Oliver Twist

Summary

Oliver Twist, subtitled The Parish Boy's Progress, follows an orphan from a workhouse cradle to a safe home, passing on the way through the criminal underworld of 1830s London. Oliver is born in a workhouse in an unnamed town; his mother dies within minutes, leaving only a locket and a ring that later prove who she was. Raised on a parish baby farm run by Mrs. Mann and returned to the workhouse at nine, he is chosen by lot to ask the master for a second helping of gruel, a request the board treats as a sign that he will be hanged. The beadle Mr. Bumble apprentices him to Mr. Sowerberry, an undertaker, where he fights the bullying charity-boy Noah Claypole and then runs away to London. On the road he meets Jack Dawkins, the Artful Dodger, who brings him to Fagin, an old receiver of stolen goods who trains boys as pickpockets. On his first outing Oliver watches the Dodger and Charley Bates rob an elderly gentleman, Mr. Brownlow, is himself seized, and is taken in by Brownlow, who notices his likeness to a portrait. Fagin's gang recaptures him through Nancy, a young woman of the gang, and her violent partner, the housebreaker Bill Sikes. Forced to help Sikes in a burglary at Chertsey, Oliver is shot and left in a ditch, then sheltered by the household he was meant to rob: Mrs. Maylie, her adopted niece Rose, and the surgeon Mr. Losberne. Meanwhile a sinister stranger called Monks pays Fagin to ruin the boy, and Bumble, now unhappily married to the workhouse matron Mrs. Corney, sells Monks the mother's trinkets. Nancy overhears the plot and, at great risk, tells Rose Maylie and Brownlow on London Bridge. When the spying Noah reports the meeting, Fagin rouses Sikes, who kills Nancy in their room. Pursued by the city and haunted by what he has done, Sikes dies by accident from his own rope while escaping across the rooftops of Jacob's Island. Brownlow forces Monks, really Edward Leeford, Oliver's half-brother, to confess that he had destroyed their father's will; Rose turns out to be the sister of Oliver's mother, Agnes Fleming. Fagin is tried and hanged, the Dodger is transported, Charley Bates reforms, the Bumbles end as paupers in their own workhouse, and Brownlow adopts Oliver. The novel ran monthly in Bentley's Miscellany from February 1837 to April 1839, with George Cruikshank's etchings, and was published in three volumes in November 1838.

Plot or Argument

• Workhouse and baby farm (Chapters I-III)

  Oliver's birth and his mother's death; his childhood on Mrs. Mann's parish farm; the request for more gruel and the board's offer of five pounds to anyone who will take him.

• The undertaker's boy (Chapters IV-VIII)

  Bound to Mr. Sowerberry, Oliver serves as a mute at children's funerals, thrashes Noah Claypole for insulting his mother, is beaten, and walks seventy miles to London, receiving his first blessing from the dying child Dick on the way.

• Fagin's den and Mr. Brownlow (Chapters VIII-XV)

  The Artful Dodger brings Oliver to Fagin; the boy sees a theft, is arrested before the magistrate Mr. Fang, and is nursed back to health by Brownlow before Nancy and Sikes recapture him.

• The Chertsey burglary (Chapters XVI-XXXI)

  Sikes forces Oliver through a window; the boy is shot, abandoned by Toby Crackit and Sikes, and taken in by the Maylies and Mr. Losberne. Bumble courts Mrs. Corney, and the dying pauper Old Sally confesses that she robbed Oliver's mother.

• The Maylies' cottage and Monks (Chapters XXXII-XXXIX)

  Oliver recovers in the country; Rose falls dangerously ill and recovers; Harry Maylie declares his love; Monks buys the locket and ring from the Bumbles and throws them into the river.

• Nancy's choice (Chapters XXXIX-XLVI)

  Nancy drugs Sikes to slip away, reveals Monks's plot to Rose, and refuses every offer of rescue; Noah Claypole, now in Fagin's service, spies on her second meeting on London Bridge.

• Sikes's crime and flight (Chapters XLVII-L)

  Sikes kills Nancy, wanders the countryside with his dog Bull's-eye, returns to London, and dies on Jacob's Island as the crowd closes in.

• Disclosures and endings (Chapters LI-LIII)

  Monks's confession establishes Oliver's parentage; Rose marries Harry, now a country clergyman; Oliver visits Fagin in the condemned cell; Brownlow adopts Oliver, and the narrator closes at the memorial tablet to Agnes.

