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Oliver Twist is born in a workhouse, where his mother dies, and raised on starvation rations until, chosen by lot, he walks up to the master and asks for…
Oliver Twist is born in a workhouse, where his mother dies, and raised on starvation rations until, chosen by lot, he walks up to the master and asks for more gruel. Sold as an apprentice to an undertaker, he runs away to London, where the Artful Dodger leads him to Fagin, who trains a gang of boy pickpockets. Rescued by the kindly Mr Brownlow, Oliver is dragged back into the underworld by the brutal housebreaker Bill Sikes, while a mysterious man named Monks plots against him, and Sikes's companion Nancy risks her life to save him.
Context and significance
Charles Dickens wrote the novel in monthly parts in 1837 to 1839, in the wake of the harsh Poor Law of 1834, and it shocked readers with its picture of hunger, crime and the workhouse. Fagin's portrait drew on ugly stereotypes, and after a Jewish reader, Eliza Davis, protested years later, Dickens changed many references in later editions. His later story of an orphan's rise is Great Expectations.
About the author
Charles Dickens (1812–1870) worked in a boot-blacking factory as a boy while his father was in a debtors' prison, and poverty and wronged childhood run through his novels, from Oliver Twist to the largely autobiographical David Copperfield.