Published Paper Details:

Dickens' early novels are replete with pictures of a squalid London life with its dingy lanes, shabby marketplaces and choking workhouses, which together put up a veritable spectacle of suffering. They mirror forth the drawbacks of a utilitarian society and the failure of the Poor Law in saving the orphans and castaways from going astray or turning into hapless preys to criminal gangs. What emerges from these novels is the sense of an unbridgeable socio-economic hiatus existing between the solvent moneyed class and the people belonging to the lowest rung of society, people who were considered beyond redemption. Oliver Twist very subtly seeks to explode this myth by allowing Nancy, a lowly and apparently insignificant character as well as a member of the so-called criminal community, play a pivotal role in disrupting the stasis in the existing socio-economic order. Gifted with humaneness rare in a woman of her status and possessed with an improbable desire to break free from bondage, she betrays her community and extends a narrative that runs counter to the ostensible motif of the novel. This paper seeks to explore Nancy's role in dismantling the conventional social mores by problematising the term 'criminality' in the context of the 19th Century.