Do you think Faggin ever slept w/ any of the boys?

Fagin strikes me as the type of character that doesn't want or need sex. Certainly, the way Ron Moody plays him he was, i.e. in the line, "a wife you can keep anyway, I'd rather sleep anyway".

The Alec Guinness portrayal? That's another story entirely. Nothing remotely nice or endearing about him.

I thought the same thing when watching the film recently,even the name fagan suggested to me of the deragatory term for homosexual *beep* even thought some of the songs were suggestive of homosexuality and sexual innuendo.''Consider yourself One of us....If it should chance to be.We should see Some harder days.''The orphans are metaphorical for outsiders or different as homosexuals often are.

I have a copy of The Friendly Dickens, and you're quite right...Dickens may have been "speaking in code" to hint at what he couldn't say. He may have also hinted that Fagin may be gay--in the novel, he seems to have a bit of a lisp and calls everyone "dear".

As for pimping/prostitution, Nancy does say (in the novel and the stage version, I can't remember if it's in the movie) that she'd started thieving for Fagin when she was six, and now the streets were the only home she'd have until her death. The hint is that, for girls like Nancy at least, they start off by picking pockets and "graduate" to...other things. (The boys, it's hinted, graduate to higher crimes like house-breaking...Bill Sikes "started small.")

That book also mentions another intriguing fact...Dickens named Fagin after a worker at the factory he was shipped to as a child. Bob Fagin looked after twelve-year-old Charles when the younger boy was sick and taught him the ropes of the factory. Charles repaid his kindness by...naming a loathsome villain after him. Jeez, with friends like that...

So why would Dickens do this when Bob had been kind to him? (One wonders how the real Bob Fagin felt if he ever read his old charge's novel.) Norrie Epstein, the book's author, speculated that it could have been a case of Dickens associating Bob, no matter how kind the older boy was, with a painful time in his life that Charles saw as dirty and degrading. To claim friendship with one of the warehouse boys would have meant that Charles WAS one of them...and this was something he wanted to deny.

Or, alternately, perhaps Bob Fagin's "friendly overtures" toward Charles had
an ulterior motive... (Remember that in Victorian England, homosexuality was not only believed to be a sin but was an actual crime, as it would be until the 1960s.)

To quote Ms. Epstein herself:

...perhaps, and here one can only be tentative, he felt shame about some of the activities that went on there...Bob Fagin may have looked out for Charles in the same way older students at public schools dote on younger ones. Always sensitive to nuances in emotions and behavior, Charles might have sensed that Bob's feelings for him were more than that of a friend...[I]t is unlikely that Dickens participated in any sexual activities. But he must have known about them, and as a child, he must have felt part of the sordid atmosphere...It just might be that Bob Fagin, the man who was such a "friend" to Charles, might not have been a friend after all.