Oliver Twist. ILLUSTRATED

Illustrated by George Cruikshank

Oliver Twist (1838) is Charles Dickens' second novel. The book
was originally published in Bentley's Miscellany as a serial, in monthly
instalments that began appearing in the month of February 1837 and continued
through April 1839. George Cruikshank provided one steel etching per month to
illustrate each instalment.

Oliver Twist is the first novel in the English language to center
throughout on a child protagonist and is also notable for Dickens' unromantic
portrayal of criminals and their sordid lives. The book's subtitle, The
Parish Boy's Progress alludes to Bunyan's The Pilgrim's Progress and
also to a pair of popular 18th-century caricature series by William Hogarth, "A
Rake's Progress" and "A Harlot's Progress".

An early example of the social novel, the book calls the public's attention
to various contemporary social evils, including the Poor Law that states that
poor people should work in workhouses, child labour and the recruitment of
children as criminals. Dickens mocks the hypocrisies of the time by surrounding
the novel's serious themes with sarcasm and dark humour. The novel may have been
inspired by the story of Robert Blincoe, an orphan whose account of his
hardships as a child labourer in a cotton mill was widely read in the 1830s.

— Excerpted from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.