Life and Crimes of Ikey Solomon

Nancy is a symbol of “fallen women”.

Nancy is in Fagin’s gang member.

Nancy’s love for Sikes exemplifies the moral ambiguity of her character.

Despite her criminal lifestyle, she is among the noblest character in the novel.

Nancy,  is fiercely protective of Oliver and harbors a great deal of motherly affection and pity for him.

She tries to prevent him from being kidnapped a second time, after Oliver has finally managed to find safety in the household of the Maylie family, whom Sikes tried unsuccessfully to rob.

She gives Rose Maylie and Mr. Brownlow, Oliver’s benefactor, information about Oliver’s evil half-brother Monks, who is in league with Fagin.

However, she has managed to keep Bill’s name out of it.

But Fagin has sent a spy (Noah) out after her, and when the spy reports on what he has heard and seen, Fagin, furious at what she has done, tells Sikes about her actions.

However, he twists the story just enough to make it sound as if she informed on him, knowing that this will probably result in her being murdered and thus silenced.

It is her murder and the subsequent search for Sikes, her killer, that helps bring down Fagin’s gang.

Nancy commits one of the most noble acts of kindness in the story when she ultimately defies Bill, in order to help Oliver to a better life, and she is subsequently martyred for it.

Her character represented Dickens‘ view that a person, however tainted by society, could still retain a sense of good and redeem for past crimes.

One of the main reasons Dickens puts Nancy in Oliver Twist is so that she can be contrasted with the pure, gentle Rose Maylie.

Nancy’s character suggests that the boundary between virtue and vice is note always clearly drawn.

Then there’s Fagin: the leader of Oliver’s gang of pickpockets.

Dickens’ portrayal of Fagin, an elderly Jewish man, was hugely controversial at the time

and led to him facing accusations of anti-Semitism

(midway through serialization, he opted to remove practically all references to Fagin’s faith,

after receiving a letter of complaint from a Jewish friend).

He is ugly, simpering, miserly, and avaricious.

He is also a buyer of other people’s stolen goods. Fagin is more than a statement of ethic prejudice.

He is a richly drawn, resonant embodiment of terrifying villainy.

Fagin is meant to inspire nightmares in child and adult readers a like.

But like many of Dickens’ most colorful characters, Fagin is believed

to have been based on an equally colorful real-life character named Isaac “Ikey” Solomon—

whose life story is almost as dramatic as one of Dickens’ own plotlines.

Solomon was born in the Houndsditch area of East London sometime around 1787.

Not much is known about his childhood, but it’s believed that his father,Henry .

(also known to the law) introduced him to a life of crime at an early age.

Henry Solomon also worked in various places in London and once remarked,

 “I have worked for every factory in London”

Solomon soon followed in his dad’s footsteps as a “fence,” a receiver and dealer in stolen goods.

By the early 1800s, Solomon was in charge of his own jewelry store near London’s Petticoat Lane,

which he used as a cover for buying and selling his ill-gotten wares.

Isaac married Ann (or Hannah) Julian at the Great Synagogue, Dukes Place, London in 1807.

His first brush with the law came in 1810, when he and an accomplice,

Joel Joseph, were arrested for stealing a man’s wallet outside the Houses of Parliament.

The pair fled the scene (with Joseph reportedly stuffing £37 of bank notes down his shirt,

to avoid being found with evidence), and were eventually apprehended and arrested.

At just 21, Solomon was found guilty of theft at London’s Old Bailey court,

and sentenced to be transported to a penal colony in Van Diemen’s Land (modern-day Tasmania).

Solomon’s sentence, however, was never carried out in full.

Instead, he was merely held on a prison ship that never left British waters, and four years later managed to escape (or, more likely, was released by mistake).

By 1818, he was back in London.

Solomon continued to work as a fence until 1827, when he was found guilty of theft and receiving:

with six watches, 17 shawls, 3½ yards of woolen cloth and 12 pieces of valentia (an expensive wool and silk fabric) recorded among the goods involved.

He was sent to London’s notorious Newgate prison—but Solomon had one more trick up his sleeve.

After a court hearing, Solomon was bundled into the back of a hackney carriage by his prison guards.

Unbeknownst to them, the coach was being driven by Solomon’s father-in-law.

On its way back to Newgate, the carriage unexpectedly took a detour back towards a prearranged place ,

Petticoat Lane, where the guards were attacked and the keys to Solomon’s restraints were stolen

and he escaped through the many narrow lanes and houses of that part of London.

