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Chapter 24
Themes
Key
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in Oliver Twist, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
Thievery and Crime
Poverty, Institutions, and Class
Individualism and Social Bonds
Social Forces, Fate, and Free Will
City and Country
Summary
Analysis
Back at Fagin's apartment, Bates, the Dodger, and Chitling are playing hands of whist, a card game, with one another. The Dodger is a wonderful player (it's implies that he's also cheating); Chitling remarks, aloud, that he cannot fathom how the Dodger wins so much, and Bates finds Chitling's gullibility to be quite funny.
It stands to reason that the Dodger, so good at tricking people on the street, would be a gifted cheater at cards. Chitling, characteristically, is not intelligent enough to realize that the Dodger's trickery does not disappear at the gambling table.
Themes
Quiz
Test Yourself
The Dodger and Bates continue teasing Chitling about Bet, as they believe Chitling has taken a liking to her. Chitling denies this heatedly. After a while, the boys and Fagin hear a bell indicating that someone wishes to come up to the apartment. The Dodger returns leading up a very quiet, and haggard-looking, Toby Crackit, alone. Fagin is shocked at his solo appearance, but offers Crackit food and drink before asking him about the events of the robbery, which Fagin fears has gone awry.
This scene is another example of Dickens' manipulation of the expectations of the audience. For several chapters, we have awaited word of what has become of Oliver, but Dickens does not give this information outright. For readers of the serialized version of the novel, the wait for Oliver's fate cold be many weeks at a time.
Themes
Quiz
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After eating, Crackit tells Fagin and the boys that the robbery failed, that he and Sikes escaped the property with Oliver, who was shot in the arm and wounded; and after worrying that they would all be caught, the two men abandoned Oliver in a ditch. Crackit lost Sikes, too, and came back to London alone. Fagin, horrified at this news, runs yelling out of the apartment, horrified by the bungled robbery and the possibility of Oliver's endangerment.
Fagin's reaction here is an interesting one. Typically so cool and collected a customer, Fagin here belies an especial interest in Oliver's fate. Fagin believes that Oliver can make him a great deal of money, as a thief; thus Fagin is upset not for Oliver's fate, per se, but for the potential loss of income that Oliver's injury seems to promise.
Themes
Quiz
Test Yourself
