Allison Epstein specializes in novels inspired by literary history. Her past works have taken us on a deep dive into the life of one of Shakespeare’s contemporaries (Christopher Marlowe in A Tip for the Hangman” and into an alternate history of early 19th-century Russia (Let the Dead Bury the Dead).
Her latest offering, Fagin the Thief, expands the world of Charles Dickens’ Oliver Twist, an old chestnut that’s seen so many theatrical and cinematic adaptations. But Epstein’s novel isn’t merely a retelling. Instead, she expands our perspective to go beyond “reviewing the situation” to empathizing with the full sweep of 19th-century England’s poor underclass. Her Fagin is smart, wounded, caring, heroic, craven, and unapologetically Jewish. Epstein transforms Dickens’ morality tale to a complex exploration of the life of an underdog that invites us to question the pat answers Dickens provided in his early novel about morality and the complex ways people are shaped by their own traumas.
I recently spoke with Epstein about her new novel. The conversation has been edited for length and clarity.
Kay Daly
So far, you’ve written biofiction about Christopher Marlowe, a novel inspired by War and Peace, and now a quasi re-telling of Oliver Twist. What draws you to history and, more specifically, literary history?
Allison Epstein
I think of myself as an amateur history nerd. I don’t have any formal training as a historian, but I will pick up any historical topic and follow it way down a rabbit hole, much farther than I need to. My academic training actually is in classic literature—you know, the classic English major. So writing literary history brings together those two aspects of what I love. I’ve written things adjacent to Shakespeare and adjacent to Dickens, and both Shakespeare and Dickens are held up as great writers, as if they have produced these things out of all context—you just absorb them as the workings of a great genius. When you think about them more in terms of a historical person who wrote this book in a historical context, it really comes to life. They’re flawed men who wrote flawed books, as great as they are, and that I find it really energizing to imagine what the author might have been living through, what the characters in that time might have been living through.
Kay Daly
What drew you to the project of telling Fagin’s story beyond the bounds of Oliver Twist? Do you have a history with this novel, or was there something else that planted the seed?
Allison Epstein
I came into my love for Oliver Twist through my love for the Broadway musical. The Fagin in that show is really just a whimsical uncle figure who’s got a little bit of mystery. He’s got all the best songs in the show. When I got old enough to actually read the book, it was an extremely different experience. Dickens was telling a morality tale with characters who served a particular purpose but were not built out as people. Bill Sykes is a really dramatic example. He’s a villain who has no motivations other than ‘he is a villain.’ Fagin is a stock character of the evil Jew who preys on children. There’s no way around that. But to me, he’s still interesting because he’s as close as Dickens got in that book to writing a character. You can tell when Fagin’s talking on the page. He’s a different kind of person. He’s funny, and he’s got his own little schemes on the side, and he has really complicated relationships with people in his circle. He cares for people, and he betrays them. He hates them and he loves them at the same time. Dickens is so close to giving Fagin a whole life, and then he just doesn’t do it. And I find that infuriating, because I love the raw materials that he put down, and then he gave up and turned it into an antisemitic stock figure. Dickens put all of these beautiful raw materials right down on the table, and then he wasn’t interested in playing with them. So I will.
Kay Daly
You mention the musical. There have been so many adaptations, on stage and screen, of this story. Did you look to any of those for inspiration? What do you think of the ways Fagin has been depicted?
Allison Epstein
I’ve really immersed myself in Oliver Twist adaptations in the last couple of years. What I’ve seen is you can have an interesting adaptation of Fagin, but you can’t have an interesting adaptation of Fagin that’s Jewish. So many adaptations step back so fast, as if to say, “We’re making this interesting, compelling villain who’s sashaying onto the stage doing all these interesting things. He can’t be Jewish when he does that, because then that’s an antisemitic caricature.” So they either make him interesting and captivating, or they make him boring. But his only character trait is that he’s Jewish. I’ve seen several adaptations where you just see him praying and speaking with an exaggerated Yiddish accent, and that’s the extent of the characterization. And that’s part of what I wanted to do in this book. I want him to be Jewish and interesting at the same time.
Kay Daly
There’s a certain audacity in retellings, which Fagin the Thief is in part—as well as an affection for the work you’re retelling. What was it like to confront this giant of the English literary tradition?
Allison Epstein
There’s a reason that I chose Oliver Twist for a Dickens retelling and not, say, Bleak House or David Copperfield. Oliver Twist is a strange book. It’s a classic, and it’s compelling in certain places, but there are also parts of that book that don’t work and don’t make sense. You see the sparks of genius that Dickens will give us in a book like Bleak House. But you also see one-hundred-and-fifty pages about a side plot that nobody needs. No one cares about the brother in Oliver Twist! That gave me a sense of, not exactly permission, but that it did not feel like a great book that’s untouchable. It felt like a fascinating book that I loved, that had problems that I desperately wanted to fix. And it sounds incredibly arrogant to say, “Yes, I can fix Dickens’s problems.” Charles Dickens is a better writer than I will ever be. But it did feel like the book is alive enough that there’s space to kind of step into it and say, What didn’t he add in this world? He added everything to David Copperfield. He didn’t add everything to Oliver Twist in that way. There’s very clearly a world that exists beyond the snapshot that he showed us in that book.
Kay Daly
I was captivated by your empathetic portrayals of both Fagin and Bill Sykes, as well as your beautifully tragic rendition of Nancy. You’re clearly writing against the grain of Dickens’ intent. In the current cultural climate, there are many who embrace these kinds of critical reading practices, while others view them as unfair to the author’s intent or off-limits because you’re taking the original author out of their context. What would you say to such a critique?
