Oliver Twist

Set in London’s seedy backstreet slums, Oliver Twist is the story of a workhouse orphan captured and thrust into a den of thieves, where some of Dickens’s most depraved villains preside: the incorrigible Artful Dodger, the barbarous bully Bill Sikes, and the terrible Fagin, whose knavery threatens to send them all to the gallows. At the heart of the drama, however, is Oliver, the orphan whose unsullied goodness leads him to salvation and who represents Dickens’s belief in the principle of good triumphing at last. This was the first of Dickens’s works to depict realistically London’s impoverished underworld and to illustrate his belief that poverty leads to crime. Writing it shortly after the government halted payments to the poor unless they entered workhouses, he used the tale of young Oliver as his vehicle for social criticism.