Book Bearings
Oliver Twist
- 414 pages · about 7 hours
- First published 1839
- 2,211 editions
- Free to read
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1 About this book
Oliver is born in a workhouse and raised on its meager charity. When he dares to ask for more gruel he is sent away as an apprentice, and after more ill-treatment he runs off to London. There he falls in with a gang of young pickpockets led by Fagin, an old criminal who trains children to steal. Oliver is pulled back and forth between this underworld and the kind strangers who try to rescue him. Dickens's second novel, published as a serial from 1837 to 1839, shows the lives of criminals without romance and attacks the treatment of orphans and the poor in the England of his day.
- Bildungsromans
- Coming of age
- Classics
- Historical fiction
- Identity (Psychology)
- London, history
- Boys
- Brigands and robbers
2 What to expect
Dickens's early novel about a workhouse orphan who falls among a gang of child pickpockets in London. It is part satire on the Poor Laws and the treatment of pauper children, part crime melodrama, with strong villains, heavy coincidence and some brutal violence. The prose is ironic and wordy in the Victorian manner, and the portrayal of Fagin draws on antisemitic stereotype.
Good for readers who want: a Dickens classic, the London underworld, and social satire with melodrama.
3 Read it free, right here
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Read it on the Internet Archive4 About Charles Dickens
Bio adapted from Wikipedia (CC BY-SA 4.0)
5 More by Charles Dickens
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