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.

Top 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.

• 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.

• 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.

• 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.

Verified Quotes

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.

• Chapter II

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

• 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.

• Chapter XXXIII

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

• 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.