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What it argues
Oliver Twist is the story of an orphan born in a workhouse who runs away from an abusive apprenticeship, falls in with a gang of thieves in London, and — in Dickens's scheme — is eventually rescued and restored to his rightful identity. It was Dickens's second novel, published when he was twenty-four, and it remains startling for its anger: the workhouse scenes, with their gruel-measuring, their "please, sir, I want some more," and their board of self-satisfied administrators, were a direct polemic against the New Poor Law of 1834, which Dickens despised.
The novel is split between two registers. Oliver's story is essentially fairy-tale wish fulfillment: he is too pure, too passively virtuous, to be the realistic center of a social novel. What Dickens was actually most interested in — and where the novel still lives — is the world around Oliver: Fagin, the fence who runs the gang of child pickpockets with a mixture of genuine warmth and ruthless self-interest; Bill Sikes, the brutal robber whose violence is rendered without mitigation; and Nancy, Sikes's partner, who is perhaps the novel's most fully realized character, trapped between her loyalty to Sikes and her genuine affection for Oliver and her knowledge of what she's become.
What it gets right
- 1.
The workhouse scenes constitute one of the most effective polemics in English fiction — Dickens's attack on the New Poor Law through Oliver's story was politically pointed and widely felt.
- 2.
Oliver is less a character than an argument: his incorruptibility in the face of every corrupting circumstance is Dickens insisting that poverty is not destiny.
- 3.
Fagin is the novel's most ambivalent creation — criminal, exploiter of children, and yet genuinely fond of his boys in a way that complicates simple condemnation.
What it covers
Who wrote it
Charles Dickens (1812–1870) was an English novelist whose serialized fiction shaped the Victorian era's understanding of itself. Born into poverty and forced to work in a blacking factory as a boy after his father was imprisoned for debt, Dickens drew on that experience throughout his career. Oliver Twist, his second novel, was published in serial form from 1837 to 1839 and remains one of his most widely known works. His other major novels include Great Expectations, Bleak House, David Copperfield, and A Tale of Two Cities.
