"Fagin – The Jew" – Rare, Large Poster – USA, Late 19th Century

"Fagin – The Jew" – Rare, Large Poster – USA, Late 19th Century
"Fagin – the Jew" / "Oliver Twist" – a poster presumably advertising an American theatrical production of Charles Dickens' Oliver Twist. Color woodblock. Hartford (Connecticut, USA): Calhoun Print Co., [ca. late 19th century]. English.
Impressive, large poster, featuring three illustrations to the novel Oliver Twist after illustrations of the English artist George Cruikshank for the first edition of the novel.
The central, large illustration (titled "Fagin's Last Night Alive") depicts Fagin the Jew before his execution, hunched on his prison bunk, biting his fingernails. The two illustrations in the corners of the poster (titled "Oliver Introduced to the Old Gent" and "Oliver’s Reception by Fagin and the Boys") depict Fagin's crime – enticing Oliver Twist to join the gang of thieves. Fagin's figure in all three illustrations, as in the novel itself, follows common antisemitic stereotypes – his nose is elongated and he is wearing old and filthy clothes.
Oliver Twist, Charles Dickens' second novel, was published as a serial during the years 1837-1839 in the English newspaper Bentley's Miscellany. The novel tells the story of the orphan Oliver who is expelled from a workhouse after asking for another portion of gruel. After arriving to London, he is forced to join a gang of children-pickpockets led by one of the most well-known villains in the history of English literature – the elderly Fagin. The Jewishness of Fagin, depicted as a child-corrupting demonic criminal, is emphasized time and again throughout the novel by various means, including the constant reference to "The Jew", which appears more times than the character's name (Fagin is called "The Jew" no less than 257 times compared with the 42 times he is called by his name or "The Old Man").
Fagin's character elicited severe criticism by the Jewish community in England; many accused Dickens of antisemitism and hatred of Jews. Dickens denied these claims again and again and in a letter to a Jewish acquaintance, Eliza Davis, he wrote that Fagin in Oliver Twist was a Jew since "it unfortunately was true, of the time to which the story refers, that that class of criminal almost invariably was a Jew". In later editions of the novel, personally edited by Dickens (from 1863 onwards), the reference to "the Jew" was mostly removed, not appearing in the last 15 chapters of the book even once. This poster explicitly makes this controversial word choice – the phrase "Fagin – the Jew" is printed in large characters on its bottom (the words "the Jew" were omitted from later reproductions of the broadside).
Despite Dickens' later efforts to downplay Fagin's Jewishness, his character became a prototype of the criminal Jew. Over the 19th and 20th centuries, it became a common theme in antisemitic art and appeared on a variety of artifacts – figurines, cups, plates, candlesticks, jugs, fireplace tools and more. See: The Jew in Antisemitic Art, by Peter Ehrenthal, Jerusalem, 2011, pp. 27-32 (the present poster documented on p. 32).
107.5X209.5 cm (printed on three sheets of paper, attached to each other). Good-fair condition. Tears, including open tears (mostly small), some repaired (with paper and paint). Some stains. Linen-backed for display and preservation.