Beastly Criminals and Criminal Beasts: Stray Women and Stray Dogs in Oliver Twist

This chapter examines Bull&s;s-eye&s;s role as a criminal animal, paying particular attention to his interactions with both Sikes and Nancy and the ways in which Charles Dickens offloads undesirable traits from the two characters onto the dog. The intensity of the violence, loyalty and suffering of both Nancy and the dog is accentuated by the somewhat insipid interactions in the comfortable bourgeois world to which Oliver Twist is restored. The columnist Mary Fortune was to adopt the equation of stray dogs with stray women in a number of her articles for The Australian Journal in the late 1860s, although she is more kindly disposed toward both dogs and women. The journalist and renowned slummer James Greenwood explicitly equated stray dogs with streetwalkers in his article for The Star Going to the Dogs . The stray dogs are depicted in abject terms and their degradation is highlighted by the fact that they are the victims of street children.