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Foil
Explanation and Analysis—Oliver and Fagin's Boys:
Virtually all of the other boys who work for Fagin—the Artful Dodger, Charley Bates, and even Noah Claypole—serve as foils to Oliver by falling into the life of crime he manages to resist. In Chapter 42, Noah's admission that he would like to earn money through crime allows Fagin to blackmail Noah into working for him:
Whether Noah Claypole, whose rapacity was none of the least comprehensive, would have acceded even to these glowing terms, had he been a perfectly free agent, is very doubtful; but as he recollected that, in the event of his refusal, it was in the power of his new acquaintance to give him up to justice immediately, (and more unlikely things had come to pass,) he gradually relented, and said he thought that would suit him.
Noah comes from a similar background to Oliver, having worked for Mr. Sowerberry as well. Noah spent longer there than Oliver and had already "soured" into a mean-spirited young man when Oliver met him. This difference in temperament is the main difference between Oliver and Noah, especially given their uncannily parallel encounters with Fagin immediately upon coming to the city. The fact that Noah has no choice but to work for Fagin, lest Fagin turn him into the police, suggests that Oliver may not have been so resistant to criminality had he stayed in the Sowerberry house long enough to have his inherent goodness bullied out of him.
Noah is not the only young man who is different than Oliver only in caving to Fagin's pressure. The Artful Dodger and Charley Bates have already become thieves by the time Oliver meets them, driven by Fagin's predatory "fathering" and similarly desperate circumstances to those Oliver finds himself in. Whereas Oliver has chance encounters with Mr. Brownlow and the Maylies before he gives in to Fagin's pressures, the other boys are not so lucky. In Chapter 43, Charley describes what happens to the Dodger when he is caught for a series of thefts:
"They’ve found the gentleman as owns the box; two or three more’s a coming to ’dentify him, and the Artful’s booked for a passage out," replied Master Bates.
The Dodger is set to be transported to a penal colony, ripped away from home and made to labor on behalf of the English empire as punishment for his crimes. This moment illuminates what may easily have happened to Oliver if he had gone through with the burglary at the Maylies' house, or even if the Maylies had not chosen to direct the investigators away from him. By including Fagin's other boys as foils for Oliver, Dickens emphasizes that Oliver gets his happy ending by the skin of his teeth.
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