Richard Harris Barham Critical Essay | Critical Essay by William G. Lane

Critical Essay by William G. Lane

SOURCE: "R. H. Barham and Dickens's Clergyman of Oliver Twist," Nineteenth-Century Fiction, Vol. 10, No. 2, September, 1955, pp. 159-62.

In the following essay, Lane refutes the theory that Barham was the model for Dickens's cleric in Oliver Twist.

In an article occasioned by the centenary of the first issue of Bentley 's Miscellany, Miss L. M. Littlewood makes a connection between the clergyman of Oliver Twist and Richard Harris Barham ("Thomas Ingoldsby").

"Boz," all the world knows, was a sensitive man [she writes] and, in this case, there is ground for supposing that he resented Barham's friendship with Bentley, with whom he was becoming dissatisfied, and also the power of gentle satire possessed by the Minor Canon. He was a Tory and a cleric, and Dickens, at that time, had no use for either. The irreverent clergyman in Chapter V of Oliver Twist may have originated in this...
(read more)