Oliver Twist: Chapter 51 Summary & Analysis

Oliver is finally informed of everything having to do with his own history, and with the plot Monks has been organizing against him. This, like other important activities at the end of the novel, also takes place outside the frame of the narrated story, as the reader is already acquainted with what Oliver has yet to learn.

Dick, perhaps forgotten by the readers after his two short appearances in the novel to this point, has nevertheless remained an important touchstone for Oliver: the first person who was ever kind to him. Oliver's memory of Dick here sets the stage for the novel to reveal Dick's fate just a little later on.

Brownlow is oppositional to the last, even though he knows that Oliver will, at this point, receive his inheritance. But the nature of Monks' anger against Oliver is much deeper-seated than was originally shown. It is not just that Monks wanted Oliver's share of the money Edwin left behind; Monks hates the very idea that so virtuous a child can spring from a union that society has determined "improper," the one between Agnes and Edwin. There is also a sense that Monks despairs at his own inability to escape his criminality—a criminality that he sank into because of a crime he and his mother would not have had to commit if Oliver never existed—and so he wants to drag Oliver down to the same moral hell where he must reside.

It seems that Monks has always had a penchant for misbehaving, as though his criminal nature is inborn in him, and not just a product of the society around him. Though, again, its also possible to trace Monk's criminality back to his and his mother's first crime—destroying the will that would have given Leeford's wealth to Oliver..

The Bumbles, finally, are called to account for what they have done. Bumble is exposed as a mediocrity and a terrible judge of character, and his wife is shown to be the mastermind of a very small plot to enrich herself by 25 pounds. But soon the Bumbles will be suffering, stripped of their positions, in the workhouse.

This coincidence is almost too much for the structure of the book to bear; it does seem to strain credulity. But Dickens was not interested in writing "realistic" fiction so much as he cared to write fiction that generated a series of emotional states with which the reader could sympathize. Here, the reader is happy to know that Rose could be reunited with part of her family, and that Oliver, also a good boy, should have so noble and virtuous an aunt.

The novel began with an extended attack on the Poor Laws and the state of the poor in England. As Oliver's adventure begins and his background is revealed, that attack recedes. But the story of Dick's fate brings that attack back. Dick was as kind as Oliver, as good as Oliver, but unlike Oliver his poverty killed him. In this way Dickens is able to once more show the brutal unfairness and immorality of the Poor Laws.