by Robert Sirabian (Original)
In London Labour and the London Poor (1851, 1861–2), Victorian social historian Henry Mayhew includes the section “Pickpockets and Shoplifters” in which he describes how pickpockets are trained: “A coat is suspended on the wall with a bell attached to it, and the boy attempts to take the handkerchief from the pocket without the bell ringing” (304). Another training session Mayhew describes will be familiar to readers of Charles Dickens’ Oliver Twist (1837–39): “The trainer—if a man—walks up and down the room with a handkerchief in the tail of his coat, and the ragged boys amuse themselves abstracting it until they learn to do it in an adroit manner” (304). “Amuse” and “adroit,” the telling words in Mayhew’s description, suggest the nature of this activity—the boys play and compete while learning to become proficient pickpockets. Mayhew’s description recalls Fagin’s method of training his young “ragged boys.” Fagin intentionally constructs his training session as a specific type of play—a fun game that also has an educational purpose. This culturally recognizable game, however, informs the more expansive, serious contest against society the criminals design themselves. Oliver Twist is centered on material play and games, which are not presented simply as descriptive details of novelistic realism or as offhand metaphorical comparisons to life. Play, in its inclusive sense, elucidates the ways in which characters in the novel understand their selfhood as well as their relationship to Victorian society and culture.
