George MacDonald reads Oliver Twist reading

One of the key moments in Oliver Twist's non-development occurs when Fagin leaves Oliver alone with an unnamed but recognizable volume of the Newgate Calendar.  The scene parodies Protestant tropes of conversion in which the act of reading a Bible--its meaning assumed to be transparent to those encountering it in the right frame of mind--leads the inquirer to the light.  In Oliver Twist, though, the Newgate Calendar confirms, rather than converts.  Like the Bible, the Newgate Calendar promises entry into a new community: its materiality, with "pages [that] were soiled and thumbed with use," testifies to a regular readership, but one that taints what it touches (and that, by dint of the dirt, threatens Oliver's own body as well).  And the sensational stories all affect the body as well as the mind, making "the blood run cold" and "the flesh creep, and the limbs quail, to think of."  Much as the corpses keep returning in the Newgate Calendar murder narratives, so too does the reader's body in the act of reading them; the reader remains insistently conscious of the self and its terrors.  Oliver's absorption in the text climaxes in the moment when, in his mind, "the sallow pages seemed to turn red with gore; and the words upon them, to be sounded in his ears, as if they were whispered, in hollow murmurs, by the spirits of the dead": the dead letter of the page becomes instead the undead, as the stories momentarily escape and transform the object that supposedly contained them.  But even when terrified, Oliver is still capable of "clos[ing] the book" and bursting into spontaneous prayer, warding off the criminal community with the organic language of innocent childhood spirituality.  Oliver's prayers, which relieve his momentary suffering, emphasize both his absolute solitude on earth and his only hope in God; they assert his otherness from this "wickedness and guilt," not any point of contact.   His language, as it happens, proves far more efficacious than anything in the Calendar.

Many years later, George MacDonald evokes this scene in The Vicar's Daughter (1872), the third volume of his Walton trilogy (about an Anglican clergyman and his family).  The Christ-like Miss Clare, orphaned as a young girl, comes under the protection of an Irish charwoman.  Clare is left alone for long stretches of time with nothing to read but--you guessed it--the Newgate Calendar.  Unlike Oliver Twist, Clare narrates her multiple readings of the Newgate Calendar in retrospect, to a sympathetic and interested audience, so that her feelings about the book are not mediated through the narrator (who, you might note, holds off ascribing any sensation to Oliver until we get to "his ears"), but instead laid out in first person, as part of a larger life story.  That is, her early solitary reading becomes part of an oral narrative that brings her even closer to her listeners, not a sign of her alienation.  Strikingly, Clare immediately insists not on her absolute difference from the criminals, but instead her "profoundest sympathy, not with the crimes of the malefactors, only with the malefactors themselves, and their mental condition after the deed was actually done."  MacDonald has no interest in the book qua object (no bleeding pages here!), and where Dickens dwells on the narratives' terrors, MacDonald merely has Clare remark that "it was with the fascination of a hopeless horror, making me feel almost as if I had committed every crime as I perused its tale, that I regarded them. They were to me like living crimes."  Clare's deep immersion in the text and the psychology of sin, far from being destructive, turns out to be a key aspect of her conversion.  Whereas Oliver turns to God out of horror at those around him, fleeing from what presses him on every side, Clare comes to God via her ability to feel with the criminal.  Kerry Dearborn has argued that for MacDonald, "even the most destructive person could be made to repent when faced with the reality of her own evil" [1]; in engaging with the criminal as like-me, not other-to-me, Clare begins her journey towards understanding the radically redemptive possibilities of divine love.  Despite the "hopeless horror" that besets Clare as she reads, she remains within the criminal's subjectivity, as opposed to experiencing them as ghastly persecuting forces from without.  It is from this early reading of the Newgate Calendar, Clare argues, together with her youthful reading of the Bible, that she eventually developed her mature understanding of "the last prayer of our Lord for those that crucified him, and the ground on which he begged from his Father their forgiveness,--that they knew not what they did."  Clare's "sympathy" thus ultimately sacrifices personal safety (keep me away from the wicked, both in reality and on the page) in order to transform everyone around her (all may be forgiven); moreover, her narrative's emphasis on spiritual growth (she does not fully understand the implications of her response at the time) sharply contrasts with Oliver's notoriously flat perfection.  It sets her on the road towards what Dearborn calls the "freedom from selfish prudence" (138) that is one of the signs of true holiness in MacDonald's work.   Oliver's yearning to escape evil transforms into Clare's longing to redeem even the deepest sinners around her.   Indeed, MacDonald seems to imply that Oliver is, perhaps, nowhere near as good as Dickens thinks..

[1] Kerry Dearborn, Baptized Imagination: The Theology of George MacDonald (Ashgate, 2006), 167.