Oliver Twist

Born in a workhouse to a mother who dies naming him, Oliver Twist grows up starved and beaten under the parish's care, and his famous crime is asking for more gruel. Apprenticed out and then running away to London, he falls in with the Artful Dodger, a boy pickpocket who brings him to Fagin, an old man who trains orphans as thieves and sells what they steal. Oliver is nearly ruined by association, arrested for a theft he did not commit, and then rescued by the theft's actual victim, the kindly Mr Brownlow, who takes him in. Fagin's associates, the brutal Bill Sikes and Sikes's abused companion Nancy, drag Oliver back into their orbit for a burglary that goes wrong, and Nancy, at terrible risk to herself, works secretly to protect Oliver from the criminal Monks, who has his own hidden reasons for wanting the boy ruined. Sikes murders Nancy for her betrayal and is killed fleeing a mob that hunts him down. Oliver's true parentage and inheritance come out at last, and Fagin is hanged.

Dickens is working close to the world he grew up frightened of, and the workhouse and criminal underworld chapters read as reporting as much as invention; he had spent time as a boy in a factory under conditions he never fully forgave. The plotting can be melodramatic and its coincidences generous, but the writing about poverty and cruelty to children still lands with force, and Fagin and Sikes remain two of the most vivid villains in English fiction.

A caution worth stating plainly: Fagin is repeatedly identified in the text simply as "the Jew," language Dickens later revised after a reader wrote to object, and the book carries the antisemitic caricature of its period alongside its sympathy for the poor.