What is Oliver Twist about?

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.

The London criminal underworld that Dickens conjured from his own street knowledge has a specificity and texture that Oliver's genteel rescue plot doesn't match. Fagin's lair, the Artful Dodger's patter, the night streets of the rookeries — these scenes have the feeling of documentary. Dickens was simultaneously fascinated and disgusted by this world, and that ambivalence produces something more interesting than condemnation.

Oliver Twist is more uneven than Dickens's mature work — the plot relies on coincidence, Oliver is more symbol than person, and the ending is somewhat perfunctory. But for Fagin and Nancy alone, and for the energy of the early workhouse and London sections, it remains essential. Readers encountering Dickens for the first time will find it accessible; readers familiar with his later work will notice the seeds of everything that follows.