Nancy
A young woman who has stolen for Fagin since she was a child and lives with Bill Sikes. She tries to save Oliver and pays for it.
She wants Oliver kept out of the life she was put into as a child, without betraying the man she loves.
The book
Oliver Twist
Charles Dickens
Who they are in the book
Spoiler-freeNancy is the one person in the gang who changes sides, and she only half does it. She helps Oliver and refuses to help the police catch Sikes. Dickens later made her death the centre of his most famous public reading.
How Nancy Is Portrayed
- Playing the sisterIn Chapter XIII Fagin sends her to the police office dressed respectably, with a basket and a door key. She weeps for her poor, dear, innocent little brother to find out where Oliver has gone.
- The recaptureIn Chapter XV she grabs Oliver in the street and tells the crowd he is her runaway brother. Sikes and his dog help drag him back.
- Standing between Oliver and the clubIn Chapter XVI she stops Fagin beating Oliver. She shouts that she thieved for him when she was a child not half Oliver's age, and has been in the same trade for twelve years.
- A warning before the burglaryIn Chapter XX she comes to take Oliver to Sikes. She shows him the bruises on her neck and arms, says she has already borne them for him, and begs him to keep quiet.
- Meeting Rose MaylieIn Chapter XL she talks her way into a family hotel near Hyde Park to tell Rose about Monks. Rose offers to help her get away. Nancy says she cannot leave Sikes.
- London BridgeIn Chapter XLVI she meets Rose and Mr Brownlow on the steps of London Bridge at midnight. She gives them Monks, but will not give them Sikes.
Nancy quotes
I thieved for you when I was a child not half as old as this!
Noah Claypole overhears the London Bridge meeting for Fagin. At dawn Sikes beats Nancy to death. As she dies she holds up a white handkerchief that Rose Maylie gave her and prays.
If you like Oliver Twist
If you like Charles Dickens
Explore authors with a similar voice, perspective, and influence.
Victor Hugo
Poet, novelist and playwright who spent sixteen years in an apartment on the Place des Vosges that is now his museum, wrote a novel about Notre-Dame that shamed France into repairing the cathedral, spent nineteen years in exile for opposing the emperor Napoleon III, and was buried in the Panthéon — the Paris monument where France buries its most honoured dead — in 1885 after a funeral that brought roughly two million people into the streets of Paris.
View author
Louis-Ferdinand Céline
The doctor of the Paris slums who wrote the century's blackest, funniest novel — and changed the sound of French prose.
View author
Rudyard Kipling
The English writer of the Jungle Books, Kim and Just So Stories, and in 1907 the first author writing in English to win the Nobel Prize in Literature. His love of France began at twelve, when his father turned him loose alone in the Paris Exhibition of 1878 with two francs a day; it ended with the war-graves work that kept him crossing the Channel after his only son was killed at Loos, and with a small French book, Souvenirs of France, published in Paris in 1933.
View author