Character guide

Oliver Twist

major

Also known as Oliver, young Oliver Twist, little Oliver, poor Oliver, young Twist

Raised on starvation rations and apprenticed to an undertaker, Oliver runs to London and falls in with Fagin's boys before a kind gentleman named Mr. Brownlow takes him in. His passivity is not blankness but a kind of incorruptibility: he asks for more at the workhouse, and he keeps asking, in his way, for a life that matches the decency he somehow still expects from people. His flight and recapture set the whole plot in motion, and every faction in the book — the parish, the gang, the gentleman — wants to define what he is.

Fagin

major

Also known as old Fagin, Mr. Fagin, the merry old gentleman

Fagin presides over a den of handkerchiefs, trinkets, and boys, lecturing Oliver on the crying sin of ingratitude while keeping his own accounts strictly. He is genuinely fond of his trade and his pupils in the way a man is fond of tools, and his charm is the most unsettling thing about him. He matters because he is the middleman between Oliver and the shadowy figure paying to make the boy a thief — a bargain that turns the novel's comedy of rogues into something colder.

Bill Sikes

major

Also known as Sikes, Mr. Sikes, Mr. Bill Sikes, the brutal Sikes

Sikes seizes Oliver by the collar and drags him through a dark passage into a burglary, treating the boy as equipment and the dog as a companion. He is jealous of his share, quick with his fists, and utterly without Fagin's calculating charm — violence is his only argument. His presence raises the stakes of Oliver's captivity: where Fagin wants to use the boy, Sikes is simply willing to spend him.

Nancy

major

Also known as Miss Nancy, Nance

Nancy moves between the gang's squalid rooms and the respectable world she can only watch through windows, and she is the one who overhears Monks bargaining with Fagin over Oliver's fate. Her loyalty to Sikes and her pity for Oliver pull in opposite directions, and she knows the cost of choosing. She matters because she is the novel's bridge between the criminals and the gentry — the only person who can carry the truth from one side to the other.

Mr. Brownlow

major

Also known as Brownlow, the indignant Mr. Brownlow

Brownlow first appears as the victim of a pickpocketing and ends as the boy's adoptive father, a man whose benevolence is as quick as his temper. He is surrounded by friends like the contrary Mr. Grimwig, whose gloomy predictions he cheerfully endures, and his household is the first place Oliver is treated as a child rather than a case. His belief in Oliver's honesty gives the novel its moral center of gravity, and his search for the boy's history drives the mystery forward.

Monks

major

Also known as Mr. Monks

Monks is the hidden hand behind Oliver's recapture: he strikes bargains with Fagin, laughs about drowning the proofs of the boy's identity, and speaks of hatred so earnest that Nancy would rather face anyone else. He is not a thief but something worse — a man with a grievance and a birthright, watching Oliver from the shadows. His conspiracy gives the early and middle chapters their menace, turning a story about a lost boy into a story about who wants him lost, and why.

Rose Maylie

major

Also known as Rose, Miss Rose, dear Rose, Maylie

Rose belongs to the comfortable Maylie household that shelters Oliver after his fever, and her tenderness toward the boy becomes the emotional counterweight to the workhouse and the den. When Nancy reveals what she knows of Oliver's past, Rose is torn between a sacred promise of confidence and her burning wish to see the outcast girl redeemed. Her sleepless deliberations and reluctance to summon Harry back show a heart pulled between duty, secrecy, and feeling, making her the story's quiet moral center.

Mr. Bumble

supporting

Also known as Bumble, the beadle

As the parish's appointed enforcer, Bumble presides over Oliver's earliest miseries, from starvation rations to the apprenticeship that sends the boy to the undertaker's. He speaks of Oliver's mother with smug contempt and prescribes starvation as a cure for a child's spirit, revealing a man whose pomposity is matched only by his callousness. His petty tyranny sets the moral baseline against which every later kindness in the novel is measured.

Noah Claypole

supporting

Also known as Mr. Noah Claypole, Claypole, Mister Noah, Mr. Bolter

Noah occupies the lowest rung of the undertaker's household yet claws for status by persecuting the newest apprentice, needling Oliver about his mother's death until the quiet boy erupts. His cowardice is laid bare when he blubbers for help the instant Oliver seizes him, exposing the gap between his cruelty and his courage. That outburst of Oliver's is the first sign of the fire beneath the orphan's meekness, and Noah's later drift toward Fagin's circle shows how meanness finds its natural home.

Charley Bates

supporting

Also known as Master Bates, Charley, young Bates, Mr. Charles Bates

Charley treats theft as sport, mimicking reading from stolen books and dissolving into ecstasies of laughter at Oliver's horror when the gang's plunder is revealed. His lively sense of the ludicrous keeps him buoyant in a world of cruelty, and his loyalty to Fagin and Sikes is unthinking rather than malicious. He embodies the gang's seductive surface of camaraderie, the grinning face of a trade that ruins children, and his presence sharpens the contrast with Oliver's stubborn conscience.

The Artful Dodger

supporting

Also known as Dodger, Jack Dawkins, John Dawkins, Mr. Dawkins

The Dodger moves through London's streets with the swagger of a man twice his age, sizing up marks and speaking in a slang that marks him as native to the underworld. He is the one who plucks Oliver from the road and delivers him to Fagin, offering food and shelter with a grin that hides the trap. His worldly competence and Oliver's bewildered innocence collide in the novel's central seduction scene, where the boy's charm is the gang's most effective lure.

Harry Maylie

supporting

Also known as Harry

Harry arrives at his mother's cottage in a fever of anxiety over Rose's illness, and his urgent questions reveal a heart wholly given to her. His mother warns that marrying a woman with a stain on her name could cost him his worldly prospects, but Harry insists his devotion is no boyish impulse and will not be shaken. His stand turns private affection into a public test of principle, pressing the novel to ask whether love can survive the cruelties of reputation.

