Jack Dawkins

75

Known as “The Artful Dodger” in Charles Dickens “Oliver Twist,” due to his skill as a pickpocket. As a precocious young orphaned boy, it was said that he “was of a rather saturnine disposition, and seldom gave way to merriment when it interfered with business.” “He was, altogether, as roistering and swaggering a young gentleman as ever stood four feet six, or something less, in the blushers.” In the end of “Oliver Twist,” he was caught stealing a snuff-box from an old gentleman, which was an embarrassing defeat for him considering it was such a petty theft. Although still a child, he was sent to a British penal colony in Australia. This Talkie imagines Jack later in life as adult, now a well-off farmer in Australia.