Allison Epstein
My intent is not to condemn Charles Dickens as an antisemite. I find that an incredibly uninteresting line of argument. What I am interested in is the character and the text. And I think we can look at a character written in a book from two-hundred years ago, and say, This is not a whole person, without saying, therefore this book should not be read. I find it worrisome that a problematic character or problematic attitude from a past book means that that book shouldn’t be read. I think that book should still be read. And I don’t think a racist character in a book means that the book is racist. I don’t think it means that we should throw out the baby with the bathwater necessarily. I think what it means is, when we’re approaching these texts from a time that’s not ours with a standard that’s not ours, it becomes twice as important for us as modern readers to come into it with nuance and awareness so that we can say, “This book is brilliant. In some ways, this book is also harmful in some ways.” How do we reconcile that? How do we think about it? I think we need to be able to hold both of those ideas in our heads at once and acknowledge that this book, if written today, would probably not become a classic because of how it portrays particular groups. There are still things in this book that are important, that are true, that are compelling. Both of those are true at the same time.
Kay Daly
I absolutely loved getting Fagin’s point of view on Oliver, who is presented by Dickens as all purity and innocence and light, which Dickens tacitly attributes to the fact that Oliver really comes from the upper classes, despite his workhouse origins. How do you conceive of Oliver in your retelling, and what was your intent? Are you reflecting Fagin’s character, or Oliver’s?
Allison Epstein
I feel that Oliver is almost certainly—were he a real person—not as innocent as Charles Dickens projects him to be. That is the quintessential innocent child flung into a literal den of thieves. Oliver is no more a fully drawn person than Bill Sykes is a fully drawn person. To me, for Oliver to be interesting, there has to be something in him that’s not pure and good. I would make the argument that he survives a pretty terrible set of circumstances in the original novel, and that seems very unlikely for someone who is not at least standing up for himself a little bit, who’s not witnessing the game that’s going on around him. So I think we don’t give them enough credit if we think, “Oh, he didn’t know that any of these people were bad, and he didn’t know he shouldn’t be friends with the Artful Dodger.” He knew something, I feel fairly certain that made sense to me.
Kay Daly
You speak a lot to the experience of antisemitism in Victorian London, which is deeply enmeshed in Dickens’ original novel, though not critiqued. What was your experience confronting these prejudices unglossed, and how much was that experience a motivation for your writing of Fagin the Thief?
Allison Epstein
Essentially, the first sentence we meet Fagin, he is an ugly, old Jew leaning over a fireplace. Dickens uses his name and “the Jew” interchangeably, and he’s described as reptilian. He’s slithering through the world. You can’t trust him for a second. The physicality of it is frightening. If I see you hammering the word Jew repeatedly four times a page, every page for an entire book, it hits you every single time, like, “Okay, I get it. You can back off a little bit.” But as a person interested in classic literature, I can say that is not a Dickens problem. I used to play a game with myself in graduate school. I would pick up a book before 1900 and say, “I wonder how long I can get before someone does something weird about the Jews in this book?” Wow. You almost can’t make it through a book without a classic author just tossing it off. Sometimes it’s just a joke and it’s not relevant to the plot at all. I love many of those books, but it’s just a thing that happens all the time, and once you look for it, you can’t stop noticing it.
Kay Daly
Of historical fiction, some people will bluntly say, “I don’t like historical fiction” or “I’m not interested in reading those stories.” Have you encountered those kinds of attitudes? If so, what is your response?
Allison Epstein
I do hear people say, “I’m not interested in historical fiction,” the same way that I hear people say, “I don’t like learning about history.” And I wonder how much of that is the way that historical fiction is presented as well as the way that we learn history. I love learning about history. I don’t love being taught history. And I think that when you’re reading a book that’s a nonfiction historical book, the biggest compliment a reviewer can give it is that it is readable. That should be the baseline for a book of history because the past is full of everything that goes on today. It’s just as human and alive as the present moment is. And I don’t think we were always encouraged to experience history that way. We think of history as a set of names and dates and figures rather than people, and what I love about historical fiction is that it takes those figures and makes them people again. But if that’s not something you expect when you hear the word history; you expect something dry. You expect to be lectured about a particular battle of World War II, I’m not surprised people aren’t interested in that.
Kay Daly
Your acknowledgements end with a charming note: “Charles Dickens: You made a mistake with Bullseye. Don’t worry. I fixed it.” I’ve got to ask: What mistake did you fix? And were there other “mistakes” you fixed?
Allison Epstein
It’s the scene where Sykes dies, and as the last sentence of that entire scene, Dickens also throws the dog off the roof and has him break his head open on a rock. It’s just horrifying and completely unnecessary. And I feel very strongly that that’s a mistake, that poor dog, who never did anything to anybody.
I don’t know if I would call it fixing a mistake, but one aspect of the original that troubled me, and that I wanted to think about, was Bill and Nancy. Both of them in the original novel don’t seem real to me, and Dickens really doubled down on it. “This is how an abusive relationship works. Some are just bad, and some people who are just good get trapped in just bad relationships.” That, to me, doesn’t feel right or respectful to people who are in those relationships. It’s not a personal experience I’ve had, but it’s a personal experience that I’ve seen, and I always find the one note that Dickens gives it to be very disrespectful to Nancy. She’s a whole person who’s smart and paying attention, and she has a personality, and she has wants and dreams. She wouldn’t be in a relationship that was awful from day one because she feels she doesn’t deserve anything. That’s not how those situations start. There has to be something there that’s worth holding on to. And Dickens doesn’t give Nancy darkness to her light, and he doesn’t give Bill light to the darkness. That bothers me every time I read it, not only because Bill is a human being, but also because Nancy is a person who’s in love with the person who is hurting her, and that that theme is as relevant now, as it was for Dickens.
FICTION
Fagin the Thief
By Allison Epstein
Doubleday
Published on February 25, 2025
