One of the great novelist’s most popular works, Oliver Twists is also the purest distillation of Dickens’s genius. This tale of the orphan who is reared in a workhouse and runs away to London is a novel of social protest, a morality tale, and a detective story. Oliver Twist presents some of the most sinister characters in Dickens-the master thief Fagin; the leering Artful dodger; the murderer Bill Sikes-along with some of the most sentimental and comical characters. Only Dickens can give us nightmares and daydream together. According to George Orwell, ‘in Oliver Twist … Dickens attacked English institutions with a ferocity that has never since been approached. Yet he managed to do it without making himself hated, and, more than this, the very people he attacked have welcomed him so completely that he has become a national institution himself.’

With an introduction by Frederick Busch and and afterword by Edward Le Comte

‘The greatest writer of his time.’ Edmund Wilson

‘One of the great poets of the novel, a genius of his art.’ Edgar Johnson

‘All of his characters are my personal friends-I am constantly comparing them with living persons and living persons with them, and what a spirit there was in all he wrote.’ Leo Tolstoy