Oliver Twist by Charles Dickens

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.

Also known as: The Parish Boy’s Progress

A good story, but a horrible book.

Not my favourite Dickens novel (that would be Tale of Two Cities), but I do love how ‘it all comes together in the end'. Fagin and Dodger are such a memorable characters, Oliver was a bit of a drip though.

Some unforgettable characters in Oliver Twist, a good story that felt rushed at the end. My 2nd Dickens novel, as I read it I began picking up on how many other stories and series drew from this book. Also, Dickens writes quite affectingly about death and facing death, those moments leapt off the page, under the skin, and into the soul.

Somewhere closer to 3.5 than 4 stars.

It chugged along rather nicely at first, although I didn't like to picture the beatings and starvation too clearly. Certain characters, such as Mr. Bumble in his pomposity, were much more interesting to imagine than pathetic Oliver taking punches. However, once we came to Chapter 15 I almost tossed the book aside because I was so sad and frustrated with what happened. Almost, but I didn't.

I stuck with it through the hard bits, ones that justified the creation of a new adjective to describe the squalor and misery in Mr. Dicken's books, and came out into the sunshine of the happy ending that I knew would be waiting for me, complete with all loose ends tied up and all the villains getting their just rewards. The only real surprise was the murder of Nancy, which I didn't think for a second was going to happen. It wasn't until the final sentence of the chapter, where Bill takes a heavy club and strikes her down, and is named a murderer, that I believed it. Up through the very sentence before that I thought there was going to be a way out for her, or that he would go to the edge of death but not over. Frankly, I didn't think Dickens had it in him to kill off a woman like that. It sounds perverse that this violent death made the book, but it's true. Without Nancy's murder it's a collection of predictable cliches molded around a mildly entertaining plot; with her murder we are reminded that shock and surprise exist, even in a Dickens book.