Edwin Leeford, Tim Dutton, a country landowner, falls for his neighbour Agnes Fleming, Sophia Myles. Agnes lives with her widowed father, a former sea captain, and her younger sister Rose, Keira Knightley. When Agnes becomes pregnant, she discovers Edwin is already married to Elizabeth Leeford, Lindsay Duncan, who has kept a long estrangement from him and has a teenage son. Edwin is summoned to Rome by a dying uncle who intends to leave him a fortune as compensation for Edwin’s unhappy marriage. Elizabeth learns of this plan, follows him abroad, and murders him; after the uncle dies and Edwin inherits wealth, she schemes to bend their son Edward to murder Agnes. The attempt triggers a tense confrontation in which Rose witnesses the assault and escapes, forever shaken. Agnes, weathering despair, presses forward to a town, collapses, and dies in childbirth; her baby is christened Oliver Twist and taken to a farm for foundlings.
Oliver Twist, Sam Smith, is moved back to the workhouse at nine, where he is starved, beaten, and forced to labor long hours alongside other boys. When a mealtime plea for more food is met with further abuse, the workhouse board decides he must be sent away. He is apprenticed to Mr. Sowerberry, Roger Lloyd Pack the undertaker, who is only partly sympathetic, while Sowerberry’s wife and servants subject Oliver to further cruelty. Oliver’s fate worsens when Noah, James Bradshaw the other apprentice, insinuates that his mother was a criminal, stoking Oliver’s anger and impulse toward violence. He eventually escapes and travels to London, where a young pickpocket known as the Artful Dodger, Alex Crowley, guides him to a den of aspiring thieves under Fagin, a former Prague magician reduced to a life of crime. Fagin, Robert Lindsay, oversees the group and teaches Oliver the art of slipping through crowds and lifting coins.
Meanwhile, Edward Leeford, Oliver’s half-brother, remains in London with his mother, who seeks to disinherit Oliver. Using the alias Monks, Marc Warren partners with Fagin to turn Oliver into a symbol of public disgrace, ensuring that most of the Leeford estate passes to Agnes’s child—or is otherwise blocked from Oliver if he shows “bad character.” Oliver, under the Dodger’s guidance, accompanies Charley Bates, a fellow youth thief, and they set him up for a run-in with Mr. Brownlow, Edwin Leeford’s dear friend and executor of the will. A bookstore owner’s testimony ultimately clears Oliver.
Brownlow welcomes Oliver into his home and greets him warmly with his housekeeper Mrs. Bedwin, Annette Crosbie. Yet Oliver’s past is never far behind: Fagin and Monks persist in their attempts to pull him back into crime. Oliver is briefly kidnapped by Sikes, Andy Serkis and Toby Crackit, and taken back to Fagin’s circle. Brownlow’s confidant Grimwig urges patience as Mrs. Bedwin defends Oliver’s innocence, but the thieves’ efforts culminate in a country-house robbery. Oliver is shot in the confusion, and Sikes disappears into the night, leaving him to be cared for by Mrs. Bedwin after Brownlow returns to the estate. Rose befriends Oliver, but the trauma resurfaces when Monks and Fagin return and are kept at bay by the presence of Oliver and Rose.
Back in London, Nancy, who has shown sympathy for Oliver, reveals the truth of the conspiracy to Brownlow and Rose, sparking a race to stop Monks from seizing Oliver’s inheritance. Fagin grows increasingly cornered as his gang fractures; Sikes becomes a fugitive and, in a final act of desperation, climbs onto a rooftop and falls to his death, while Fagin is arrested after being spotted by Oliver and Charley, who has begun to turn away from crime.
Edward Leeford/Monks is pressed to confess to Rose and Oliver what he and his mother had attempted. He describes his own childhood trauma and seizures, and Brownlow, Rose, and Oliver resolve that he should receive his rightful share of his father’s estate. Monks emigrates to the Caribbean, where he marries and starts a family, finally achieving some measure of peace away from the schemes that haunted him. The unmailed letter from Edwin to Agnes—revealed by Brownlow to Oliver—guides the final understanding of Oliver’s true lineage and the family’s hidden past.
As the story culminates, Rose marries Dr. Losberne, David Bark-Jones, and Oliver attends the wedding with Brownlow’s household, where Charley Bates, now reformed and employed, stands nearby. In the aftermath, Brownlow’s household reads the long-sought letter and disentangles the tangle of secrets that had clouded Agnes’s memory and Oliver’s future. The tale closes with the sense that justice and compassion have threaded their way through decades of misfortune, transforming a boy who began as a waif into a child connected to a larger family legacy.