Characters

• Oliver Twist, protagonist

  A workhouse orphan whose gentle nature survives hunger, cruelty, and Fagin's school of thieves.

• Fagin, antagonist

  An old receiver of stolen goods who trains boys as pickpockets and plots with Monks to corrupt Oliver.

• Jack Dawkins (the Artful Dodger), pickpocket

  Fagin's swaggering star pupil, who leads Oliver to London and is finally transported.

• Nancy, member of Fagin's gang

  A young woman raised among thieves who risks and loses her life to save Oliver.

• Bill Sikes, housebreaker

  A brutal burglar, Nancy's partner, who kills her and dies in flight.

• Mr. Bumble, parish beadle

  The pompous beadle who names Oliver, sells him into apprenticeship, and ends a pauper himself.

• Mr. Brownlow, benefactor

  An elderly gentleman, friend of Oliver's late father, who takes the boy in and finally adopts him.

• Rose Maylie, Oliver's aunt

  Mrs. Maylie's gentle adopted niece, later revealed as the younger sister of Oliver's mother.

• Monks (Edward Leeford), Oliver's half-brother

  A haggard, fit-prone man who pays Fagin to ruin Oliver and keep him from his inheritance.

• Noah Claypole, bully and informer

  Sowerberry's charity-boy, later a thief in Fagin's service, whose spying leads to Nancy's death.

• Mr. Losberne, surgeon

  The hot-tempered, warm-hearted Chertsey surgeon who treats Oliver's wound and shields him from the law.

• Mrs. Corney, workhouse matron

  The matron who marries Bumble and sells Agnes's locket to Monks.

Lessons

• Goodness that hunger cannot erase

  Dickens places Oliver in every setting meant to harden a child: the baby farm, the workhouse, the undertaker's cellar, Fagin's den. The boy stays truthful and grateful throughout. The novel argues that a child's soul is not simply the product of his surroundings, while still showing how cruelly those surroundings press on him.

  • Why does Oliver refuse to become a thief even when he is frightened and alone?
  • Is Oliver's goodness believable, or is he more a symbol than a boy?
  • Which adults help Oliver hold on to goodness, and how?

• Nancy's courage

  Nancy was raised among thieves, yet she is the one who saves Oliver. She tells Rose Maylie the truth at the cost of her life and refuses to betray the people she grew up with. Dickens makes her the moral center of the crime plot.

  • Why does Nancy refuse Rose's offer of a safe place?
  • What does Nancy mean when she says she thieved for Fagin when she was younger than Oliver?
  • How does Nancy's choice change the ending for everyone else?

• Charity by rule and charity from the heart

  The workhouse board and Mr. Bumble claim to serve the poor but follow rules that starve them. Mr. Brownlow, Mr. Losberne, and the Maylies act from personal mercy, even bending the law to protect a boy who was found in their house. Dickens contrasts institutional relief with neighborly love.

  • Why does the workhouse board treat Oliver's request for more as a crime?
  • Why do Losberne and the Maylies decide not to hand Oliver over to the Bow Street officers?
  • What is the difference between Bumble's idea of charity and Brownlow's?

• Crime and its consequences

  Dickens shows crime without making it glamorous. Sikes is driven by guilt across the countryside, and Fagin spends his last night in terror. The ending gives each character a fate that matches the way they lived.

  • How does Dickens show that Sikes cannot escape what he has done, even before he is caught?
  • Why does Oliver pray for Fagin in the condemned cell?

Context

The novel opens shortly after the Poor Law Amendment Act of 1834, which reorganized poor relief in England around union workhouses, where conditions were deliberately kept harsh so that only the truly destitute would apply. Supporters argued that the old system of outdoor relief encouraged idleness and burdened ratepayers; critics, including Dickens, saw the new workhouses as cruel to children, the old, and the sick. The London scenes draw on the real geography of Saffron Hill, Clerkenwell, Smithfield, and the riverside slum of Jacob's Island, and on the courts, police offices, and Newgate gallows of the day.

Composition

Dickens wrote Oliver Twist in monthly instalments for Bentley's Miscellany, the magazine he was editing, from February 1837 to April 1839, at first overlapping with the final numbers of The Pickwick Papers. The three-volume edition appeared in November 1838, before the serial had finished, with etchings by George Cruikshank. In the preface to the 1841 edition Dickens defended showing thieves and their companions as they really were rather than as romantic highwaymen.

