Oliver Twist (Vintage Classics)

This darkest and most colorfully grotesque of Charles Dickens&;s novels swirls around one of his most beloved and unsullied heroes, the orphan Oliver Twist. One of the most swiftly moving and unified of 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 nineteenth-century 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 century and a half have delivered an alternative judgment by making this story of the orphaned Oliver one of its author&;s most loved works.