William "Bill" Sikes is one of the two main antagonists (alongside Edward Leeford) of the classic novel Oliver Twist by Charles Dickens. Although Fagin and Mr. Bumble are sometimes regarded as antagonists, it is Bill Sikes who provides a large amount of the conflict to the story due to his violent nature and criminal tendencies, which surpass the thieving ways of Fagin as well as the child-abusing ways of Mr. Bumble and ultimately led to murder.
His Evil Ranking[]
His Villainous Deeds[]
- Even before the events of the novel, Sikes was already a bad person from the beginning, as he regularly beat his bull terrier Bulls-Eye for petty reasons. In fact, the beatings were so brutal that he was forced to acquire stitches for life.
- He was on board with Fagin's operation to train children into becoming criminals when they are older, which would make him partially responsible for their crimes.
- He threatened to kill Oliver if he didnāt go through a window and unlock a door to instigate a robbery, despite him being an orphaned child. He also had no remorse for using Oliver as an accomplice in his crimes.
- To a point, his actions led to Oliver taking a bullet to the arm and getting taken in by the gang he tried to rob, making Sikes responsible for Oliver's tragic and undeserved fate after the robbery went awry.
- He killed his girlfriend Nancy by brutally beating and bludgeoning her to death in a violent fit of rage out of paranoia and fear that she ratted him out based on what Fagin told him, and he didn't know that Nancy didn't actually betray him.
- When he encounters an angry mob, he tried to flee out of cowardice only to accidentally hang himself as a result, thus showing no remorse for his actions (with the exception of his murder of Nancy).
Why Doesn't He Stand Out?[]
- The reason he ultimately cannot qualify as Near Pure Evil is because he fails the Heinous Standards too much to Fagin, who directly influenced children into becoming criminals by teaching them about crime and he was also the one who manipulated Sikes himself into killing Nancy.
- On the other hand, Sikes plays a pretty indirect role in Fagin's operation to train children into becoming criminals as he isn't needed for the plan to succeed and he only has one murder to his name, and even if his killing of Nancy was brutal, he was manipulated into killing her by Fagin, meaning his worst act was more of Fagin's heinousness than his own.
- He is genuinely remorseful for killing Nancy, as while he is her murderer, he couldn't shake the guilt away from himself and starts having visions of Nancy at several points in the novel after murdering her in cold blood. He even attempted to abandon his dog Bulls-Eye as a representation of his guilt, which is played for slight sympathy in the novel.
- He has a Pet the Dog moment where he helps an injured Oliver even when it would have been easier to leave him to die.
Trivia[]
- While the original version of Sikes is a Villainous Benchmark, his animated counterpart in the 1988 Disney movie Oliver & Company qualifies as Pure Evil due to teaching one of his underlings how to torture a man before executing him with "cement shoes", threatening to feed Jenny (a child who is also the movie's heroine) to Roscoe and DeSoto if he orders them to do so and trying to kill Oliver and his friends when they try to save Jenny even after knowing they're sapient.
- Ironically, Sykes himself used to be a Villainous Benchmark due to being too standard for a crime lord and not being aware of Oliver and his friends being sapient, but when it was decided that he is heinous enough due to having his underling torture a man brutally and threatening Jenny with letting his dogs eat her alive, he was reproposed and approved as Pure Evil.
External Links[]
- Bill Sikes on the Villains Wiki