Fagin, the first of Dickens' great villains, is a Jew. In making Fagin a Jew, Dickens drew on a tradition of villainy that had been in English literature from the beginning. Only in our own time has there been a widespread reaction against this literary injustice. One effect of this reaction has been to introduce into our response to characters such as Barabbas, Shylock, and Fagin problems that are not only insoluble but perhaps irrelevant. No responsible critic has, to my knowledge, ever called Dickens an anti-Semite. If the character of Fagin arouses racial hostility in the reader of Oliver Twist, as some overzealous guardians of the public weal would have us think, it is more because this character, by its archetypal nature, appeals to emotions and prejudices already firmly set by custom and tradition. The main fault is not in Dickens but in his readers. Dickens' only sin was that writing at a very early age his first real novel and writing rapidly under the pressure of serial publication, he drew on a tradition already widespread in English literature and, with Fagin at least, made it powerfully and uniquely his own.