Description

Born into poverty and hardship, Oliver Twist is an unfortunate young boy. An orphan, he is sent to a workhouse at a tender age, forced to labor all day with very little to eat. Oliver creates a scandal one day when he requests a second helping of the miserable gruel the workhouse children are fed. Thrown out of this sorry excuse for a home, Oliver is taken in as an undertaker's apprentice. Soon realizing that his fate has become no less desperate, Oliver runs away and finds himself under the wing of the London crime boss Fagin. Along with other young thieves working for Fagin, Oliver turns to a life of crime against his better judgment. Although it is here, in the midst of wickedness, that he finds the only kindness he has known, Oliver's destiny is far from complete. As in many of Dickens's greatest novels, our hero's fortunes rise and fall and an incredible cast of characters play out a grand human drama, highlighting such glaring social problems of the day as poverty and child labor in industrial society.

About the Author

Charles Dickens (1812-1870) was uniquely successful as a writer during his lifetime, enjoying huge followings from readers and audiences in England and America. When, early in life, sudden misfortune sent his family into extreme poverty, the young Charles was sent to work in a factory. Never forgetting this childhood misery, Dickens wrote often in later life about the plights of the working poor. As a young man he became a law clerk and stenographer, moving into journalism in the 1830s. Dickens's early journalistic sketches formed the basis for his first literary works. With the 1836 serialized publication of The Pickwick Papers, his unparalleled success as an author began. Dickens went on to write such famous novels as David Copperfield, Great Expectations, Barnaby Rudge, Hard Times, and Bleak House, with all of his works remaining in print to this day.

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Opening Lines (Experimental)

Among other public buildings in a certain town, which for many reasons it will be prudent to refrain from mentioning, and to which I will assign no fictitious name, there is one anciently common to most towns, great or small: to wit, a workhouse; and in this workhouse was born; on a day and date ...