1. Failing to kill Brother Mouzone once Omar decided not to finish him. His hospital visit made it clear to Mouzone who had sought his demise and eventually led to Bell’s.
2. Failing to locate and eliminate Omar. Since Omar (and any of his associates) were the only links to Brother Mouzone’s assassination attempt, their failure should have been punished with their deaths. Failing to do this caused Bell problems later on leading to his death.
3. Not using Avon Barksdale’s imprisonment as the opportunity to seize control of the organization for himself. By isolating Barksdale in prison, Bell could have run the organization as he saw fit and actually turned the prospects of the organization around into a less violent, but more profitable enterprise.
4. Only killing D’Angelo Barksdale and not also Avon and Avon’s sister. A clean sweep of the Barksdale family would have allowed Bell to run the organization as he thought he needed to and removed an unnecessary level of burden to an already complicated situation.
5. Not using a knowledgeable intermediary to deal with Senator Clay Davis. He was clearly out of his league with Davis and had he used an attorney with the correct political connections, he could have likely gained all that he sought with fewer complications than he did.
6. Admitting that he had killed D’Angelo Barksdale. This very likely angered Avon Barksdale and led him to to betray Stringer more than the potential for his organization to cutoff from a quality supply of product.
7. Stringer Bell had no mentor nor close adviser apart from Avon Barksdale.Had he had a “Butch” like Omar, a number of the obvious traps he was entering he would have easily avoided as they would have been pointed out to him.
8. Stringer Bell had few if, any men, that were strictly loyal to him. This lack of loyalty was exhibited in the fact that men loyal to him would have avenged his death regardless of input from Avon. He also seemed to have a very poor resource of internal and external spies to gather information for him.
9. Stringer Bell failed to properly use the police more effectively than he did. He was in possession of enough information to bring down his competitors, yet only used it against Avon and not the others. Any crime boss knows that cops are usually his second best tool against his enemies.
10. Bell failed to recognize that leaving the business (and thus Baltimore) was open to him. As the character was portrayed in the series, he clearly had no close family or friends in the city and could have easily departed a wealthy man to enjoy the fruits of his labors elsewhere. He chose to stay in a business that he eventually knew would either led to his imprisonment or his death.

By Joy DeLyria and Sean Michael Robinson

There are few works of greater scope or structural genius than the series of fiction pieces by Horatio Bucklesby Ogden, collectively known as The Wire; yet for the most part, this Victorian masterpiece has been forgotten and ignored by scholars and popular culture alike.  Like his contemporary Charles Dickens, Ogden has, due to the rough and at times lurid nature of his material, been dismissed as a hack, despite significant endorsements of literary critics of the nineteenth century.  Unlike the corpus of Dickens, The Wire failed to reach the critical mass of readers necessary to sustain interest over time, and thus runs the risk of falling into the obscurity of academia.  We come to you today to right that gross literary injustice.

The Wire began syndication in 1846, and was published in 60 installments over the course of six years.  Each installment was 30 pages, featuring covers and illustrations by Baxter “Bubz” Black, and selling for one shilling each.  After the final installment, The Wire became available in a five volume set, departing from the traditional three.

Bucklesby Ogden himself has most often been compared to Charles Dickens.  Both began as journalists, and then branched out with works such as Pickwick Papers and The Corner. While Dickens found popularity and eventual fame in his successive work, Ogden took a darker path.

Dickens’ success for the most part lies in his mastery of the serial format.  Other serialized authors were mainly writing episodic sketches linked together only loosely by plot, characters, and a uniformity of style.  With Oliver Twist, only his second volume of work, Dickens began to define an altogether new type of novel, one that was more complex, more psychologically and metaphorically contiguous.  Despite this, Dickens retained a heightened awareness of his method of publication.  Each installment contained a series of elements engineered to give the reader the satisfaction of a complete arc, giving the reader the sense of an episode, complete with a beginning, middle, and end.

One might liken The Wire, however, to the novels of the former century that were single, complete works, and only later were adapted to serial format in order to make them affordable to the public.  Yet, while cognizant of his predecessors, Ogden was not working in the paradigm of the eighteenth century.  As a Victorian novelist, serialization was the format of choice for his publishers, but rather than providing the short burst of decisively circumscribed fiction so desired by his readership, his tangled narrative unspooled at a stately, at times seemingly glacial, pace.  This method of story-telling redefined the novel in an altogether different way than both Victorian novelists and those who had come before.

The serial format did The Wire no favors at the time of its publication.  Though critics lauded it, the general public found the initial installments slow and difficult to get into, while later installments required intimate knowledge of all the pieces which had come before.  To consume this story in small bits doled out over an extended time is to view a pointillist painting by looking at the dots.

