The Artful Dodger: My favourite Charles Dickens character The Artful Dodger - aka Jack Dawkins - may only be a minor character in a relatively short, early Dickens novel, but the cockney rascal has performed the impressive feat of wheedling his way into our collective cultural consciousness like few others. After all, not many Dickens characters have had "90s R&B acts named after them. The leader of Fagin's gang of pick-pocketing urchins, he commands the respect of the other children and even of their insidious boss, but he's my favourite Dickens character because of the fondness with which the author himself describes his antics - and this despite him being in a real sense the villain of the piece (it was of course the Dodger who first ensnared poor Oliver and lured him to the thieves" layer in Saffron Hill). All the other thieves get their comeuppance, but while The Artful should similarly deserve our disdain, he is last seen reducing a courtroom to hysterics with his boisterous behaviour, warning his prosecutors that "my attorney is a-breakfasting this morning with the Wice-President of the House of Commons" before leaving for sunnier climes with a grin of "great glee and self-approval." And you can't stay angry at that.