Novel: Oliver Twist

Overview
Charles Dickens's Oliver Twist (1838) follows an orphan's perilous journey through England's workhouses and criminal underworld to expose the cruelty of the Poor Laws and the hypocrisy of Victorian society. Written early in Dickens's career, the novel blends melodrama with forensic social critique. Its villainous figures, sympathetic outcasts, and indelible scenes, pickpockets at play, a murder by the Thames, a condemned criminal in Newgate, form a narrative that indicts institutional neglect while insisting on the endurance of innocence.

Plot
Oliver is born in a parish workhouse, his mother dying moments after childbirth. Starved and brutalized under the authority of the beadle Mr. Bumble, the boy is apprenticed to the undertaker Mr. Sowerberry. After a taunt about his dead mother from fellow apprentice Noah Claypole, Oliver rebels and runs away to London. On its outskirts he meets the Artful Dodger, who leads him to Fagin, an elderly fence who coaches a crew of boys in pickpocketing. Unaware of their trade, Oliver is taken out to “work” and, when a gentleman named Mr. Brownlow is robbed, the boy is arrested by mistake. Brownlow, moved by Oliver's innocence, takes him in and begins to care for him.

As Oliver recovers, Fagin and the brutal housebreaker Bill Sikes conspire to reclaim him, fearing exposure. Nancy, Sikes's companion, drags the boy back to the den. Forced into a burglary with Sikes and Toby Crackit, Oliver is shot and left behind at a country house belonging to Mrs. Maylie and her niece Rose. They nurse him and determine to protect him, gradually uncovering scraps of his past. Meanwhile, a shadowy figure called Monks presses Fagin to criminalize Oliver at all costs, hinting at a hidden inheritance that depends on the boy's ruin.

In London Nancy overhears Monks and Fagin plotting and, moved by pity, risks her life to warn Rose and Mr. Brownlow, who reenters the story as an ally, about the scheme. Brownlow begins to assemble Oliver's history: a locket and ring once carried by Oliver's mother Agnes, the friendship between Brownlow and Oliver's father, and the identity of Monks as Oliver's half-brother, Edward Leeford. Monks has bribed the Bumbles for the tokens and cast them into the river to erase proof of Oliver's parentage.

Fagin learns of Nancy's betrayal through Claypole, now a paid spy, and Sikes murders Nancy in a frenzy that shocks even his criminal circle. Hunted through the city and haunted by visions of the dead woman, Sikes accidentally hangs himself while trying to escape a mob. Fagin is arrested and condemned to death; his final interview with Oliver in Newgate is a chilling portrait of fear and denial.

Revelations and Resolution
Confronted by Brownlow, Monks confesses. Oliver is revealed as the legitimate son of Edwin Leeford and Agnes Fleming, with a claim to his father's fortune. Brownlow secures a fair settlement for Oliver, while Monks wastes his share and dies abroad in ignominy. Rose Maylie is discovered to be Agnes's sister, removing a cloud over her birth, and she marries her longtime suitor, Harry Maylie. The Bumbles are disgraced and reduced to the workhouse; the Dodger is transported; Charley Bates reforms. Oliver is adopted by Brownlow and finds a home founded on affection rather than charity.

Themes and Significance
The novel condemns the New Poor Law's parsimony, the commodification of children, and the complicity of petty officials. Against a backdrop of vice, Dickens insists on the persistence of moral choice, granting Nancy tragic nobility and showing redemption as possible even for a thief like Charley. Oliver's innate goodness, sometimes criticized as implausible, is less psychology than principle: a standard by which institutions are measured and found wanting. Through suspense, caricature, and pathos, the book forged a template for the social novel and fixed in cultural memory the figure of the child endangered by the very systems meant to protect him.