And yet, there is no other form in which The Wire could have been published other than the serial, for both economic and practical reasons.  The volume set, at 3£, was an extraordinary expense, as opposed to a shilling per month over six years.  Furthermore, while The Wire only truly received praise from scholars, it was produced for the masses, who would be more likely to browse a pamphlet than they would be to purchase a volume set.

Lastly, one might stand back from a pointillist work; whereas physically there is no other way to consume The Wire than piece by piece.  To experience the story in its entirety, without breaks between sections, would be exhausting; one would perhaps miss the essence of what makes it great: the slow build of detail, the gradual and yet inevitable churning of this massive beast of a world.

The genius of The Wire lies in its sheer size and scope, its slow layering of complexity which could not have been achieved in any other way but the serial format.  Dickens is often praised for his portrayal not merely of a set of characters and their lives, but of the setting as a character: the city itself an antagonist.  Yet in The Wire, Bodymore is a far more intricate and compelling character than London in Dickens’ hands; The Wire portrays society to such a degree of realism and intricacy that A Tale of Two Cities—or any other story—can hardly compare.

That is not to say that one did not have an influence on the other.  Oliver Twist is a searing treatment of the education system and treatment of children in Victorian society; meanwhile,The Wire’s portrayal of the Bodymore schools is a similar indictment, featuring Oliver-like orphans such as “Dookey” and the fatherless Michael, and criminal activity forced upon children with Fagin-like scheming.  Yet while Ogden no doubt took a cue from Dickens in his choice to condemn the educational institution, The Wire builds from the simplicity of Oliver Twist, complicating the subject with a nuance and attention to detail that Dickens never achieved.

In fact, Dickens, in later novels—which incriminate fundamental social institutions such as government (Little Dorrit), the justice system (Bleak House), and social class (A Tale of Two Cities, among others)—seems to have been influenced by The Wire. This is evidenced by the increased complexity of Dickens’ novels, which, instead of following the rollicking adventures of one roguish but endearing protagonist, rather seek to build a complete picture of society.  Instead of driving a linear plot forward, Dickens, in A Tale of Two Cities and Bleak House, seeks to unfold the narrative outward, gradually uncovering different aspects of a socially complex world.

While Dickens is lauded for these attempts, The Wire does the same thing, with less appeal to the masses and more skill.  For one thing, The Wire’s treatment of the class system is far more nuanced than that of Dickens.  Who could forget “Bubbles”—the lovable drifter, Stringer Bell—the bourgeoisie merchant with pretentions to aristocracy, or Bodie—who, despite lack of education or Victorian “good breeding”, is seen reading and enjoying the likes of Jane Austen?  Yet these portrayals of the “criminal element” always maintain a certain realism.  We never descend into the divisions of “loveable rogues” and truly evil villains of which Dickens makes such effective use.  Odgen’s Bodie, an adult who uses children to perpetrate criminal activity, is not a caricature of an ethnic minority in the mode of Dickens’ Fagin the Jew.

In fact, none of The Wire’s villains have the unadulterated slimy repulsion of David Copperfield’s Uriah Heep, except for perhaps the journalist, Scott Templeton.  The final installments of The Wire were sometimes criticized for devolving into Dickensian caricature in regards to the plots surrounding Templeton and The Bodymore Sun.  (It is interesting to note first that Dickensian characterizations were Templeton’s number one crime, and second, that these critics of The Wire were for the most part journalists themselves.)

If at any time besides its treatment of Templeton The Wire flirts with caricature, it does so in the character of Omar Little.  Yet no one would ever reduce such a monumental culmination of literary tradition, satire, and basic human desire for mythos as Omar Little by defining him as mere caricature.  Little is not Dickensian.  Nor is he a character in the style of Thackeray, Eliot, Trollope, or any of the most famous serialists.  If he must be compared to characters in the Victorian times, he most closely resembles a creation of a Brontë; he could have come from Wuthering Heights.

The reason that Little so closely resembles a Brontë hero is of course that the estimable sisters were often not writing in the Victorian paradigm at all, but rather in the Gothic.  Their heroes were Byronic, and Lord Byron himself took his cue from the ancient tradition of Romance, culminating in Spenser’s Faerie Queene, but originating even further back.  Little would not be out of place in Faerie Queene, and even less so in Don Quixote: an errant knight wielding a sword, facing dragons, no man his master.  The character builds on the tradition of the quintessential Robin Hood and borrows qualities from many of the great chivalric romances of previous centuries.  Meanwhile there is an element of the fay, mirroring Robin Hood’s own predecessor—Goodfellow or Puck—and prefiguring later dashing, mysterious heroes who also play the part of the fop, as in The Scarlet Pimpernel.

