Oliver Twist and Edwin Leeford

Oliver Twist and Edwin Leeford are father and son, a biological and legal bond that the novel keeps hidden until its final revelations, making it the foundational secret upon which the entire plot of conspiracy, inheritance, and identity turns. Edwin Leeford was a young man of great gifts, forced by family pride into a wretched marriage with a woman who bore him a single son, Edward (later known as Monks). That union produced only misery, and Leeford eventually separated from his wife, who abandoned herself to continental frivolities while he lingered in England with blighted prospects. In his wandering, he fell among new friends and met Agnes Fleming, the beautiful nineteen-year-old daughter of a retired naval officer. He contracted a solemn engagement with her, the first true passion of a guileless girl, and she became pregnant with his child.

The Father's Confession and Will

Before leaving for Rome to settle the affairs of a wealthy relative who had died, Leeford passed through London and visited his old friend Mr. Brownlow. He was worn by anxiety and remorse, talking in a wild, distracted way of ruin and dishonor. He confided his intention to convert his property into money, settle a portion on his wife and son, and then flee the country—Mr. Brownlow guessed too well that he would not flee alone. Leeford left with Mr. Brownlow a portrait he had painted himself, a likeness of Agnes Fleming, and promised to write with a full confession and to see his friend once more. He never did. Stricken with mortal illness in Rome, he was joined there by his wife and son, who came from Paris to look after his property. He died the day after her arrival, leaving no will. Among his papers, however, were two documents dated the night his illness first came on, directed to Mr. Brownlow and enclosed with instructions not to be forwarded until after his death. One was a letter to Agnes Fleming, a penitent confession crossed and recrossed on the sheet, in which he told her that some secret mystery had prevented his marrying her just then, prayed her not to curse his memory, and reminded her of the little locket and ring he had given her with her Christian name engraved and a blank left for the surname he hoped one day to bestow. The other was a will. In it, Leeford spoke of the misery his wife had brought upon him, of the rebellious disposition and premature bad passions of his only son Edward, who had been trained to hate him. He left his wife and son each an annuity of eight hundred pounds, and divided the bulk of his property into two equal portions—one for Agnes Fleming, the other for their child, if it should be born alive and ever come of age. If the child were a girl, the inheritance was unconditional; if a boy, it was conditional on his never having stained his name with any public act of dishonor, meanness, cowardice, or wrong during his minority. Leeford did this to mark his confidence that the child would share Agnes's gentle heart and noble nature. If he were disappointed, the money was to go to Edward.

The Suppression of the Truth

Monks's mother, Leeford's legal wife, burned the will. The letter to Agnes never reached its destination, but she kept it and other proofs, in case anyone ever tried to lie away the blot. She told the truth to Agnes's father, with every aggravation that her violent hatred could add. Goaded by shame and dishonor, the father fled with his two daughters into a remote corner of Wales, changing his very name so that his friends might never know of his retreat. There, not long afterward, he was found dead in his bed. Agnes had left her home in secret some weeks before; her father had searched for her on foot in every town and village near, and it was on the night he returned home, assured that she had destroyed herself to hide her shame, that his old heart broke. Years later, Monks's mother, sinking under a painful and incurable disease, recovered her son from London, where he had associated with the lowest outcasts, and on her deathbed bequeathed these secrets to him together with her unquenchable hatred of all whom they involved. She was filled with the impression that a male child had been born and was alive, and Monks swore to hunt it down, to pursue it with the bitterest animosity, and to drag it to the very gallows-foot if he could.

The Revelation and Its Aftermath

The truth emerges only after Nancy's secret meeting with Rose Maylie, the subsequent murder of Nancy by Bill Sikes, and the forced confession of Monks in the presence of Mr. Brownlow, Oliver, Rose, and Mrs. Maylie. Mr. Brownlow, who had been Edwin Leeford's oldest friend, confronts Monks with the full story, laying bare the villainy. Monks, overwhelmed by the accumulated charges, admits the truth and sets his hand to a statement of facts. The revelation transforms Oliver's world: he learns that Rose Maylie, whom he has loved as a sister, is in fact his maternal aunt—the younger daughter of Agnes Fleming's father. The locket and ring, stolen from Agnes's corpse by the nurse Old Sally and later pawned, are produced as evidence. Monks, having squandered his portion, dies in prison in a distant part of the New World. Oliver, by the provisions of his father's will, would have been entitled to the whole of the remaining property, but Mr. Brownlow, unwilling to deprive the elder son of the opportunity of reform, proposes an equal division, to which Oliver joyfully accedes. Mr. Brownlow adopts Oliver as his son, and the boy at last finds the home and family that his father's love, though thwarted and hidden, had intended for him.