Nancy Oliver Twist Quotes

Don’t be out of temper, my dear,’ urged Fagin, submissively. ‘I have never forgot you, Bill; never once.’ ‘No! I’ll pound it that you han’t,’ replied Sikes, with a bitter grin. ‘You’ve been scheming and plotting away, every hour that I have laid shivering and burning here; and Bill was to do this; and Bill was to do that; and Bill was to do it all, dirt cheap, as soon as he got well: and was quite poor enough for your work. If it hadn’t been for the girl, I might have died.’ ‘There now, Bill,’ remonstrated Fagin, eagerly catching at the word. ‘If it hadn’t been for the girl! Who but poor ould Fagin was the means of your having such a handy girl about you?’ ‘He says true enough there!’ said Nancy, coming hastily forward. ‘Let him be; let him be.

I don’t know what it is", answered the girl, "I only know that it is so, and not with me alone, but with hundreds of others as bad and wretched as myself. I must go back. Whether it is God’s wrath for the wrong I have done, I do not know, but I am drawn back to him through every suffering and ill usage; and I should be, I believe, if I knew that I was to die by his hand at last.

This is Thackeray’s first full-length novel, which appeared in serialised instalments in Fraser’s Magazine between May 1839 and February 1840. Thackeray’s original intention was to criticise the Newgate school of crime fiction, exemplified by Bulwer-Lytton and Harrison Ainsworth, whose works Thackeray felt glorified criminals. Thackeray even accused Dickens of this in his portrayal of the good-hearted prostitute Nancy and the charming pickpocket, the Artful Dodger, in Oliver Twist.  The appearance of the first instalments of Ainsworth’s novel Jack Sheppard at the beginning of 1839 seems to have been what spurred Thackeray into action. Ainsworth’s novel portrayed a real life prison breaker and thief from the eighteenth century in flattering terms. In contrast, Thackeray sought out a real life criminal whom he could portray in as unflattering terms as possible.

and wherever they chose. The formidable Bill Sikes glowered and menaced and planned robberies. Oliver Twist—to the best of Dodger’s knowledge—was lying in a ditch somewhere and might well be dead. And Nancy, that tragic woman whose fundamental goodness of femininity had been diminished and dimmed, but not destroyed, by her life as a slattern whore, was still practicing her trade