Oliver Twist
Contributors: Peter Fairclough (Editor); Angus Wilson (Introduction)
Edition: Reprint
Series: Penguin Classics
Publisher: Penguin Books
Published: 1988
Place of publication: London
Language: eng
Format: Paperback
Number of pages: 490
ISBN-13: 9780140430172
First sentence: 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, it boasts of one which is common to most towns, great or small, to wit, a workhouse: and in this workhouse was born, on a day and date which I need not take upon myself to repeat, inasmuch as it can be of no possible consequence to the reader, in this stage of the business at all events, the item of mortality whose name is prefixed to the head of this chapter.
Description: Oliver Tivist was a huge popular success.

It was Dickens's second novel with recognizable antecedents in the Gothic Romance, the Newgate Novel and popular melodrama. But out of these elements the 25 -year-old writer created an entirely new kind of novel, scathing in its exposure of contemporary cruelties, always exciting, and clothed in an unforgettable atmosphere of mystery and pervasive evil. Its major characters — Fagin, Bill Sykes, the Artful Dodger — have become creatures of myth, and its great scenes have lost none of their power to terrify and move.