Volume 28, Number 16 · October 22, 1981
The Inferiority Complex
By Richard C. Lewontin
The Mismeasure of Man
by Stephen Jay Gould
Norton, 352 pp., $14.95
The first meeting of Oliver Twist and young Jack Dawkins, the Artful Dodger, on the road to London was a confrontation between two stereotypes of nineteenth-century literature. The Dodger was a 'snub-nosed, flat-browed, common-faced boy…with rather bow legs and little sharp ugly eyes.' Nor was he much on English grammar and pronunciation. 'I've got to be in London tonight,' he tells Oliver, 'and I know a 'spectable old genelman lives there, wot'll give you lodgings for nothink….' He was just what we might have expected of a ten-year-old streetwise orphan with no education and no loving family, brought up among the dregs of the Victorian Lumpenproletariat.
Review, 4123 words
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