Analysis of Major Characters

Oliver Twist

As the child hero of a melodramatic novel of social protest, Oliver Twist is meant to appeal more
to our sentiments than to our literary sensibilities. On many levels, Oliver is not a believable
character, because although he is raised in corrupt surroundings, his purity and virtue are
absolute. Throughout the novel, Dickens uses Oliver’s character to challenge the Victorian idea
that paupers and criminals are already evil at birth, arguing instead that a corrupt environment is
the source of vice. At the same time, Oliver’s incorruptibility undermines some of Dickens’s
assertions. Oliver is shocked and horrified when he sees the Artful Dodger and Charley Bates
pick a stranger’s pocket and again when he is forced to participate in a burglary. Oliver’s moral
scruples about the sanctity of property seem inborn in him, just as Dickens’s opponents thought
that corruption is inborn in poor people. Furthermore, other pauper children use rough Cockney
slang, but Oliver, oddly enough, speaks in proper King’s English. His grammatical fastidiousness
is also inexplicable, as Oliver presumably is not well-educated. Even when he is abused and
manipulated, Oliver does not become angry or indignant. When Sikes and Crackit force him to
assist in a robbery, Oliver merely begs to be allowed to “run away and die in the fields.” Oliver
does not present a complex picture of a person torn between good and evil—instead, he is
goodness incarnate.

Even if we might feel that Dickens’s social criticism would have been more effective if he had
focused on a more complex poor character, like the Artful Dodger or Nancy, the audience for
whom Dickens was writing might not have been receptive to such a portrayal. Dickens’s Victorian
middle-class readers were likely to hold opinions on the poor that were only a little less extreme
than those expressed by Mr. Bumble, the beadle who treats paupers with great cruelty. In
fact, Oliver Twist was criticized for portraying thieves and prostitutes at all. Given the strict morals
of Dickens’s audience, it may have seemed necessary for him to make Oliver a saintlike figure.
Because Oliver appealed to Victorian readers’ sentiments, his story may have stood a better
chance of effectively challenging their prejudices.

Nancy

A major concern of Oliver Twist is the question of whether a bad environment can irrevocably
poison someone’s character and soul. As the novel progresses, the character who best illustrates
the contradictory issues brought up by that question is Nancy. As a child of the streets, Nancy
has been a thief and drinks to excess. The narrator’s reference to her “free and agreeable . . .
manners” indicates that she is a prostitute. She is immersed in the vices condemned by her
society, but she also commits perhaps the most noble act in the novel when she sacrifices her
own life in order to protect Oliver. Nancy’s moral complexity is unique among the major
characters in Oliver Twist. The novel is full of characters who are all good and can barely
comprehend evil, such as Oliver, Rose, and Brownlow; and characters who are all evil and can
barely comprehend good, such as Fagin, Sikes, and Monks. Only Nancy comprehends and is
capable of both good and evil. Her ultimate choice to do good at a great personal cost is a strong
argument in favor of the incorruptibility of basic goodness, no matter how many environmental
obstacles it may face.

Nancy’s love for Sikes exemplifies the moral ambiguity of her character. As she herself points out
to Rose, devotion to a man can be “a comfort and a pride” under the right circumstances. But for
Nancy, such devotion is “a new means of violence and suffering”—indeed, her relationship with
Sikes leads her to criminal acts for his sake and eventually to her own demise. The same
behavior, in different circumstances, can have very different consequences and moral
significance. In much of Oliver Twist, morality and nobility are black-and-white issues, but
Nancy’s character suggests that the boundary between virtue and vice is not always clearly
drawn.

Fagin

Although Dickens denied that anti-Semitism had influenced his portrait of Fagin, the Jewish thief’s
characterization does seem to owe much to ethnic stereotypes. He is ugly, simpering, miserly,
and avaricious. Constant references to him as “the Jew” seem to indicate that his negative traits
are intimately connected to his ethnic identity. However, Fagin is more than a statement of ethnic
prejudice. He is a richly drawn, resonant embodiment of terrifying villainy. At times, he seems like
a child’s distorted vision of pure evil. Fagin is described as a “loathsome reptile” and as having
“fangs such as should have been a dog’s or rat’s.” Other characters occasionally refer to him as
“the old one,” a popular nickname for the devil. Twice, in Chapter9 and again in Chapter 34,
Oliver wakes up to find Fagin nearby. Oliver encounters him in the hazy zone between sleep and
waking, at the precise time when dreams and nightmares are born from “the mere silent presence
of some external object.” Indeed, Fagin is meant to inspire nightmares in child and adult readers
alike. Perhaps most frightening of all, though, is Chapter 52, in which we enter Fagin’s head for
his “last night alive.” The gallows, and the fear they inspire in Fagin, are a specter even more
horrifying to contemplate than Fagin himself.

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