Mrs. Maylie

supporting

Also known as the old lady

Mrs. Maylie presides over the rural household at Chertsey that takes Oliver in after the burglary, and her tenderness toward Rose reveals a woman whose love runs deeper than her reserve. When Rose falls dangerously ill, she checks her own lamentations mid-sentence and becomes composed and firm, dispatching letters and directing care with a steadiness that astonishes Oliver. Her strength gives the novel's middle chapters their moral center: a portrait of goodness that is not softness, and of age that has learned how to endure.

Mr. Grimwig

supporting

Also known as Grimwig

Mr. Grimwig is Mr. Brownlow's perpetual sparring partner, forever predicting the worst of human nature while his friend insists on the best. He declares he will eat his own head if Oliver proves honest, and his bristling skepticism serves as a comic counterweight to Brownlow's easy trust. Yet when Rose finishes her account of Oliver's sufferings, he limps a dozen turns around the room and kisses her without preface — proving the gruff exterior hides a heart as warm as the one he pretends to doubt.

Toby Crackit

supporting

Also known as Crackit, Mr. Crackit, flash Toby Crackit

Toby Crackit lounges in Fagin's den with his legs higher than his head, admiring his own top-boots and sizing up Oliver as 'a fortin' for the old ladies' pockets in chapels.' He is vain, lazy, and casually cruel, forcing spirits down a terrified child's throat and laughing at the coughing fit that follows. As Sikes's partner in the Chertsey burglary, he embodies the gaudy, seedy glamour of the criminal world that Dickens sets against Brownlow's drawing-room — a man whose taste for display is matched only by his indifference to the boy he is about to risk.

Mr. Sowerberry

supporting

Also known as Sowerberry

Mr. Sowerberry takes Oliver from the workhouse as an apprentice and promptly reduces him to a walking advertisement, dressing him in black and putting him at children's funerals because his sad expression makes a 'superb effect.' He is timid before his sharp-tongued wife, deferential to Mr. Bumble, and entirely comfortable with the idea that a child's grief can be sold by the yard. His household is Oliver's first taste of the working world outside the parish — and of how readily respectable trades turn human misery into merchandise.

Mrs. Sowerberry

minor

The undertaker's wife who treats Oliver harshly.

Mrs. Corney

supporting

Also known as Corney, the late Mrs. Corney

Mrs. Corney runs the female side of the workhouse with a mixture of self-pity and calculation, doling out comfort and discipline according to what each may yield her. Her courtship by Mr. Bumble — conducted over tea and the careful weighing of each other's prospects — is one of Dickens's finest satires of parish respectability, two small tyrants negotiating a marriage of convenience. She matters because she shows how the workhouse system rewards those who administer it, and how easily kindness is converted into leverage.

Mrs. Mann

minor

The neglectful superintendent of the baby farm where Oliver lived.

Mr. Giles

minor

Also known as Giles

The butler at Mrs. Maylie's house.

Brittles

minor

Also known as Mr. Brittles

A servant at Mrs. Maylie's house.

Mr. Losberne

supporting

Also known as the kindhearted Mr. Losberne, the doctor

Mr. Losberne is the Maylies' physician and ally, a bluff, impulsive man whose professional competence is matched by a readiness to act on generous instinct. He takes Oliver under his care after the shooting, and later drives him to Mr. Brownlow's old house only to find it empty and a 'To Let' bill in the window — a disappointment he bears with the same brisk sympathy he shows the boy. His presence gives the novel's middle chapters their practical kindness: a doctor who treats not just a wound but a child's hope.

Charlotte

minor

The Sowerberrys' maidservant who later marries Noah Claypole.

Tom Chitling

minor

Also known as Chitling, Mr. Chitling, Tommy

A slow-witted member of Fagin's gang.

Barney

minor

A Jewish servant at Fagin's den who speaks with a lisp.

Mr. Gamfield

minor

Also known as Gamfield

A brutish chimney sweep who nearly takes Oliver as an apprentice.

Mrs. Bedwin

minor

Also known as Bedwin

Mr. Brownlow's kind housekeeper.

Old Sally

minor

Also known as old Sally

An old pauper nurse who attended Oliver's mother at his birth.

Dick

minor

Also known as little Dick, Poor Dick

A sickly orphan boy and Oliver's friend at the workhouse.

Mr. Limbkins

minor

A member of the parish board who deals with Oliver.

Blathers

minor

Also known as Messrs. Blathers

A police officer who investigates the burglary at Mrs. Maylie's.

Duff

minor

Also known as Mr. Duff

A police officer who investigates the burglary with Blathers.

Agnes Fleming

minor

Also known as Agnes, poor young Agnes Fleming

Oliver's deceased mother, a tragic figure from the past.

Mr. Fang

minor

Also known as Fang, the renowned Mr. Fang

A harsh and biased police magistrate.

Bet

minor

Also known as Betsy, Miss Betsy, Poor Bet

A young woman in Fagin's gang, friend of Nancy.

Conkey Chickweed

minor

Also known as Conkey, Mr. Chickweed, the great Mr. Conkey Chickweed

A flashy criminal associate of Fagin's.

Kags

minor

Also known as Mr. Kags

An old criminal acquaintance of Fagin's.

Jem Spyers

minor

Also known as Spyers, Jem

A police officer involved in the pursuit of Sikes.

Phil Barker

minor

Also known as Phil

A man who helps track Sikes after the murder.

Edward Leeford

minor

Also known as Ned

Oliver's father, a deceased gentleman with a secret past.