Oliver TwistCharles Dickens

Oliver Twist began appearing in monthly parts in 1837, and its first target was a statute three years old. The New Poor Law of 1834 cut off relief outside the workhouse and made the workhouse harder than the worst free labor, on the theory that poverty is a choice to be discouraged. Dickens opens there. A boy born to a dying woman nobody can name is raised on thin gruel by a parish that treats his hunger as insolence, and when he asks for more he is sold off for five pounds.

London supplies the second world. Fagin trains children as pickpockets and holds them by turns fed and terrified. The Artful Dodger has the manners of a small businessman; Bill Sikes has none. Nancy moves between the thieves and the people trying to get Oliver out, and Sikes beats her to death for it. In his preface Dickens defended these portraits against the fashion for highwaymen in velvet coats. He wanted thieves shown in their filth and their fear, and the gallows at the end of the road. Fagin's last night is written from inside the condemned cell.

The plot resolves through an inheritance. Oliver turns out to be a gentleman's son, cheated of his legacy by his half-brother Monks, and money returns him to the station he was born into.

Oliver himself never changes. Workhouse, undertaker's shop, and thieves' kitchen leave no mark on him, and Dickens gives that as a fact about the boy rather than something the story produces. The Syntopicon takes the novel up under wealth, punishment, and good and evil, where its institutions do the arguing.