Oliver Twist [Paperback]

One of the great novelist’s most popular works,Oliver Twistis also the purest distillation of Dickens’s genius.

This tale of the orphan who is reared in a workhouse and runs away to London is a novel of social protest, a morality tale, and a detective story.Oliver Twistpresents some of the most sinister characters in Dickens: the master thief, Fagin; the leering Artful Dodger; the murderer, Bill Sikes…along with some of his most sentimental and comical characters. Only Dickens can give us nightmare and daydream together.

According to George Orwell, “inOliver Twist…Dickens attacked English institutions with a ferocity that has never since been approached. Yet he managed to do it without making himself hated, and, more than this, the very people he attacked have welcomed him so completely that he has become a national institution himself.”

With an Introduction by Frederick Busch
and an Afterword by Edward Le Comte The greatest writer of his time. —Edmund Wilson

One of the great poets of the novel, a genius of his art. —Edgar Johnson

All of his characters are my personal friends—I am constantly comparing them with living persons and living persons with them, and what a spirit there was in all he wrote. —Leo TolstoyCharles Dickenswas perhaps the most popular English novelist of the nineteenth century. Born in Portsmouth, Hampshire, England in 1812, he had a happy early childhood, which was interrupted when his father was sent to debtors' prison. Young Dickens came to know not only hunger and privation but also the evils of child labor when he had to go to work in a factory at age twelve. After a turn of fortune in the shape of a legacy, Dickens was able to work as an attorney's clerk and newspaper reporter until his first novel,The Pickwick Papers (1837), brought him instant success at age twenty-five. SubsequlÓ+