Mr. Brownlow and Edwin Leeford

Mr. Brownlow and Edwin Leeford were bound by a friendship that reached back into their earliest years and was sealed by a shared, enduring grief. Brownlow, an elderly gentleman of benevolent appearance and a warm heart, had once been engaged to Edwin's only sister, a "fair creature" who died young on what was to have been their wedding morning. That loss left Brownlow a solitary man, but it also forged an unbreakable tie to her brother. "It is because I was your father's oldest friend," Brownlow later told Edwin's son Monks, explaining the depth of his involvement, "it is because the hopes and wishes of young and happy years were bound up with him, and that fair creature of his blood and kindred who rejoined her God in youth, and left me here a solitary, lonely man: it is because he knelt with me beside his only sister's death-bed when he was yet a boy." From that morning forward, through all of Edwin's subsequent trials and errors, Brownlow's "seared heart clung to him" until Edwin died.

The Friendship Tested by Edwin's Secret Life

Despite their closeness, Edwin kept from Brownlow the most consequential secret of his life. Forced into a miserable marriage as a mere boy by family pride and ambition, Edwin eventually separated from his wife and fell among new friends—a retired naval officer and his two daughters. He fell in love with the elder daughter, Agnes Fleming, and became secretly contracted to her. When a rich relation died and left him money, Edwin traveled to Rome to settle the estate, but before leaving England he stopped in London to see Brownlow. He came "worn by anxiety and remorse almost to a shadow," talking "in a wild, distracted way, of ruin and dishonour worked by himself." He confided his intention to convert his property into cash, settle a portion on his wife and son, and flee the country—Brownlow guessed "too well he would not fly alone." Yet even to his oldest friend, Edwin withheld the full truth about Agnes. He left with Brownlow a portrait he had painted of her—a likeness that would later prove crucial—and promised to write and see him once more. He did neither; he died in Rome the day after his wife and son arrived, leaving no will.

Brownlow's Quest for Justice and Resolution

After Edwin's death, Brownlow went to the scene of his "guilty love," resolved that if his fears were realized, "that erring child should find one heart and home to shelter and compassionate her." But the family had vanished. Years later, when the ragged, neglected boy Oliver Twist was cast in Brownlow's way, the old gentleman was struck by his strong resemblance to the portrait Edwin had left him. He rescued Oliver from a life of vice, but the boy was snatched away before Brownlow could learn his history. Brownlow then devoted himself to uncovering the truth. He traced Monks, Edwin's legitimate son, to the West Indies and back to London, and finally cornered him. In a confrontation, Brownlow laid bare the whole story: the forced marriage, the secret love, the destroyed will, the stolen proofs of Oliver's identity. "I know that of the wretched marriage, into which family pride, and the most sordid and narrowest of all ambition, forced your unhappy father when a mere boy, you were the sole and most unnatural issue," he told Monks. He forced Monks to confess and to make restitution to Oliver. Having fulfilled his duty to his old friend, Brownlow adopted Oliver as his son, gratifying "the only remaining wish of Oliver's warm and earnest heart" and linking together a little society that approached perfect happiness.