“Please, sir, I want some more. . . . Please, sir . . . I want some more”: Unhooding Richler’s Fang to Find Justice for Oliver Twist and Jacob Two-Two

In an article published a few years after the release of Jacob Two-Two Meets the Hooded Fang in 1975, Mordecai Richler located the literary origins of his book for children in British literature of the nineteenth century. He explained that he had written the book in large part out of a sense that children’s literature had not come very far from its pre-twentieth-century days of moral instruction:

most children’s books were awfully boring or insufferably didactic or sometimes both. These dreary, ill-written books were conceived for profit or to teach the kids racial tolerance, hygiene, or other knee-jerk liberal responses. . . . In contemporary children’s stories parents were never hungover or short-tempered and the kids were generally adorable. I decided if I ever got round to writing a book for my kids its intentions would be to amuse. Pure fun, not instruction, is what I had in mind. . . . [T]oo many [children’s books] are written by third-rate writers for children already old enough to enjoy at least some adult books. Say, Mark Twain, some Dickens, certainly The Scarlet Pimpernel. . . .

(“Writing” 7)

Here Richler gestures to the writer who obviously sparked some of his book’s settings, details, and concerns: Charles Dickens. In his desire to amuse rather than instruct children, Richler also appears to note indirectly just how much Jacob Two-Two Meets the Hooded Fang reflects late-twentieth-century notions of childhood, whereby children are seen as people in their own right, in contrast to Victorian notions of childhood, whereby children are seen within a religious framework as “little sinners” who require explicit instruction in order to be made into “little angels.”

A careful comparison of Richler’s Jacob Two-Two and Dickens’s Oliver Twist (1837–39)¹ reveals not only Richler’s debt to Dickens, but also the debt of illustrator Fritz Wegner to George Cruikshank, the illustrator of the initial edition of Dickens’s novel. Both sets of illustrations are pen-and-ink satires that are similar in mood, subject, and characters. Through their mockeries of justice and arrogant, unjustified adult power wielded against defenceless minors, Richler and Wegner also demonstrate the changes in cultural attitudes toward children and adult authority that have taken place in the 138 years since the publication of the Dickens-Cruikshank text. In late-twentieth-century England, the setting for Richler’s work, changes in the law with regard to the abuse, labour, and education of children have considerably lessened their material suffering. At the same time, however, such improvements have not appeared to alleviate the psychological dread and anxiety that oppressive, prison-like, adult-led institutions such as schools and court systems evoke. Dickens’s Oliver is powerless on his own in a harsh, adult world, and even though Richler’s Jacob is a “little person” with his own rights, he experiences a sense of powerlessness. Whereas Dickens and Cruikshank show the young person to be trapped in a materially threatening society, Richler and Wegner situate him in a post-Freudian society where he feels psychologically besieged by adults who are threatened by “Child Power.”

Oliver Twist is one of Dickens’s earliest and shortest books. The story’s relative brevity makes for a sharp focus on the figure of an orphan who, as Dickens noted in his Preface to the third edition of the novel, epitomizes “the principle of Good surviving through every adverse circumstance” (xxv).² Almost everywhere Oliver turns, from the workhouse from which overseers could have children as young as nine apprenticed (Pool 241), to his time with Fagin and his pickpocketing protégés in a London slum, he encounters coldness, nastiness, or a ruthless pragmatism. These cruelties are all key elements in Dickens’s scathing criticism of his society’s treatment of children. In her study of children in books by Charlotte and Emily Brontë, Eliot, and Dickens, Susmita Bhattacharya suggests that the inclusion of such elements in fiction was not uncommon during...