Charles Dickens
Oliver Twist
1838 · 366 pages
- Author
- Charles Dickens
- Edition
- First edition in book form, in three volumes; this file is Volume I
- Published
- London, Richard Bentley, New Burlington Street (printed by Samuel Bentley), 1838
- Pages
- 366
- File
- DjVu, 8.3 MB
- Text search
- yes
- Rights
- public domain
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About the book
Oliver Twist; or, The Parish Boy’s Progress is Charles Dickens’s second novel. It came out in monthly instalments in Bentley’s Miscellany from 1837, and the three-volume book edition appeared in 1838, before the serial had finished, still under the pen name “Boz”.
Oliver is an orphan born in a workhouse. After he dares to ask for more gruel he is sold off as an apprentice, runs away to London and falls in with a gang of young pickpockets run by Fagin, alongside the Artful Dodger, Bill Sikes and Nancy. This first volume takes the story from Oliver’s birth through his first arrest, his rescue by Mr Brownlow, his recapture by Nancy and the gang, and the plan to use him in a burglary.
The book was an attack on the Poor Law of 1834 and on the workhouse system, and one of the first English novels with a child as its hero. Its scenes and characters became part of the language and have been adapted countless times for stage and screen.
Contents
Tap a chapter to open the book there.
About this edition
Volume I of the first book edition, published by Richard Bentley in London in 1838 and printed by Samuel Bentley; the author appears only as “Boz”. George Cruikshank’s etched plates are bound in between the text pages, starting with “Oliver asking for more” (file page 40), though several have faded badly in this copy. The scan comes from a University of Illinois copy and has a text layer; publisher’s advertisements follow the text.
How to read it
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- Search works across the whole book.
- In the reader you can jump between chapters, zoom, switch to a night page and save the book as a PDF.
Source
A scan from the Wikimedia Foundation's open projects. The book is in the public domain: free to read, download and share.