Charles Dickens: Oliver Twist. Vorwort von Irving Howe. Bantam Dell, New York 2005, ISBN 0-553-21102-1, S.XIX (englisch, google.com): “Dickens himself, in a letter to a Jewish woman who had protested the stereotypical treatment of Fagin, sought to reduce the problem to one of historical verisimilitude. 'Fagin,' he wrote, 'is a Jew because it unfortunately was true, of the time to which the story refers, that that class of criminal almost invariably was a Jew.'”
