2 August: Boreham on Bill Sikes

The Evolution of Bill Sikes
It was on the evening of August 2, 1838, that amidst tremendous emotion and excitement, Charles Dickens reached the climax of his delineation of one of the most dramatic, and in some ways the most convincing, of all his picturesque creations. Dickens was busily engaged in producing "Oliver Twist" in monthly parts. In setting out upon the 13th chapter there sprang into being—almost to the novelist's own astonishment—the full-blooded, personality of Bill Sikes. His debut is like the sudden crash of a thunderstorm. "What the blazes is in the wind now?" snarled a deep voice in the thieves kitchen.

The man who growled out these words was a stoutly-built fellow of about five-and-thirty, in a black velveteen coat, very soiled drab breeches, lace-up half-boots and grey cotton stocklings which enclosed a bulky pair of legs with large swelling calves—the kind of legs which, in such costume, always look in an unfinished and incomplete state without a pair of fetters to garnish them. He had a broken hat on his head, and a dirty belcher handkerchief round his neck, with the long frayed ends of which he smeared the beer from his face as he spoke. He disclosed, when he had done so, a broad heavy countenance with a beard of three days' growth and two scowling eyes, one of which displayed various parti-coloured symptoms of having been recently damaged by a blow.

Thus Bill Sikes makes his bow to a public which he has held spell-bound for a hundred years. He is worthy of contemplation today, not merely as a magnetic and tragic individual, but as the representative of a class. Bill Sikes, as a person was killed by his creator, and no murderer ever felt more unstrung by his gruesome task. None of his books captivated the fancy of Dickens as did "Oliver Twist." As he neared the end, he found it impossible to tear himself from the manuscript. Forster trembled for his friend's health and begged Dickens to join him in a ride into the country. "Not till I have sent Sikes to the devil," the novelist replied. When, on a night that he could never forget, he completed that tragic process, he made an end, not of a species but merely of one solitary specimen and of an imaginary specimen at that. And, in spite of his tragic destruction at the end of the novel, Bill Sikes remains among us as the representative of a class that is not so easily disposed of.


Ancient and Modern
It is true that, with the passage of the years, he has shaved his beard, changed his garments and adopted startlingly new methods. Several of our leading magistrates, in commenting upon the extraordinary prevalence of housebreaking nowadays, have referred—in terms that almost sounded like sobs of lamentation—to the divergence of the modern burglar from the ancient type. It might reasonably have been supposed that the burglar of the old school would have been allowed to pass from the scene of his villainies without any very poignant grief being squandered over his exit. But, in one of their ironical frolics, the fates have decreed that the departure of the criminal mode that Mr. Sikes so magnificently represented, shall lie deplored even by those who might have been expected to show nothing but exultation over the vanishing vogue.

"Bill Sikes has disappeared from the dock," exclaimed the chairman of the Middlesex Sessions some time ago. "You never see the old-fashioned type of burglar now, but in his place you find the cunning boy-criminal. At the Middlesex Sessions today, for instance, there are 10 cases of burglary and housebreaking, and five of the offenders are little more than boys, their ages being 16,17, 19, 20, and 23. The old muscular criminal has gone, and these undersized specimens of low cunning have taken his place." Another leading London magistrate comments upon the fact that, of the prisoners now charged with housebreaking, the majority are men of first class education and attainments. Some years ago, Mr. Charles H. E. Brookfield the actor, wrote a little play entitled, "The Burglar and the Judge." On its production he himself took the role of the burglar. In drafting the manuscript, and in preparing to act his part, Mr. Brookfield deemed it essential that he should probe the conditions under which the up-to-date housebreaker lives and moves and has their being. His researches were a revelation to him. They convinced him that nowadays the redoubtable associate of Fagin, the Artful Dodger, and Charley Bates would be hopelessly at sea. In the old days, he said, cribs were cracked by courage; now they are cracked by downright craftiness. The type has changed beyond all recognition.

