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Look Inside | Reading Guide
Reading Guide
Oct 09, 2001 | ISBN 9780375757846 Buy
May 01, 1982 | ISBN 9780553211023 Buy
Nov 03, 1992 | ISBN 9780679417248 Buy
Jan 17, 2012 | ISBN 9780307950567 Buy
May 31, 2005 | ISBN 9780553901566 Buy
Jan 11, 2011 | 966 Minutes | Young Adult Buy
Buy from Other Retailers:
Oct 09, 2001 | ISBN 9780375757846
May 01, 1982 | ISBN 9780553211023
Nov 03, 1992 | ISBN 9780679417248
Jan 17, 2012 | ISBN 9780307950567
May 31, 2005 | ISBN 9780553901566
Jan 11, 2011 | ISBN 9780307916051 | Young Adult
966 Minutes
Dickens’s classic morality tale of a starving orphan caught between opposing forces of good and evil is a powerful indictment of Victorian England’s Poor Laws. Filled with dark humor and an unforgettable cast of characters Oliver Twist, Fagin, Nancy, Bill Sykes, and the Artful Dodger, to name a few Dickens’s second novel is a compelling social satire that has remained popular since it was first serialized in 1837-39. The text for this Modern Library Paperback Classic is taken from the 1846 New Edition, revised and corrected by the author. It includes new explanatory notes and an appendix, A Brief History of the English Poor Laws.
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. 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."
Oliver is an orphan living on the dangerous London streets with no one but himself to rely on. Fleeing from poverty and hardship, he falls in with a criminal street gang who will not let him go, however hard he tries to escape.One of the most swiftly moving and unified of Charles Dickens’s great novels, Oliver Twist is also famous for its re-creation–through the splendidly realized figures of Fagin, Nancy, the Artful Dodger, and the evil Bill Sikes–of the vast London underworld of pickpockets, thieves, prostitutes, and abandoned children. Victorian critics took Dickens to task for rendering this world in such a compelling, believable way, but readers over the last 150 years have delivered an alternative judgment by making this story of the orphaned Oliver Twist one of its author’s most loved works.This edition reprints the original Everyman’s introduction by G. K. Chesterton and includes twenty-four illustrations by George Cruikshank.
Dickens’s classic morality tale of a starving orphan caught between opposing forces of good and evil is a powerful indictment of Victorian England’s Poor Laws. Filled with dark humor and an unforgettable cast of characters Oliver Twist, Fagin, Nancy, Bill Sykes, and the Artful Dodger, to name a few Dickens’s second novel is a compelling social satire that has remained popular since it was first serialized in 1837-39.
Charles Dickens was born in a little house in Landport, Portsea, England, on February 7, 1812. The second of eight children, he grew up in a family frequently beset by financial insecurity. When the family fortunes improved, Charles went back to… More about Charles Dickens
"The power of [Dickens] is so amazing, that the reader at once becomes his captive, and must follow him whithersoever he leads."–William Makepeace Thackeray
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