Oliver Twist [Paperback]

This fiercely comic tale stands in marked  contrast to its genial predecessor,The Pickwick  Papers. Set against London's seedy back  street slums,Oliver Twistis  the saga of a workhouse orphan captured and thrust  into a thieves' den, where some of Dickens's most  depraved villains preside: the incorrigible  Artful Dodger, the murderous bully Sikes, and the  terrible Fagin, that treacherous ringleader whose  grinning knavery threatens to send them all to the  "ghostly gallows." Yet at the heart of this  drama is the orphan Oliver, whose unsullied  goodness leads him at last to salvation. In 1838 the  publication ofOliver Twistfirmly established the  literary eminence of young Dickens. It was,  according to Edgar Johnson, "a clarion peal  announcing to the world that in Charles Dickens the  rejected and forgotten and misused of the world had a  champion.""The power of [Dickens] is so amazing, that the reader at once becomes his captive, and must follow him whithersoever he leads."
--William Makepeace ThackerayCharles Dickens(1812-1870) was born in Portsmouth, England, and spent most of his life in London. When he was twelve, his father was sent to debtor’s prison and he was forced to work in a boot polish factory, an experience that marked him for life. He became a passionate advocate of social reform and the most popular writer of the Victorian era.Chapter I

Treats of the place where Oliver Twist was Born; and of the Circumstances attending his Birth.

Among other public buildings in a certain town, which for many reasons it will be prudent to refrain from mentioning, and to which I will assign no fictitious name, there is one anciently common to most towns, great or small: to wit, a workhouse; and in thl³*