Coffins Symbol Analysis

Coffins crop up repeatedly in the novel, and symbolize not only the proximity of death throughout Oliver Twist, but the very real possibility that Oliver himself will not live long enough to realize his high birth and receive his due inheritance. Oliver is apprenticed, first, to Sowerberry, a coffin-maker, and is forced to sleep among the coffins while in the house. Oliver is made to witness numerous burials while working as a "mute" mourner for Sowerberry—someone brought along to enlarge the size of a funeral party. Other characters in the novel, too, use coffins in their figures of speech: Monks, on seeing Oliver in the town of Chertsey, while Oliver is delivering a letter, utters an oath involving the word, and Nancy tells Rose and Brownlow, later, that the only home she will ever know is the final home provided by a coffin. Indeed, the novel ends with a bittersweet image of a tomb for Agnes, Oliver's unwed mother, in the local church near where Oliver settles; this tomb has no coffin, symbolizing the fact that, though Agnes was a good women, she committed a crime against God by having a child out of wedlock, and her body was not buried with the rest of the family but rather interred in a shallow grave near the workhouse. Thus Oliver manages, at the end of the novel, to avoid the grisly fate, the waiting coffin, reserved for others—Nancy and his mother among them.