The Short Answer
Full spoilers ahead.
Here is the short answer. Oliver is the son of a man named Edwin Leeford and a young woman named Agnes Fleming, who died when he was born. Monks, the man who has been hunting him, is Oliver’s half brother. Nancy is killed by Bill Sikes. Sikes dies on a rooftop, Fagin is sentenced to hang, and Mr. Brownlow adopts Oliver. If you have not finished the book, stop here.
The Text
I read the Project Gutenberg text, ebook number seven hundred and thirty, which has fifty-three chapters. The ending I mean runs from chapter forty to the last one, roughly the final quarter of the book. Dickens uses it to answer every question he raised, one chapter at a time.
I give no first publication date, because I could not source one twice.
Nancy’s Pledge
Chapter forty is where the ending starts. Nancy slips away from Sikes and finds Rose Maylie in London. She tells Rose about a man called Monks, who knows Rose by sight and has been plotting against Oliver. She is full of shame, and the book says her pride will not let her show it.
Rose holds her confidence sacred. They agree to meet again on London Bridge. The first night she is supposed to go, Nancy fails. Fagin has noticed a change in her, and he suspects something. He sets Noah Claypole to follow her.
The Bridge
On the night, she is there. The church clocks chime three quarters past eleven, and she walks onto London Bridge, watching the faces. Rose arrives with a grey haired gentleman, and they stop to talk. Nancy asks for a promise. If this leads to Fagin being arrested, it must not happen without her consent. The gentleman agrees.
Noah is hiding in a recess of the bridge, listening. He hears every word. When it is over, Nancy sits down in tears on the stone stairs, and Noah runs to Fagin as fast as his legs will carry him.
Sikes Runs
Fagin tells Sikes what Noah heard. In the dark hour before dawn, Sikes kills Nancy. The book does not look away. It says that of all the bad deeds done in London that night, this was the worst.
Then the book follows Sikes. He cannot stand the sunlight in the room. He runs, and his own dog will not stay with him. At last he reaches a hiding place at Jacob’s Island. There, Charley Bates, one of Fagin’s boys, sees him and is horrified. He throws himself at the murderer, shouting for help.
A crowd arrives. Sikes climbs onto the roof with a rope, hoping to drop into the ditch below. The noose slips around his neck, and he dies there. His dog leaps after him, misses, and dies in the ditch.
Who Is to Blame
Count the chain. Nancy speaks to Rose. Noah hears it. Noah tells Fagin. Fagin tells Sikes. Sikes does the deed. The book lets no link off. Fagin sets the spy, Noah does the listening, and Sikes holds the weapon.
Notice who is missing. Monks, the man whose plot started everything, never touches her. He is the engine, and it runs on other people’s hands. In my reading, which is a draft, that is Dickens’s point about how crime spreads downhill.
Brownlow and Monks
While the city hunts Sikes, Mr. Brownlow has been doing something quieter. He has Monks seized in the street and brought to his own house. He tells Monks plainly: sit down and talk, or I hand you to the police.
Mr. Brownlow turns out to have known Monks’s father. He was Edwin Leeford’s oldest friend. Monks’s real name, he says, is Edward Leeford. Brownlow tells him he has a brother, and that he knows more about the family than Monks guesses.
The Hotel
Two days later, Oliver travels with Mrs. Maylie, Rose, Mrs. Bedwin and the doctor to the town where he was born. At the hotel, Mr. Brownlow asks Monks to repeat his confession in front of them.
The story is this. Edwin Leeford was separated from his wife. He wrote to Agnes Fleming, telling her a mystery kept him from marrying her. Taken ill in Rome, he wrote her a long letter and a will, and then he died. Agnes was pregnant, and she died giving birth to Oliver.
The will would have split Edwin’s property between Agnes and her child. If the child was a boy, he would inherit only if he never stained his name with a public act of dishonour. Monks’s mother burned the will. Years later, on her deathbed, she made Monks swear to hunt the child down.
The Portrait
Now the mystery of the portrait makes sense. Mr. Brownlow tells Monks that Edwin came to him before his last journey, and left behind a portrait of Agnes that he had painted himself. It is the picture Oliver stares at in Mr. Brownlow’s house. When Mr. Brownlow cried out, I think he saw the likeness. The book does not spell that out, so this part is my reading.
Why They Wanted Oliver
Brownlow adds the part that ties it to Fagin. Fagin was Monks’s old accomplice, and he had a large reward for keeping Oliver ensnared. A dispute over that money is what led them to the Maylies’ house to identify Oliver. In other words, the boy was never random. Fagin was being paid to keep Oliver ensnared.
The Locket and Ring
Then comes the proof. Agnes wore a gold locket and a wedding ring with her first name on it. The nurse stole them from her body. Mrs. Corney, who is now Mrs. Bumble, took a paper from the dying nurse’s hand, redeemed them from a pawnbroker, and sold them to Monks. Two old women who watched it testify against her.
Mr. Bumble is told he will never hold a position of trust again. He defends himself by saying his wife made him do it, and that the law is an ass.
Rose
Then comes the second secret. Agnes had a younger sister. After their father died, a cruel woman, Monks’s mother, found the child living with poor cottagers and told them she came from bad blood. A widow took pity and brought her up. That girl is Rose. She is Oliver’s aunt.
Oliver throws his arms around her and says he will never call her aunt, only sister. Harry Maylie arrives, having given up his prospects for a village home. Rose, who refused him because of what she called a stain on her name, now accepts. Mr. Grimwig kisses the bride to be.
The chapter ends by taking some of it back. Oliver is crying, and the reason is that Dick, the little boy who blessed him, has died.
Fagin’s Last Night
Fagin is tried and sentenced to hang. Noah testifies against him and is pardoned. In the condemned cell, he cannot bear the dark, and begs for a light.
Mr. Brownlow and Oliver visit him to ask for the papers that Monks left in his hands. Fagin tells them they are in a canvas bag, up the chimney. Then he pulls Oliver close, asks for help to escape, and mixes Oliver up with his old boys. Oliver cries and asks God to forgive him. It is the cruelest scene in the book, and Oliver is the one person who offers any mercy.
What Oliver Gets
By his father’s will, Oliver would have been entitled to the whole property. But Mr. Brownlow, unwilling to deprive the elder son of the chance to retrieve his vices, proposes an equal split, and Oliver joyfully agrees. By the book’s own figures, that is little more than three thousand pounds each, because the property has dwindled.
So the money is not a fortune. What Oliver really gains is a family: a sister who was an aunt, and a father in Mr. Brownlow.
The Accounts
The final chapter settles everyone. Rose and Harry marry within three months, and Harry becomes the village clergyman. Monks squanders his share in the New World, falls back into his old ways, and dies in prison.
The Bumbles become paupers in the same workhouse where they once ruled. Noah becomes an informer. Charley Bates leaves the gang, and ends up a farmer. Mr. Brownlow adopts Oliver and moves within a mile of the parsonage, with Mrs. Bedwin.
In the church there is a white tablet with a single word, Agnes. There is no coffin beneath it.
What It Means
Here is my reading, and it is a draft for you to check. The ending is a ledger. Each character gets paid back in proportion, and the harshest account is Fagin’s. Even Monks gets a second chance, and Fagin gets a trial, a cell and a rope.
The part I find strangest is the money. The will rewards a child for never staining his name, and Oliver gets his share. But Oliver never really chooses to be good. The book just gives him that nature, and I find Nancy’s choice a much braver one.
If this helped, subscribe, and tell me in the comments whether Nancy deserved a different ending.
