A Novel, Classic, Original Sequel: The Artful Dodger

We’ve seen it before, and we’ll see it again. Such is the cyclical nature of storytelling. There are nevertheless a handful of English classics that regularly receive film adaptations, notably Austen and Shakespeare’s corpora and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes. More often than not, though, they stick to the same well-trodden plots. There is no doubt something magnetic about these stories that we return to—the memorable characters and iconic moments—but it’s certainly a joy to find an adaptation of a classic doing something cleverer: enter The Artful Dodger.

I’m far from a fan of Charles Dickens, but this limited series—which just received its second season—convinced me to at least give Oliver Twist a skim. For those as unread as I was, the Artful Dodger is the moniker of Jack Dawkins, the young pickpocket who ropes poor, innocent orphan Oliver Twist into a little gang of thieves in London under the tutelage of an old man, Fagin, whom Dickens made quite the antisemitic caricature of. The nature of the novel is that all the wrongdoers get what’s coming to them, and Dickens’s story ends with Fagin hanged for being an accomplice to murder and the Artful Dodger convicted for theft at thirteen years old. Instead of suffering a 15-year sentence, the show imagines the Artful Dodger escaping prison to live and become the main character of a lively new story.

Fifteen years after the events of Oliver Twist, it's 1855, and Jack Dawkins is an escaped convict who became a naval surgeon and now works at the hospital in the fictional penal colony of Port Victory, Australia. It’s the noose for him if his past is discovered, and the mere pennies he gets as a doctor aren’t enough to pay his gambling debts to a cheating harbormaster. If he can’t cough it up, he loses his hand and with it his ability to perform surgery—the one good thing that’s come of his nimble pickpocket fingers.

The only aspect of Dickens that I would argue remains in The Artful Dodger, beyond the broad strokes of the handful of characters and most of the canon events of Oliver Twist, is the Dickensian degree of coincidences and twists. The show, like Dickens’s novel, balances an intricate and layered plot that is much more of a delight for me to see unfold on screen than read on the page. The camera movements invite predictions, then throws new, seemingly inevitable wrenches in the characters’ plans. In the first episode alone, Jack’s father figure Fagin turns up in Port Victory (very much not dead) and attempts to entice Jack back to his thieving ways for one more grand heist. But sunny Australia is the ironic inverse of foggy London—there’s nowhere to hide if things go sideways, and they’re hardly the only troublemakers at the edge of Empire. Countering Jack is Lady Belle Fox, the governor's daughter who’s read all the latest medical discoveries and is set on being the first female surgeon—not least to save her own life—and when she first catches Jack stealing, she blackmails him into helping her revolutionize medical practices.

Contrary to the classical European setting and drawing inspiration from historical developments in medicine and the penal colonies of Australia, the show takes what Dickens wrote and runs with the possible ramifications of it in a gloriously twisting and heart-pounding way, with British humor to boot. It goes to show there’s more to be mined in the stories we love to repeat than just readapting what’s already happened. Those adaptations feel more about the creator than the work they’re creating. The Artful Dodger proves that a classic plot can be novel, and a sequel quite original.