A father dies leaving a will with a condition: the younger son inherits only if he reaches adulthood without staining his name by any public act of dishonour, meanness or wrong. The elder son, who goes by Monks, therefore does not need his half-brother dead. He needs him convicted. So he seeks out a receiver of stolen goods in London and pays him to make a nine-year-old into a thief — and pays again, and pays more, because the boy keeps failing to become one. The plot is machinery, and like a lot of Victorian machinery it exposes the assumptions it was built on.
// The theoryTwo families that justified thirty years of law
The hereditary account of crime was not a fringe position; it was the mainstream, and it rested on a genre. Richard Dugdale's The Jukes (1877) traced a New York kinship network of some 700 people and counted the paupers, prostitutes and convicts among them. Henry Goddard's The Kallikak Family (1912) went further and cleaner: one man, two lines of descent — one from a respectable marriage and one from an alleged encounter with a “feeble-minded” tavern girl — and a contrast between the two that looked like a controlled experiment. Around them sat Lombroso's atavism, Morel's degeneration, and Galton's eugenics, and out of all of it came policy: compulsory sterilisation statutes in more than thirty American states, upheld by the Supreme Court in Buck v. Bell (1927) in an opinion that concluded three generations of imbeciles are enough. Something close to 60,000 people were sterilised. The theory was not an idea that failed to find an application. It found one immediately.
Both studies said something else
The detail that matters most is that neither foundational study supports what was built on it. Dugdale was substantially an environmentalist. His book argues repeatedly that where heredity produces disease, environment produces the crime, and he recommended improved conditions and education — a position so inconvenient that in 1916 Arthur Estabrook reissued the Jukes research stripped of it, and that version is the one that entered the textbooks. Goddard's case is worse. His family data was collected largely by a fieldworker knocking on doors and recording hearsay about people long dead; the classifications were made on sight; and the photographs of the “bad” Kallikaks in his book were retouched to darken the eyes and heavy the features, which Stephen Jay Gould documented decades later. What both studies actually measured was poverty, illiteracy, disability and rural isolation, all of which cluster in families for entirely unmysterious reasons. The genealogical method cannot distinguish an inherited trait from an inherited situation, and it was never asked to.
// The subjectThe novel argues both sides and only notices one
Monks is a thin character doing heavy structural work, and the interesting thing is where he fails. His scheme requires corruption to be effective — that a child placed among thieves will become a thief — which is the environmental thesis, and it is the thesis Dickens spent the book's first act proving with the workhouse, the undertaker and the gruel. Then the plot refuses it. Oliver lives among Fagin's boys and does not become one of them. He speaks a register of English no one in his environment speaks. He faints at violence. His decency is presented as constitutional, and when his parentage is revealed it functions as an explanation. Dickens, a genuine reformer who did more than almost anyone to make Victorian poverty visible, wrote a plot whose logic is that blood tells — and gave the same logic to Monks in negative, a man corrupted by the maternal line, described in the novel in the vocabulary of inherited taint.
That contradiction is not a flaw to be scored against a novelist. It is the most accurate thing in the book, because it is exactly the contradiction the century held. The same reformers who campaigned for sanitation, schooling and factory acts also funded eugenic research, and they saw no tension: environment explained the deserving poor, heredity explained the residuum. Monks and Oliver are those two explanations wearing the same surname.
Monks
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// The crackWhat is left once the genealogies are thrown out
Discarding hereditary criminality does not license the opposite error, and the modern literature is specific about what survives. Twin and adoption designs — the Danish register studies of Mednick and Hutchings, and the Swedish and Minnesota cohorts — find moderate heritability for antisocial behavior, typically around 40 to 50 per cent for persistent patterns and considerably less for adolescence-limited offending. But the modern findings dismantle the old theory rather than rescuing it, in four ways. First, heritability is a population statistic: it describes how much of the variation in a particular population at a particular time tracks genetic variation, and says nothing whatever about any individual, which is precisely the inference the Jukes literature made. Second, molecular genetics has found no genes of large effect — polygenic scores for antisocial behavior explain a small percentage of variance at best, and the candidate-gene findings of the 2000s largely failed replication. Third, what look like genetic effects often run through environments: gene-environment correlation means the same parents supply both genes and household, and the adoption designs that separate them show the interaction, not the main effect, doing the work. Fourth, heritability says nothing about malleability — myopia is highly heritable and corrected with glasses. The honest position is that inherited differences in temperament, impulse control and cognitive function are real and modest, they operate through environments that can be changed, and any argument that moves from “heritable” to “fated” has made an error that has already cost tens of thousands of people their capacity to have children.
Innate virtue, innate vice
Monks is guilty of conspiracy to corrupt a child for money, and Dickens gives him no defense worth the name. The reason this file matters is the other direction: the book is on Oliver's side, and the argument it uses to defend him is the same argument that sterilised 60,000 people. Innate virtue and innate vice are one claim, and you cannot keep the flattering half. That is the practical value of reading a Victorian plot with a criminology textbook open — not to convict a novelist of bad politics, but to notice how naturally a sympathetic story reaches for a hereditary explanation the moment it needs one.
Three key ideas
- Hereditary criminality rested on two family studies — Dugdale's Jukes (1877) and Goddard's Kallikaks (1912) — and produced sterilisation laws in over thirty US states, upheld in Buck v. Bell (1927). Roughly 60,000 people were sterilised.
- Neither study supports what was built on it: Dugdale was largely an environmentalist and was reissued stripped of it, and Goddard's data was hearsay with photographs retouched to look sinister. Genealogy cannot separate an inherited trait from an inherited situation.
- Monks's scheme requires corruption to work, which is the environmental thesis; the plot then refuses it and makes Oliver good by blood. Modern behavioral genetics finds moderate heritability, no genes of large effect, and no route from heritable to fated.
Sources · to keep reading
- Dugdale, R. L. (1877). The Jukes: A Study in Crime, Pauperism, Disease and Heredity. Putnam.
- Goddard, H. H. (1912). The Kallikak Family. Macmillan.
- Gould, S. J. (1981). The Mismeasure of Man. Norton.
- Mednick, S. A., Gabrielli, W. F. y Hutchings, B. (1984). “Genetic Influences in Criminal Convictions”, Science, 224(4651).
- Rafter, N. H. (1988). White Trash: The Eugenic Family Studies. Northeastern University Press.
- Moffitt, T. E. (2005). “The New Look of Behavioral Genetics in Developmental Psychopathology”, Psychological Bulletin, 131(4).
Case-file questionsFrequently asked questions
Who is Monks?
Monks (“Edward Leeford”) is a villain from Oliver Twist, analysed on KRIMINIS through the lens of criminology. He does not want Oliver dead.
Why does Monks (Edward Leeford) become a villain?
Monks and hereditary criminality: the half-brother who needs to manufacture a delinquent. The file on the novel that denounces the workhouse and simultaneously argues that virtue runs in the blood.
Which criminological theory explains Monks?
Monks's case is analysed through Criminal heredity. For almost a century criminology held that crime is inherited like eye color. The evidence was genealogy: Richard Dugdale traced the Jukes in 1877, Henry Goddard published the Kallikaks in 1912, and on those two families more than thirty states built sterilisation laws. Monks — Edward Leeford, Oliver Twist's half-brother — is the character who lets you see the mechanism from inside, because his plan only makes sense if that theory is false: he needs to manufacture a delinquent, hiring Fagin to corrupt a child who will not corrupt on his own. And there is the contradiction in the book. Dickens wrote the most famous indictment of the workhouse and, at the same time, a plot in which Oliver's nobility is innate.