Reception

The novel was an immediate popular success and was quickly adapted for the stage, often before the serial ended; later came many films and the 1960 stage musical Oliver! Dickens's frequent use of the label the Jew for Fagin drew contemporary criticism, notably from Eliza Davis, who wrote to him in 1863; in the revised edition of 1867 he removed most of these references from the later chapters, and his next completed novel, Our Mutual Friend, includes the kindly Jewish character Riah. The scenes of Oliver asking for more and of Nancy's death became some of the best-known in English fiction, and Dickens performed the murder of Nancy in his public readings late in life.

Comparisons

• great-expectations

  Both follow an orphan boy whose fortune depends on a hidden benefactor and on criminals he first meets as a child; Pip narrates his own moral failures, while Oliver is told about from outside and stays innocent.

• david-copperfield

  Dickens's later, more autobiographical orphan story revisits a child sent to hard labor and cruel guardians, but tells it in the first person with far more humor and inner life.

• a-christmas-carol

  Both books attack the idea that workhouses and the Poor Law settle society's duty to the poor; Scrooge's question about prisons and union workhouses echoes the board that starves Oliver.

• the-pilgrims-progress

  Dickens's subtitle, The Parish Boy's Progress, recalls the progress tradition of Bunyan and Hogarth; Oliver, like Christian, passes through a city of temptation to a place of rest.

• bleak-house

  Jo the crossing-sweeper in Bleak House is a later, darker version of the homeless London child, and he does not find the rescue that Oliver finds.

• les-miserables

  Hugo's novel also sets a child of the poor against the law and the criminal underworld; Gavroche and the Thénardiers echo the Dodger and Fagin's den.

Quotes

For Students

A reading companion for classical Christian high school students. See the student guide.

Reading Guide

Watch for

• The board's reaction to Oliver's request for more in Chapter II, and how the narrator's mock-solemn tone exposes it.
• The two homes that compete for Oliver: Fagin's den off Saffron Hill and Mr. Brownlow's house in Pentonville, then the Maylies' cottage.
• Nancy's divided loyalty, from her outburst at Fagin in Chapter XVI to the meetings with Rose in Chapters XL and XLVI.
• How Sikes behaves after the crime in Chapter XLVIII, especially toward his dog Bull's-eye.
• The objects that prove Oliver's identity: the portrait at Brownlow's, the locket and ring, and the destroyed will.

Key terms and names

Workhouse

A parish institution where the destitute received food and shelter in exchange for labor and strict rules; Oliver is born in one and fed on gruel there.

Beadle

A minor parish officer who kept order and carried out the board's decisions; Mr. Bumble wears his cocked hat and coat as signs of great dignity.

Baby farm

A private house where the parish paid a woman to keep pauper infants; Mrs. Mann keeps most of the allowance for herself.

Fence

A receiver who buys stolen goods from thieves and resells them; Fagin's trade, which makes him master of the boys who steal for him.

Transportation

The sentence of being shipped to a penal colony in Australia; the Artful Dodger's fate after his trial.

Jacob's Island

A real riverside slum in Bermondsey, surrounded by muddy ditches, where Sikes makes his last stand.

Seminar Questions

1. Comprehension Why is Oliver chosen to ask for more gruel, and what does the workhouse board decide to do with him afterward?
2. Comprehension How does Oliver end up at Mr. Brownlow's house, and how is he taken back to Fagin?
3. Comprehension What does Nancy tell Rose Maylie, and how does Fagin find out about it?
4. Interpretation Why does Dickens describe the workhouse board in such polite, solemn language when what they do is cruel?
5. Interpretation Nancy saves Oliver but will not leave Sikes. What does this tell us about her, and why does Dickens make her choice so hard?
6. Interpretation Why does Oliver pray for Fagin in the condemned cell, after everything Fagin has done to him?
7. Big Question Can a person brought up among wrongdoers still be held responsible for choosing what is right?
8. Big Question Is it better to help the poor through rules and institutions, or through personal kindness, and can the two work together?

Faith Connections

• James 1:27 (Scripture)

  Pure religion is to visit the fatherless and widows in their affliction. The parish claims to care for orphans like Oliver; Brownlow, Losberne, and the Maylies actually do.

