Oliver Twist; or, The Parish Boy’s Progress was published in three volumes by Richard Bentley in November 1838, having been serialized in Bentley’s Miscellany from February 1837. It was Dickens’s second novel (overlapping with the final installments of Pickwick Papers), and it established the pattern that would define his career: a fusion of melodramatic narrative, social criticism, and character creation so vivid that the characters outlive any particular reading of the novel.
The Novel
Oliver Twist is born in a workhouse to an unnamed mother who dies immediately after delivery. He is raised in the parish system — starved, beaten, and exploited — until his famous request (“Please, sir, I want some more”) gets him expelled to an undertaker’s establishment. He runs away to London, where he falls in with Fagin’s gang of child pickpockets. The Artful Dodger, Fagin, Bill Sikes, and Nancy become his associates. Oliver is rescued by Mr. Brownlow, re-kidnapped by Sikes, used in a burglary, shot, rescued again by the Maylies, and eventually discovered to be the legitimate son of a gentleman — his identity concealed by a conspiracy involving his half-brother Monks.
The plot is melodramatic to the point of absurdity (the coincidences are staggering even by Victorian standards), but the novel’s power lies not in its plot but in its scenes: the workhouse, Fagin’s den, the murder of Nancy (one of the most shocking passages in Victorian fiction), and Sikes’s flight and death. Dickens writes these scenes with a hallucinatory intensity that transcends their narrative function.
Themes
Poverty and the Poor Law — the novel is a direct attack on the New Poor Law of 1834, which established workhouses designed to make relief so unpleasant that only the truly desperate would seek it. Dickens’s portrayal of the workhouse system — the starvation, the cruelty, the casual dehumanization — was recognized immediately as both accurate and devastating.
Innocence — Oliver is impossibly virtuous: raised among thieves, he never steals; surrounded by corruption, he remains pure. This implausibility is deliberate. Dickens is arguing that poverty does not automatically produce criminality — that goodness can survive even the worst conditions.
The criminal underworld — Dickens’s London is a city of two worlds: the respectable surface and the criminal underground. The novel moves between them with a fluency that no previous English novelist had achieved.
Collecting Oliver Twist
First edition in book form (Richard Bentley, London, 1838): Three volumes, brown cloth binding. Illustrated by George Cruikshank with 24 etched plates.
Identification points:
- Three-volume format (“three-decker”)
- “Richard Bentley” imprint
- Cruikshank plates (24 etchings)
- “Boz” credited as author (Dickens’s early pseudonym)
Market values:
- Complete three-volume set, fine: $20,000–$60,000
- Very good: $8,000–$20,000
- Individual volumes: $2,000–$8,000
Serial parts (in Bentley’s Miscellany, 1837–1839): Extremely rare as complete runs. $10,000–$30,000.
The Cruikshank plates are as famous as the text, and copies are judged partly on the quality of the plate impressions. Early impressions show finer detail. The novel’s permanent cultural presence — through countless adaptations, from the 1948 David Lean film to the 1968 musical Oliver! — ensures unending demand.