Black and white photographs show Petticoat Lane through the years | London Evening Standard

Knowing that he couldn’t possibly stay in England, Solomon fled the country.

He headed first to Denmark, before sailing to the United States and landing in New York in August 1827.

A reward was offered for his recapture.

Back in England though, his dramatic escape had prompted the police to turn their attention to his wife, Ann.

Apparently he had requested his wife Ann to purchase and sell watches to raise money,

but she was caught with them and she herself sentenced – to Van Diemens Land

She was arrested, charged with receiving stolen goods, and sentenced

to be transported to Australia along with her four youngest children, all under the age of ten.

Ann arrived in Hobart, Tasmania, in 1828.

The two eldest Solomon children, John (20) and Moses (19)

, with no clue to their father’s whereabouts, voluntarily joined their mother and siblings the following year.

Back in America, Solomon heard the news through the press, and resolved to join Ann and his children.

Traveling under the alias “Slowman,” he sailed south from New York to Rio,

then on from Brazil around the tip of South America and across where he sailed on the ‘Coronet’ to Hobart ,Tasmania to be with his family .

He arrived in Hobart on October 6, 1828, where he was quickly recognized,

by the local Lieutenant-Governor, Sir George Arthur, and by many of his old customers and accomplices who had all since been sentenced to transportation.

Since no crime had been committed on Australian soil, however, Sir George was powerless to arrest Solomon without a separate arrest warrant from London.

A request was sent, but it took another year for the warrant to arrive—during which time Solomon opened a tobacco shop on Elizabeth Street in Hobart, and paid a £1000 bond to guarantee Ann’s release from the penal colony so that she could join him at home.

The warrant for Solomon’s arrest finally arrived in November 1829, and he was immediately brought before a court in Hobart.

To Sir George’s frustration, though, both a technicality in the wording of the warrant and Solomon’s use of the habeas corpus writ meant that the court had little option but to released him on bail.

There was an outcry both in Sydney and Hobart as the Governor had failed to abide by habeus corpus. (Many articles in newspapers.)

By now, Sir George had had enough.

At last, he drew up his own arrest warrant and sent Solomon back on the ‘Prince Regent to London.

In June 1830, he was finally put on trial at the Old Bailey.

Due to Solomon’s earlier brushes with the law and his dramatic escape three years earlier,

,his case attracted considerable attention from the press, which is no doubt,

how it came to Dickens’ attention (who used reports of Solomon’s court hearing as the basis for Fagin’s trial in Oliver Twist).

Facing eight counts of receiving stolen goods—as well as “feloniously and burglariously breaking and

entering the dwelling house of Richard Groncock and another”—Solomon was found guilty of two, and sentenced to 14 years transportation.

In November 1831, he arrived back in Hobart.

In 1832 he became a Javelin Man (gaol/jail guard) there.

Solomon spent just four years of this new sentence actually in prison.

Isaac’s son John (b.1808 London) moved from Van Diemens Land in 1834 for Sydney,

where he married Elizabeth Harris in Sydney in 1856 and they had 9 children.

He was a merchant, land owner, publican and gold dealer.

In 1835, Isaac was released on a “ticket-of-leave” basis, which insisted that he live at least 20 miles away from Hobart.

After briefly reuniting with his family at their new home in nearby New Norfolk,.

all the years of upheaval soon took their toll and the Solomons began to drift apart.

The family’s two eldest sons had by now moved away, and violent arguments between Ann and Isaac,

saw her briefly sent to the Female House of Correction.

She and Isaac lived apart, female convicts were housed in the Female Factory from 1828.

The area was isolated from Hobart town and close to a source of water for laundry.

 ,After her release in September 1835, she and Isaac lived apart, with most of the children reportedly siding with Ann.

Solomon was finally granted a conditional pardon in 1840,

and received his official “Certificate of Freedom” in 1844.

He died six years later, on September 3, 1850.

Memorial to Isaac Solomon in the Jewish section of the Cornelian Bay Cemetery in Hobart Tasmania

Such was the life of Isaac (Ikey) Solomon that he is said to be the character that Charles Dickens based ‘Fagan’ on for this book Oliver Twist.

He is also the character “Ikey” in ‘The Potatoe Factory’ by Bryce Courtney.

The ‘First Fagan’by Judith Sackville-O’Donnell and ‘Prince of Fences’Life and Crimes of Ikey Solomon by JJ Tobias.

The film released in Australia in 2012 ‘The First Fagan’ is also based on his story.

Truly a memorable character and convict.