• Matthew 25:35-40 (Scripture)

  I was hungry, and ye gave me meat. The workhouse board refuses a hungry child more food, while the Maylies take in the wounded boy who was found in their house as a burglar's helper.

• Luke 7:36-50 (Scripture)

  Jesus defends the sinful woman who loved much. Nancy, scorned by respectable society, shows the greatest love in the novel, and Rose receives her with compassion rather than contempt.

• John Bunyan, The Pilgrim's Progress (1678) (Great Conversation)

  Dickens's subtitle calls the book a progress, and Oliver passes through a city of temptations toward a home of rest, though unlike Bunyan's Christian he is carried more by Providence and friends than by his own pilgrimage.

Logic and Rhetoric

Central argument: If a child's goodness depended only on his surroundings, a workhouse orphan raised on cruelty and trained by thieves would become a thief. Oliver does not. Therefore goodness can survive a corrupting world, but only with help: Nancy, Brownlow, and the Maylies must act at real cost to rescue him. The novel concludes that society's official charity fails the poor, and personal mercy must do what institutions will not.

Rhetorical device: irony. In Chapter II the narrator praises the board as wise and philosophical men while describing the starvation diet they impose, so that the polite language condemns them; the scene ends with Oliver's plain request, Please, sir, I want some more.

Debate: Resolved: that Nancy is the true hero of Oliver Twist.

Memory Work

Please, sir, I want some more.

the law is a ass—a idiot.

Writing Prompts

Essay: Compare the three households that try to claim Oliver: the workhouse, Fagin's den, and Mr. Brownlow's home. Argue what each one believes a child is for.

Comparison with Great Expectations: Oliver and Pip are both orphans whose lives are shaped by criminals and secret benefactors. Compare how each boy is tested, and argue which novel gives the more convincing picture of how a child's character is formed.

Medical Lens

The novel is a useful document of medicine under the New Poor Law. It opens with a parish surgeon who attends workhouse births by contract and a pauper nurse with a bottle, and the starvation diet of the workhouse is the engine of the first chapters. Later the Chertsey surgeon Mr. Losberne treats Oliver's gunshot wound and the fever that follows, and Rose Maylie's sudden fever brings the household to the edge of grief in the manner of many Victorian sickroom scenes, where nursing, prayer, and waiting matter more than any specific remedy. Monks suffers what the text calls fits, with bitten lips and hands, sometimes brought on, he says, by thunder; readers often take this as a portrait of epilepsy, but that is a retrospective reading of a villain whose illness Dickens uses partly as a mark of inner corruption, in keeping with period ideas linking disease and character. Sikes's flight after the murder, haunted by the image of the dead woman, is a study of guilt rather than a medical case.

• Chapter I

  Oliver's birth in the workhouse, attended by a contract parish surgeon and a pauper nurse; his unnamed mother dies soon after holding him.

  Childbirth Maternal Physicians Doctors Death Dying
• Chapter II

  The workhouse diet of thin gruel and the boys' hunger before Oliver asks for more.

  Starvation Nutrition
• Chapters XXVIII-XXX

  Oliver, shot in the arm during the burglary, lies feverish at the Maylies' house; Mr. Losberne treats him and protects him from the Bow Street officers.

  Physicians Doctors Fever Infection Nursing Caregiving
• Chapter XXXIII

  Rose Maylie's sudden, dangerous fever and the anxious watch kept by Mrs. Maylie and Oliver until she recovers.

  Fever Infection Nursing Caregiving
• Chapters XXXVIII and XLVI

  Monks has a fit during a thunderstorm before the Bumbles; Nancy later describes his desperate fits and the marks of teeth on his lips and hands.

  Epilepsy Seizures

Creative Prompts

• Classroom

  Map Oliver's journey from the workhouse town to London, Chertsey, and back, marking at each stop who helps him and who harms him.

• Fiction

  Retell the scene on London Bridge from the point of view of Noah Claypole, hiding on the steps, in your own words.

• Essay

  Compare Mr. Bumble's speeches about the parish with what the parish actually does to Oliver. How does Dickens use comedy as an argument?

• Dialogue

  Write a conversation between the Artful Dodger and Charley Bates after Charley decides to give up thieving.

Further Reading

• Charles Dickens: A Life, Claire Tomalin

• Dickens, Peter Ackroyd

• Charles Dickens, G. K. Chesterton

  Chesterton's 1906 study of Dickens's comic and moral imagination.

• Great Expectations, Charles Dickens