The Adventures Of Oliver Twist

by Charles Dickens

Overview

Orphaned at birth, Oliver Twist is brought up in the workhouse and sold into apprenticeship to an undertaker. Rebelling against starvation and ill-treatment he flees to London, only to be taken up by a gang of child-pickpockets led by the rascally Fagan, assisted by the Artful Dodger. Oliver is rescued temporarily but then snatched again by thieves, and it becomes plain that the secret of Oliver's birth and background is of deep interest to a large number of people.

In its raking condemnation of contemporary attitudes towards the poor, the claustrophobic horror and comic invention of its portrait of the Victorian underworld, and its sharp, sympathetic insight into the condition of the innocent and the outsider, Oliver Twist remains one of the most powerful and relevant of all nineteenth-century novels.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781298823366
Publisher:	Scholar Select
Publication date:	08/12/2015
Pages:	318
Product dimensions:	6.14(w) x 9.21(h) x 0.75(d)

About the Author

Born on February 7, 1812, Charles Dickens was the second of eight children in a family burdened with financial troubles. Despite difficult early years, he became the most successful British writer of the Victorian age.

In 1824, young Charles was withdrawn from school and forced to work at a boot-blacking factory when his improvident father, accompanied by his mother and siblings, was sentenced to three months in a debtor's prison. Once they were released, Charles attended a private school for three years. The young man then became a solicitor's clerk, mastered shorthand, and before long was employed as a Parliamentary reporter. When he was in his early twenties, Dickens began to publish stories and sketches of London life in a variety of periodicals.

It was the publication of Pickwick Papers (1836-1837) that catapulted the twenty-five-year-old author to national renown. Dickens wrote with unequaled speed and often worked on several novels at a time, publishing them first in monthly installments and then as books. His early novels Oliver Twist (1837-1838), Nicholas Nickleby (1838-1839), The Old Curiosity Shop (1840-1841), and A Christmas Carol (1843) solidified his enormous, ongoing popularity. As Dickens matured, his social criticism became increasingly biting, his humor dark, and his view of poverty darker still. David Copperfield (1849-1850), Bleak House (1852-1853), Hard Times (1854), A Tale of Two Cities (1859), Great Expectations (1860-1861), and Our Mutual Friend (1864-1865) are the great works of his masterful and prolific period.

In 1858 Dickens's twenty-three-year marriage to Catherine Hogarth dissolved when he fell in love with Ellen Ternan, a young actress. The last years of his life were filled with intense activity: writing, managing amateur theatricals, and undertaking several reading tours that reinforced the public's favorable view of his work but took an enormous toll on his health. Working feverishly to the last, Dickens collapsed and died on June 8, 1870, leaving The Mystery of Edwin Drood uncompleted.

Author biography from the Barnes & Noble Classics edition of David Copperfield.

Date of Birth:

February 7, 1812

Date of Death:

June 18, 1870

Place of Birth:

Portsmouth, England

Place of Death:

Gad's Hill, Kent, England

Education:

Home-schooling; attended Dame School at Chatham briefly and Wellington