Oliver Twist - Hardcover

Charles Dickens

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0679417249 ISBN 13: 9780679417248

Publisher: Everyman's Library, 1992

Synopsis

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.

About this title

From the Publisher:

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."

From the Back Cover:

One of the most swiftly moving and unified of Charles Dickens' great novels, Oliver Twist is also famous for its recreation through the splendidly realized figures of Fagin, Nancy, the Artful Dodger, and the evil Bill Sikes--of the vast London under--world of pickpockets, thieves, prostitutes, and abandoned children.

About this edition

• Publisher: Everyman's Library
• Publication date: 1992
• ISBN 10: 0679417249
• ISBN 13: 9780679417248
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 427