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Charles Dickens
Oliver Twist was originally published between 1837 and 1839. Its focus on social injustice and attack on civil institutions - such as the workhouses, the New Poor Law and a legal system
that allowed children to be sold like slaves - made him the
champion of the people...(scroll down)
DESCRIPTION
To give the book its full title: The Adventures of Oliver
Twist, or The Parish Boy's Progress. He was working on the book at the same time as
he was finishing The Pickwick Papers. After the
death of Mary Hogarth he had stopped
working on both novels and talked about the need to take a break. He explained to his readers that there would be
no instalment that month. It was originally published in Bentley's
Miscellany, a literary magazine set up by the publisher Richard Bentley.
Dickins and Bentley had a stormy relationionship and Dickins was unhappy with the way
Bentley treated him. So in 1839 he bought all the rights to Oliver from the
publisher, paying £2250 - the money had been provided by Chapman & Hall, his new
publisher.
The story is so well known now but to outline: a heavily pregnant young woman
arrives at a workhouse, gives birth to a son, then dies. The workhouse authorities name the baby
Oliver Twist. At nine years old he is put to work to earn his meagre keep. After getting into trouble with the workhouse authorities, he
is sold
to an
undertaker as an apprentice. Once there he is mistreated and runs away. He ends up walking to Londonwhere he meets Jack Dawkins, aka the Artful Dodger. The Dodger takes Oliver back to his home, where a
gang of boys live sleep and learn the A-Z of thieving, all tfor the benefit
of the aged mister Fagin (an anyone think of any other than Alec Guinness's Fagin when they think of the character?).
There have been numerous successful adaptations for the stage, television
and cinema which have contributed to making the book one of Dickens's best-known and most iconic novels.
Indeed, characters such as Fagin, the Artful Dodger, Nancy
and Oliver himself remain household names.
The manuscript pages of Oliver Twist showed marked differences from later
manuscripts. He was trying out new quill pens, using different inks and
changing the types of paper he used. His handwriting also changed.
When the young Princess Victoria became Queen she read Oliver Twist and .
was said to have found the book "excessively interesting". However it
wasn't until March 1870, three months before Dickens's death, that the two great figures of
Victorian history had their the first and only private meeting.
Sourced & abbreviated from the Holy Grail of Dickens Books - Charles Dickens [Hardcover] by Lucinda Dickens Hawksley
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