Revealed: how Dickens’ Nancy became a battle between ratings and realism

Unseen edits show that the earthiness of the ‘harlot with a heart’ in Oliver Twist was toned down for the Victorian reader

Nancy, Oliver Twist’s only true ally in the backstreets of Charles Dickens’ London, is the big-hearted “fallen woman” at the emotional core of one of the best-loved stories in the English language. Yet Dickens was unsure just how “coarse” to make her portrayal, it is revealed this month with the publication of the original manuscript of the 1837 novel to mark the 150th anniversary of the great writer’s death.

Unseen edits in Dickens’ manuscript, printed for the first time with all its surviving pages by SP Books, in a collaboration between the Charles Dickens Museum and the V&A, show how Dickens pulled back from painting Nancy too garishly. His campaigning instinct to depict the lives of poverty-stricken Londoners realistically seems to have battled with a desire to keep the more moralistic readers of his hit episodic novel on her side.

Although she is pimped and abused she has real joie de vivre. She is not just a victim

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