Nancy is an excellent character to analyse in this
wonderful book of the Victorian underworld. I definitely think you are right to admire
her, as your question states, and one of the principal reasons that you can use to
justify your admiration is the way in which she is unique in the novel. The rest of the
characters are marked by either being "good" or "bad" with no in-between states. Nancy,
however, is a character that shows that in spite of the life she has had and the way
that she has been corrupted by Bill Sikes and Fagin, she is still capable of nobility of
thought, compassion and kindness.
This is most obviously
shown in the way that she acts against Sikes and Fagin to try and save Oliver, and
regrets her action in kidnapping him back into the world of crime in which she herself
is mired. Note how she is described to us at the beginning of Chapter 40, when she meets
with Miss Maylie:
The girl's life had been squandered in the
streets and among the most noisome of the stews and dens of London, but there was
something of the woman's original nature left in her still; and when she heard a light
step approaching the door opposite to that by which she had entered and thought of the
wide contrast which the small room would in another moment contain, she felt burdened
with the sense of her own deep shame and shrunk as though she could scarecely bear the
presence of her with whom she had sought this
interview.
This, then, is why
we admire Nancy: in spite of her corrupted upbringing and childhood, she still retains
something of her "original nature." She feels shame at her state, and yet in spite of
this, she acts against those who have power over her, even when she thinks it is likely
she will be killed, to save Oliver from the same fate that has corrupted
her.
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