Abandoned at an early age, Oliver Twist is forced to live in a dark and dismal London workhouse lorded over by awful Mr. Bumble who cheats the boys of their meager rations! Desperate but determined, Oliver makes his escape. But what he discovers in the harsh streets of London's underworld makes the workhouse look like a picnic. Penniless and alone, he is lured into a world of crime by the wily Fagin - the nefarious mastermind of a gang of pint-sized pickpockets.
Will a life of crime pay off for young Oliver? Or will it earn him a one-way ticket to the gallows?

Few writers are lucky enough to have their first novels become runaway bestsellers. Yet that is exactly what happened when 25-year-old Charles Dickens published Oliver Twist in 1837.
Many readers already knew of young Dickens. As a journalist, he had written, under the pen name Boz, gripping newspaper accounts exposing social conditions in England. In another vein entirely, he had written a bestselling collection of humorous stories called The Pickwick Papers. His journalistic sketches showed descriptive power and the ability to influence people’s political ideas; The Pickwick Papers showed how he could create marvelous characters and sustain lively comic scenes. But with Oliver Twist, Dickens surprised everyone by revealing yet another talent- for spinning a rich, suspenseful web of plot.
One reason why Oliver Twist was so popular was that Dickens understood what his audience wanted to read and was willing to write it. He gave them sentimental love scenes, a horrifying glimpse of the criminal underworld, a virtuous hero in Oliver, and nasty villains in Bill Sikes and Fagin. And he wrapped it all up in a complicated, puzzling mystery story. Because Oliver Twist was published in monthly installments, Dickens could leave his readers in agonizing suspense from month to month. All across England, readers eagerly discussed what had happened in the most recent installment and argued over what they thought would
happen in the next one. Oliver Twist was a part of everyday conversation, just as top-rated television shows are for us today.
Yet, even though he was young and hungry for fame, Dickens wanted to do more than just entertain. He challenged his readers to consider things they would rather have ignored. He drew for them a picture of London’s slums that was shocking in its realism. Victorian authors were not supposed to acknowledge the existence of drunkards and prostitutes, but Dickens did. They were not supposed to use street language, even in dialogue, but Dickens did.
Dickens wasn’t the only one concerned about the poor, for poverty and vagrancy had plagued England since the sixteenth century. In 1834, a few years before the publication of Oliver Twist, Parliament had passed a Poor Law intended to end some of the worst abuses against the indigent. Yet the provision of the bill didn’t go far in providing relief for those who were suffering.
Dickens wanted to do something about the shameful poverty in England. Although his readers didn’t know this, poverty had personally scarred Dickens. His family had been quite comfortable when he was born in Portsmouth in 1812, but his parents weren’t very skilled at managing money. When he was about 12 years old, his family was confined to debtors’ prison, in London, an experience he later wrote about in Little Dorrit. Only the money left by his grandmother when she died bailed them out. His knowledge of prison gave Dickens a lifelong obsession with prisoners and inhumane institutions. The hunger and loneliness that tortures
Oliver Twist while he is a ward of the parish were very real to Dickens during his own family crisis.
For young Dickens, the lowest point of his life occurred while his family was in prison. For six dreadful months, he was forced to work as an apprentice in a bootblacking factory, pasting labels on bottles of shoe polish. Not only was the work exhausting, the experience was humiliating. In Oliver Twist he included a brief episode condemning the apprenticeship system, but it was not until later, in David Copperfield, that he could face writing about the factory in detail.
While Oliver Twist is not as autobiographical as David Copperfield, many other incidents in the novel reflect Dickens’ experiences. He deeply regretted not having had more schooling and suggests that in Oliver’s eagerness to learn.
In May 1837, his beloved 17-year-old sister-in-law, Mary Hogarth, died, and many readers of Oliver Twist think he based the characters of Rose and Nancy on Mary, as a way of working out his intense grief. While Rose survives a dangerous illness, Nancy dies a brutal death. Dickens himself felt Mary had deserted him; similarly, Oliver is terrified that Rose will die and leave him. Dickens was haunted by dreams about Mary, just as Sikes is haunted by a vision of Nancy’s eyes after he has killed her.
The criminal underworld of Fagin, Nancy, and Sikes in Oliver Twist was as well-known to Dickens as the workhouses and debtors’ prisons. As a court reporter and journalist, he had seen the seamy side of urban life. He had met hardened criminals like Sikes and women like Nancy. He had little sympathy for
criminals like Fagin, who abuse and corrupt others, yet he knew that there were others- like Nancy and Charley Bates- who were criminals only because of their environment, and who might still be reformed. Later he became actively involved with Urania Cottage, a refuge for homeless women, including prostitutes. Knowing they had led rough lives, Urania Cottage was set up as an environment where they could feel at home and prepare themselves for a better life. Dickens’ sympathy for Nancy is clear in Oliver Twist. Typically, he was motivated to get involved, to try to change conditions for girls like her before it was too late. The
1830s were a time of growing concern about social issues and energetic reform.
As a popular writer and public personality, Dickens had a power to do good. He could reach a vast middle-class audience, shocking them into action by his dramatic storytelling. Oliver Twist, which began to appear in serial form in 1837, was only the first of Dickens’ novels to increase social concern and help bring about reform.
Ironically, Dickens’ own death at age 58 is linked inadvertently to Oliver Twist. Dickens was a frustrated actor who eagerly took part in amateur and professional theatrical performances. Reading from his own works, he drew huge, enthusiastic crowds whose admission tickets helped to pay the novelist’s bills and support his large family. His final dramatic program, a reading of Nancy’s murder and Sikes’ hanging, was physically and emotionally exhausting. His body wasn’t equal to the demands he made on it. On June 8, 1870, as he was working on his final novel, The Mystery of Edwin Drood, he collapsed and died.