"Oliver Twist" (1838), by Charles Dickens

This was the second consecutive worldwide success for Dickens at the age of 26(!), and it was a shock to his vast public, who were looking for another Cockney comedy in the vein of The Pickwick Papers, but got instead a hard-hitting description of some of the most shocking aspects of the social conditions of the world’s most advanced country at the time: criminal child neglect in orphanages, inhuman conditions in public work houses, crime and prostitution ...

This is sock-it-to-’em fiction at its very best, with scenes of low life in London that just cannot be forgotten. And with a number of his most outstanding «supporting role» characters: the resourceful and worldly-wise young pickpocket The Artful Dodger, the moll Nancy, the gang leader Fagin, the brutal criminal Sikes, Mr. and Mrs. Bumble, Mr. Brownlow and Mr. Grimwig, Provis and many others.

The one major reserve modern readers can have about this famous book is its undeniably anti-Semitic portrait of the arch-villain Fagin, the central figure in the last two-thirds of the book – where the word “Jew” occurs 328 times! – in which the young Dickens probably reflected the general attitude then prevailing in England towards members of the Jewish community.

Dickens, influenced by the comments of close Jewish friends, later tried to made amends by portraying another central Jewish character, the kind-hearted dustman Old Riah in Our Mutual Friend, in an extremely favourable light — but the evil-minded and grasping but very clever, articulate and resourceful Fagin nevertheless remains as one of the most memorable characters of his entire œuvre, it must be said.

With all of the 24 realistic original illustrations by George Cruikshank — done in close collaboration with Dickens, notably regarding the scenes chosen and the captions —that appeared in the first publication of Oliver Twist in 32 monthly issues of the illustrated magazine Bentley’s Miscellany, between February 1837 and April 1839.

(159,000 words)

An e-book, with all of the illustrations, is available for downloading below.

Oliver Twist (e-book)