Oliver Twist

Description

This fiercely comic tale stands in marked contrast to its genial predecessor, The Pickwick Papers. Set against London's 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.