The contrasting world of the Brownlows and the Maylies may serve to rescue
Oliver from the corruption of Fagin and the brutality of Sikes, but the other
boys in Fagin's gang--who have been nurtured better by Fagin than Oliver's
fellows had been in the workhouse--will remain abandoned. Rose Maylie, Dickens's
first resurrection of Mary Hogarth, is discovered to be Oliver's aunt and Oliver
is returned to her through Nancy's intervention, When Bill Sikes learns of
Nancy's betrayal of him and the gang, Dickens has Sikes brutally murder her.
Dickens's almost compulsive public reading of the death of Nancy some thirty
years later--readings that shortened his own life--seems an insistent reminder
to his public that this problem has not been successfully addressed. The social
system has victimized Nancy and Sikes just as surely as the Poor Law has failed
Oliver.
There may be Brownlows and Maylies who can intervene individually and
occasionally--and miraculously--in the lives of some Olivers, but the masses of
screaming mobs hot in pursuit of Sikes for the murder of Nancy need to know how
those destructive forces can be reversed. Sikes has been as brutalized by that
society as Nancy has been by him. Dickens's novels seek to help us understand
this and to do something about it, as a society.