As previously mentioned, Little also has the flavor of the Gothic: brooding, hell-bent on revenge.  Indeed, there is a darkness to the character that would not suit Sir Gawain, but does not seem out of place in a Don Juan or Brontë’s Heathcliffe.  Little is in fact an amalgamation of these traditions, an essential archetype.

Yet, despite all this, Little can still not be called caricature.  There is an awareness of literary canon in Omar Little, a certain level of dramatic irony.  The street children and rabble, so Dickensian in their miscellany, always announce his presence, and even as The Wire grows and expands, so does the legend of Little.  The Wire is aware of the mythic quality of its character, and allows the rest of the cast to observe it, indirectly commenting on the literary traditions from which Omar Little sprang.  Only in the Victorian Age could Romanticism, Gothicism, and poignant satire come to a head in such a trenchant examination of the way such archetype endures.  It is lamentable that our culture today, sorely devoid of new mythos, could not produce a character of such quality and social commentary.

Many characters of the age pale in comparison to The Wire, but if any other deserves explicit exploration, it is James “Jimmy” McNulty.  While McNulty is rich in his own right, he is particularly interesting in comparison to the viewpoint characters of Dickens.  As Dickens progressed from his “picaresque” adventure-style novels to his more serious explorations of society, so too did his central protagonist evolve.  And yet, instead of gaining in complexity, Dickens’ viewpoint characters dwindled—in personality, idiosyncrasy, any unique or identifying traits.

Scholars believe the passivity of Dickens’ heroes was a direct result of his shift in style and subject matter: in order to portray the many aspects of society Dickens wished to explore, in order to maintain a strong supporting cast of highly individualized characters, he believed the main character must be de-individualized.  He must become a receptacle of the injustices perpetrated by society, so that the failure of social institution can be witnessed and explored as the reader identifies with the protagonist’s essential powerlessness.  This is an elegant method, used to near-perfection in David Copperfield, in which the only uninteresting character is David Copperfield himself.

The Wire charted another course.  McNulty is a challenging character; in the beginning, he is not easy to like.  Though he is our protagonist and usually our viewpoint character on our journey through The Wire, he begins and ends on a note that is extremely morally questionable, despite a redemptive arc mid-series.  We are unable to approve of his actions, unable to assimilate his qualities as our own.  Yet McNulty is powerless exactly in the way of David Copperfield.  He is used and exploited by corrupt social systems, institutions, or figures of power in exactly the way of David Copperfield or Pip from Great Expectations. He is helpless to incite real and lasting change, his passivity forced upon him as he constantly struggles against it, rather than rising from an internal lack of agency.  It is this very struggle which endears McNulty to us, in the end.

In fact, the number one way in which The Wire differs from any other Victorian novel is its bleak moral outlook.  Dickens’ works almost always had a handful of characters that were essentially likeable.  In the end, the power of love and truth is borne out and the individual triumphs over the ugliness of society by maintaining his integrity.  Trollope, Eliot, Gaskell, etc all wrote with this essentially Western—not to mention imperialist—mind-set.  Only William Makepeace Thackeray, in Vanity Fair—subtitled, A Novel Without A Hero—presents an unrelentingly bleak assessment of society.  The ending is unhappy, all of the characters flawed to varying degrees.  It is significant that critics of the time chastised Thackeray for refusing to throw his audience crumbs of moral fiber.

In our age, we can never experience a modern equivalent of The Wire. We would be unwilling to portray the lower classes and criminal element with the patience or consideration of Horatio Bucksley Ogden or of Baxter “Bubz” Black.  We would be unwilling to give a work like The Wire the kind of time and attention it deserves, which is why it has faded away, instead of being held up as the literary triumph it truly is.  If popular culture does not open its eyes, works like The Wire will only continue their slow slide into obscurity.

But more than an exercise is realism for its own sake, the verisimilitude of The Wire exists to serve something larger. In the first story-arc, the episodes begin what would seem to be the straight-forward, albeit protracted, pursuit of a violent drug crew that controls a high-rise housing project. But within a brief span of time, the officers who undertake the pursuit are forced to acknowledge truths about their department, their role, the drug war and the city as a whole. In the end, the cost to all sides begins to suggest not so much the dogged police pursuit of the bad guys, but rather a Greek tragedy. At the end of thirteen episodes, the reward for the viewer — who has been lured all this way by a well-constructed police show — is not the simple gratification of hearing handcuffs click. Instead, the conclusion is something that Euripides or O’Neill might recognize: an America, at every level at war with itself.