Oliver Twist

Oliver Twist; or, The Parish Boy’s Progress is the second novel by Charles Dickens, first published as a monthly serial in Bentley’s Miscellany from February 1837 to April 1839 and issued in book form in 1838.

Born without family or fortune, Oliver is raised in a workhouse where hunger and humiliation are the rule. When he dares to ask for more food, the authorities brand him a nuisance and send him out as an apprentice—an episode Dickens turns into a sharp indictment of institutional cruelty and social hypocrisy.

Oliver soon flees to London, where a streetwise boy leads him to a den of pickpockets. Drawn into the city’s underworld he faces beatings, temptations, and false accusations, offset by flashes of unexpected kindness. The novel paints a vivid cross-section of the metropolis while exposing the exploitation of children and the allure of criminal survival.

By weaving suspense with satire, Dickens builds a tale that moves from peril toward possibility. Oliver Twist endures as both an adventure and a social novel, celebrated for its unforgettable scenes and its call for compassion, justice, and reform.

"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 this workhouse was born; on a day and date which I need not trouble myself to repeat, inasmuch as it can be of no possible consequence to the reader, in this stage of the business at all events; the item of mortality whose name is prefixed to the head of this chapter."