Synopsis
A guide to reading "Oliver Twist" with a critical and appreciative mind encouraging analysis of plot, style, form, and structure. Also includes background on the author's life and times, sample tests, term paper suggestions, and a reading list.
A simplified retelling of the adventures of an orphan boy who lives in the squalid surroundings of a nineteenth-century English workhouse until he becomes involved with a gang of thieves.
Dickens's second novel was a far cry from THE PICKWICK PAPERS, his first. The story of an orphan who flees the workhouse only to fall in with a gang of thieves and prostitutes in London's sleazy underworld, it was a trenchant criticism of England's poor laws. Enacted in the 1830s, these laws provided assistance for the poor only through workhouses, which were deliberately squalid and miserable to encourage the poor--who were considered lazy and immoral--to better themselves and get out. The inequities between rich and poor were one of Dickens's constant themes, and with OLIVER TWIST he established himself as a staunch champion of the downtrodden, particularly children. The novel also, however, has its cheerful moments, and contains some of Dickens's most memorable characters, including Fagin, the Artful Dodger, the evil Bill Sykes, and the unfortunate Nancy.
Retells the adventures of the orphan boy who is forced to practice thievery and live a life of crime in nineteenth-century London.
| Details | | Publication Date: | 1994-07-01 | | Edition Description: | Reissue |
| Size | | Height: | 7.0 in | | Width: | 4.3 in | | Thickness: | 1.0 in | | Weight: | 8.0 oz |
Publisher's Note
A young boy flees from an orphanage to London, only to be captured by thieves.
This fiercely comic tale stands in marked contrast to its genial predecessor, The Pickwick Papers. Set against Londons seedy back street slums, Oliver Twist is 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 of Oliver Twist firmly 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."
Industry Reviews
"The character of Nancy is the finest thing he ever did. He never afterwards saw all sides of a woman's character--saw all around her."
quoted in Introduction by Angus Wilson - Wilkie Collins (01/01/1890)
"...in some curious way Fagin's court for all its squalor and meanness has a sort of ghastly gaiety and life that makes Mr. Brownlow's hot punch by the fire and Rose Maylie's country flower picking expeditions seem like the feeble stirrings of the moribund. With this ambiguity we are brought face to face with the puzzle of the force and power that still exert their influence upon most readers of this strange, great, yet often cheaply sentimental novel....Perhaps the final judgement on 'Oliver Twist' must be that it is the crude apprentice work of a very great genius, and, as such, a unique curiosity of literature."
Introduction - Angus Wilson (01/01/1966)
"I don't like that low, debasing style...I shouldn't think it would tend to raise morals."
quoted in Introduction by Angus Wilson - William Lamb
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