Oliver Twist

Charles Dickens’s Oliver Twist (1838) was his first novel and the book that made him the conscience of his age — the story of a parish orphan, born and half-starved in a workhouse, who utters the most famous request in English fiction, “Please, sir, I want some more,” and is cast out for it. Fleeing to London, Oliver falls into the hands of Fagin, who trains homeless boys as pickpockets, and into a world of thieves, fences, and the brutal housebreaker Bill Sikes — while a circle of unexpected kindness fights to save him.

Around Oliver stand some of the most indelible figures Dickens ever drew: the Artful Dodger, the jauntiest young thief in literature; Mr. Bumble, the pompous parish beadle; Nancy, the streetwalker whose loyalty to Sikes and pity for the child pull her to a terrible end; and Fagin himself, master of the den. The novel moves from savage satire of the workhouse to the dark, suspenseful melodrama of the London underworld, and reaches its climax in Sikes’s murder of Nancy and his hunted flight — some of the most frightening pages Dickens ever wrote.

Read as a story, it is a propulsive serial mystery of lost birthright and stolen innocence. Read more closely, it is a furious attack on the New Poor Law of 1834 and on a society that treated a hungry child as a criminal — the book that fixed the image of the workhouse in the English imagination forever.

This edition presents the complete public-domain text of the novel in clean, readable typesetting prepared for the modern e-reader.