Monks and his mother

Monks and his mother form one of the novel's darkest relational dyads, a partnership in hatred that spans continents and survives her death. Their bond is not one of affection but of shared venom, strategic bequest, and a mutual, consuming desire for revenge against the family of Edwin Leeford and the child of Agnes Fleming. The mother, dying in France after a long illness, makes her son the sole heir not of her fortune alone, but of a meticulously preserved secret and a sacred oath of persecution.

The Bequest of Hatred

The mother's legacy to Monks is explicitly one of hatred. On her deathbed, she bequeaths to him "her unquenchable and deadly hatred of all whom they involved"—the secrets of Edwin Leeford's will, the letter to Agnes Fleming, and the existence of a child. Monks himself admits that she need not have left him this hatred, for he "had inherited it long before." This inheritance is not passive; it is an active charge. She fills him with the "impression that a male child had been born, and was alive," and he swears to her, "if ever it crossed my path, to hunt it down; never to let it rest; to pursue it with the bitterest and most unrelenting animosity." The mother's dying wish becomes her son's life's mission, a mission he pursues with a ferocity that matches her own.

The Instrument of Revenge

Monks acts as the living extension of his mother's will. He travels to the town of Oliver's birth, locates the old nurse who attended Agnes Fleming, and through the Bumbles, secures and destroys the gold locket and ring—the only proofs of Oliver's identity. He then conspires with Fagin, plotting to make Oliver a thief and thereby fulfill the condition of his father's will that would disinherit the boy. Monks's every action is a fulfillment of the oath he swore to his mother: to drag Oliver "to the very gallows-foot." When Mr. Brownlow confronts him, Monks reveals the full extent of his mother's machinations: she had burnt the will, suppressed the letter, and, finding the orphaned Rose Fleming, told her foster parents a story of "bad blood" to ensure the child's misery. The mother's hand reaches from the grave, guiding her son's every move.

A Shared Legacy of Destruction

The relationship is ultimately self-consuming. The hatred that binds mother and son also destroys them. Monks, having squandered his portion of the inheritance in the New World, falls back into his old criminal courses, is imprisoned for fraud, and dies in prison of his "old disorder." His mother's legacy of hatred, which he so faithfully executed, leads him to the same ruin it was designed to inflict on Oliver. Their bond, forged in malice and secrecy, proves to be a chain that drags them both down, leaving Oliver, the intended victim, to inherit the peace and prosperity that the mother and son had so desperately tried to deny him.