Oliver Twist

Summary: With the publication of this fiercely comic second novel, Charles Dickens's eminent literary reputation was firmly established. "Oliver Twist" 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." Set against London's seedy back street slums, Oliver Twist is the story of a workhouse orphan captured and thrust into a den of thieves, where some of Dickens's most infernal villains preside: the impudent Artful Dodger, the barbarous bully Bill Sikes, and the odious Jew Fagin. Yet the unsullied goodness of the orphan Oliver presents allegorically Dickens's belief in "the principle of Good surviving in every adverse circumstance, and triumphing at last."

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