In no other novel of Dickens is there presented so sinister a picture of evil as in Oliver Twist. It was Dickens' first and last excursion into that underworld which he describes with such psychological truth and objective unreality. His other novels do, indeed, contain villains and murderers but they become less and less melodramatic and more realistic until we have a Mademoiselle Hortense and Julius Slinkton drawn from life. The prototype of Fagin in Oliver Twist may have been Ikey Solomons, a celebrated fence of Dickens' own day. Had Dickens followed the same method in depicting Solomons as he used in drawing Mrs. Manning, the original of Mademoiselle Hortense, the result would have been a realistic presentation of a criminal. But he has invested Fagin, Bill Sikes, the Artful Dodger, and their companions in crime, with a quality of horror which Mr. Pugh says lends them “something of the hectic effect of leering, grinning devils in red torment. Fagin, the arch-devil, though he is limned in the fewest possible words, stands forth lurid and malignant as the figure of Satan in medieval pageantry.”1 It is this satanic quality which particulary distinguishes the villains in Oliver Twist from those in Dickens' other works.