In 1888, the Orthodox English-language newspaper, The Jewish Standard, published a series of articles called ‘Jews in Fiction’ that looked critically at Jewish characters across British literature. The series began with Sir Walter Scott's Isaac of York, then featured Benjamin Disraeli's Sidonia and George Eliot's Daniel Deronda. After finding fault with Dickens's Fagin and Riah, the April 20th column conjectured what it might look like for Charles Dickens to use his ‘magician's wand’ to write a more nuanced treatment of everyday Jewish life:

This column envisions Jewish life through the lens of an outside observer; it focuses more on Dickens's imagined pleasure in the spectacle, how he would ‘revel’ in the scene, than on the characters themselves. And importantly, the column chooses Saturday for this everyday rendering, which situates religious practice at the centre of Jewish life. The writer then exclaims, ‘Shade of Dickens! would that your mantle might descend on my shoulders, that I might worthily describe all this.’ He elevates Dickens's writing into a ‘magician's wand’ and calls upon the novelist to give him the same powers, treating Dickens as an otherworldly power rather than a writer of social fiction. The irony is, of course, that the writer has already described this scene, but as the imagined Dickens.

This article from The Jewish Standard dramatises the pressure of external Jewish stereotypes on the self-conception of the nineteenthcentury Anglo-Jewish community. In the very act of portraying this community, the columnist negates the act by calling upon Dickens to make the anonymous columnist a worthy narrator for depicting Jewish life.