Crime Styles
Like everything else, crime has its styles and fancies. "Succeeding generations," as Macaulay says, "change the fashion of their morals with the fashion of their hats and coaches, take some other kind of wickedness under their patronage, and marvel at the depravity of their ancestors." Lecky, Buckle and John Stuart Mill all insist that in estimating the moral excellence or moral destitution of any historical personage, due regard must be paid to the moral atmosphere of the period in which they lived. Nietzsche preached this doctrine, which he called his Doctrine of Relativism, up hill and down dale, in season and out. "Morality," he argued, is never absolute but always relative. "Morals," he maintained, "depend on the geographical and historical conditions of a people. Every conception changes with time." A man's behaviour, these authorities contend, must be judged by the ethical standards that chance to be the mode at the moment. A portrait of a lady in a prodigious crinoline is only saved from contempt, in the eyes of her Twentieth Century grand-daughters, by a charitable remembrance of the fact that, when the curious picture was painted, the huge trooped skirt was the rage of the period and was considered the ultimate expression of feminine daintiness and charm. Our philosophical historians are never tired of appealing for a similar leniency in relation to the moral deformities of earlier days. A standard of conduct that would have passed muster in the time of George the Fourth would appears strangely reprobate in the days of George the Sixth. Mr. A. Hyatt Verrill has shown that, at one time, the pirate, the corsair, and the buccaneer cut really glorious figures in the social life of Europe. Later on Dick Turpin had his hectic day. The highwayman filled a noble and almost heroic place in the popular regard. He was to be found on every road. He was often a man of good family and high culture. Names like those of Robin Hood, Tom Faggus and Claude Duval are invested with an abiding and romantic interest. But the buccaneer has gone; the highwayman has gone; and, if it would be too much to say that the burglar has gone, it is at least clear that the burglar of the Bill Sikes pattern has bowed himself out. The style that he represented must be relegated to that ghostly realm to which the periwig and the crinoline belong. His velveteen coat, his leather breeches, his battered hat, his filthy kerchief, his heavy mask, his clumsy tools, his dark lantern, his crude professional chivalry, his mysterious vocabulary, and all the other vivid and graphic details immortalised by Dickens, will always be treasured as representative of one of the most picturesque phases among the fleeting fashions of crime. The pirate and the highwayman were more dashing and wove about themselves a lordlier spirit of romance; but the burglar of the type of Bill Sikes has left upon the human minds a certain bluff and well-defined impression which it will take a long time completely to erase.

Education and Crime
The changing fashion emphasises somewhat alarmingly the failure of our modern system of education. Several of the eminent education experts who recently visited Australia, alluded, directly or obliquely, to this aspect of the tragedy. Bill Sikes belonged to the day in which education was the privilege of the few. His shadow never darkened a school door. But, as a leading magistrate has pointed out, the up-to-date burglar has been educated, often well-educated. Yet his education has done nothing towards repressing or moderating his criminal instincts and tendencies. Dr. James Scott, who was for some years Governor of Holloway Gaol, has made the disquieting observation that education has had more effect in changing the nature and methods of crime than of diminishing its gravity or volume. Even science, splendid as is its record, has, in one phase of its history, only succeeded in placing more terrible weapons at the disposal of the criminal and of adding new horrors to war. It would have been interesting to study the expression on the face of Bill Sikes on being told that his successors would do their work by means of chloroform, radiograms and aeroplanes. To stress this phase of modern crime is by no means to disparage the excellent work of the modern scientist and the modern schoolmaster. The trend of the latest teaching is in the direction of the development of originality. Instead of teaching by rote, and moulding children to an orthodox and traditional pattern, everything is now being done to render them observant, alert, self-reliant and resourceful. Every slumbering faculty is awakened and prepared for useful service. But in thus multiplying the possibilities of usefulness, it is obvious that the school is at the same time enormously increasing the perils that menace the community. To whet and sharpen all the powerful weapons of a boy's intellectual armoury, without most carefully instructing him as to the purpose for which those weapons are designed, is manifestly to court disaster of the very gravest kind. Unless the large place filled by Bill Sikes is to be occupied, without challenge, by a type of rascality much more alarming and much more pernicious, our schools must set themselves not only to develop latent powers but to give to those developed powers definite bent, direction, and application.

F W Boreham

Image: Bill Sikes