two generations ago and of its heyday in the Enghsh novel.

2. Victorian Sensation Novels

Consideration of the sensational trend in Dickens's work necessarily restricts to that which is least admirable in his art. The best recent criticism, such as Gissing's, Chesterton's, and Professor Hugh Walker's, has especially insisted on an idea which Bagehot expressed in 1858. It has become a truism that when Dickens is chiefly concerned with plot, his favorite description of himself as ''the inimitable" is highly ambiguous. Here it is precisely with the narrative art that we have to do — with plot, the handling of incident, and the narrative rhetoric. Not Pickwick, the inexhaustible humor, or the vivid knowledge of London; but the death of Little Nell, the finding of Steerforth's bodj^, the spontaneous combustion of Krook, the murder of Nance, the execution of Carton, are the material — this is the sensation stuff that could be and was widely imitated bylesser men.

For general illustration of the Dickensian sensationalism, that preface by Collins previously referred to, which insists upon the parallelism of novel and play, the portrayal of strong emotions, and selection of incident not bounded by everyday probabilities, furnishes a helpful guide. This quality, as has been intimated, especially dominates early novels like Oliver Twist; the hue which the common creed of the Dickens school imparted to their fiction is nowhere more clearly marked. Oliver, the parish boy, is really the illegitimate son of a gentleman of some wealth by a woman whose disgrace drove her to the almshouse where the lad was born. There he spends some childhood years, the wretchedness of his life aggravated by the parsimony and brutaUty of the management. Apprenticed to the undertaker, OHver finds his lot unimproved, and decides that any change must be for the better. He sets off for London. On the road he falls in with The Artful Dodger, one of a band of London thieves, who befriends him. Finding that Oliver has no destination in the city, the Dodger offers him a lodging with the gang whom Fagin directs. Owing to the precariousness of their trade, the thieves are always on the lookout for recruits; and a recruit, all unwittingly, Oliver becomes. As soon as he has been coached a little at pocket-picking, he is sent out upon the streets, where his inexpertness and ignorance cause him to be taken in his first offense. Rescued by Mr. Brownlow (who is really his grandfather), Oliver is shortly found by one of the band, and tricked into returning to Fagin. Next he is sent with Bill Sikes, the housebreaker, to crack a country crib, Oliver's part being to effect an entrance through a small window in order to admit his confederates. In the attempt Oliver is wounded by a gunshot. A second time the boy is rescued from the band. The first expedition in which he engaged resulted in his meeting his grandfather; the second brings him to an aunt. Meanwhile, however, Oliver's half-brother, who is withholding from him considerable property, discovers the lad's whereabouts, and contracts with Fagin to have him made into an unpardonable criminal. Once more the thieves kindap him. But one of them, Nancy, the mistress of Sikes, takes pity on him and communicates with Mr. Brownlow, whom she knows to be interested in the boy. But Nancy, having fallen under suspicion of the chief, is followed and her plan discovered. Fagin intrusts the vengeance of the band to Sikes, who swiftly and brutally kills the girl. Then retribution falls fast and heavily upon the gang. Sikes, in a last effort to escape, involuntarily hangs himself in an effort to descend from a roof; Fagin is apprehended and goes insane in prison.