Marian Leighton

Oliver Twist is the first novel in English that focused entirely on a child as the protagonist. He is also known for the unromantic way Charles Dickens described the criminals and their sordid lives. In Olivier Twist, one of his best-known novels, Dickens condemns the comic but also the bitterness of the effects of industrialization in 19th century England. Oliver, an innocent child, is curled up in an unscrupulous society where, partly because of the recent Poor Laws, he can only practically choose between the asylum of the poor, the hideout of Fagin's thieves, a condemnation of imprisonment or an early death. From this bitter industrial / institutional framework, however, a fairy tale emerges: in the midst of corruption and degradation, Oliver, who by nature is essentially passive, perseveres a pure heart. He abstains from evil when everyone around him falls and, as one might expect in a fairy tale, he receives his reward, just as all his persecutor-thieves receive his reward. In anticipation of this happy event, Dickens seizes this opportunity and then explores the kind of life an orphan, an outcast might have to live in London during the 1930s.

--- Added from Google Books ---

Oliver Twist is the first novel in English that focused entirely on a child as the protagonist. He is also known for the unromantic way Charles Dickens described the criminals and their sordid lives. In Olivier Twist, one of his best-known novels, Dickens condemns the comic but also the bitterness of the effects of industrialization in 19th century England. Oliver, an innocent child, is curled up in an unscrupulous society where, partly because of the recent Poor Laws, he can only practically choose between the asylum of the poor, the hideout of Fagin's thieves, a condemnation of imprisonment or an early death. From this bitter industrial / institutional framework, however, a fairy tale emerges: in the midst of corruption and degradation, Oliver, who by nature is essentially passive, perseveres a pure heart. He abstains from evil when everyone around him falls and, as one might expect in a fairy tale, he receives his reward, just as all his persecutor-thieves receive his reward. In anticipation of this happy event, Dickens seizes this opportunity and then explores the kind of life an orphan, an outcast might have to live in London during the 1930s.

--- Added from Hardcover ---

Oliver Twist, OR: the Parish Boy's Progress, is Charles Dickens's second novel, and was first published as a serial from 1837 to 1839. The story centres on orphan Oliver Twist, born in a workhouse and sold into apprenticeship with an undertaker. After escaping, Oliver travels to London, where he meets the "Artful Dodger", a member of a gang of juvenile pickpockets led by the elderly criminal Fagin. Oliver is an orphan living on the dangerous London streets with no one but himself to rely on. Fleeing from poverty and hardship, he falls in with a criminal street gang who will not let him go, however hard he tries to escape. One of the most swiftly moving and unified of Charles Dickens’s great novels, Oliver Twist is also famous for its re-creation–through the splendidly realized figures of Fagin, Nancy, the Artful Dodger, and the evil Bill Sikes–of the vast London underworld of pickpockets, thieves, prostitutes, and abandoned children. Victorian critics took Dickens to task for rendering this world in such a compelling, believable way, but readers over the last 150 years have delivered an alternative judgment by making this story of the orphaned Oliver Twist one of its author’s most loved works.***--Goodreads*** The adventures of an orphan boy who lives in the squalid surroundings of a nineteenth century English workhouse until he becomes involved with a gang of thieves.