Dickens is concerned with the social injustices of his era. In his oeuvre we see repeated portrayals of the poor—of marginalized people who barely survive on the fringes of society. The sense one gets of him from his writings is that of someone who is concerned with fundamental flaws that exist in the way the world is governed. In this, Dickens is similar to another writer of the period to whom he is not usually compared: Gustave Flaubert. Both authors deal with people who in different ways are living outside society's bounds. There is a fundamental similarity between Nancy and Bill Sikes in Dickens's work and the eponymous adulteress and her lover in Flaubert'sMadame Bovary.

One does not usually think of Dickens as a gothic writer, but in Oliver Twist the descriptions of the London streets have an eerie, almost-surreal quality. This is something uniquely Dickensian in the way it is expressed. Yet the underworld of London in which Fagin and his band of pickpockets live is also an analogue to the dreamlike, supernatural realm of a Poe or a Hawthorne story.

It is commonplace to judge the Victorian mindset as one in which repressed thoughts, especially sexual ones, are shown in a sublimated guise. This is true of Dickens. The connection between Sikes and Nancy is a symbol of sexual abusiveness often hinted at in Victorian literature, veiled because of the censorship of the period as well as the reflexive, conventional reticence of authors. Dickens himself, in his public readings, would read the passage in which Sikes kills Nancy, but he later confessed that it was nearly unbearable for him to do so. His account of his feelings about his own work somehow attests to the attraction-repulsion to the cruelty inherent in much of human interaction, in both Dickens's time and throughout all time.