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Oliver Twist&nbsp;(1838) by Charles Dickens
Publisher: Vintage Books
The darkest and most colourfully grotesque of Charles Dickens&rsquo;s novels swirls around one of his most beloved and unsullied heroes, the orphan Oliver Twist. One of the most swiftly moving and unified of Dickens&rsquo;s great novels, Oliver Twist is also famous for its re-creation &ndash; through the splendidly realised figures of Fagin, Nancy, the Artful Dodger, and the evil Bill Sikes &ndash; of the vast nineteenth-century London underworld of pickpockets, thieves, prostitutes, and abandoned children.
Victorian critics took Dickens to task for rendering this world in such a compelling, believable way, but readers over the last century and a half have delivered an alternative judgement by making this story of the orphaned Oliver one of its author&rsquo;s most loved works.
