Hardcover, 443 pages
English language
Published Feb. 21, 1967 by Oxford University Press.
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Oliver Twist, Dicken's first novel in the strict sense, was serialized in Bentley's Miscellany from February Its subject 1837 to March 1839. matter, low life in London, and the author's attack upon the scandal of the workhouse system came as something of a surprise to readers enjoying the last episodes of Pick- wick Papers. Dickens believed, however, that ' to draw a knot of such associates in crime as really did exist ; to paint them in all their deformity, in all their wretched- ness, in all the squalid misery of their lives, to show them as they really were ... would be a service to society.' His non-romantic treatment of Fagin, Bill Sikes and Nancy, and his powerfully evoca- tive picture of London slums in the 1830s also did a service to the art of fiction, by enlarging the range of subjects permitted to the novelist, and by introducing …
Oliver Twist, Dicken's first novel in the strict sense, was serialized in Bentley's Miscellany from February Its subject 1837 to March 1839. matter, low life in London, and the author's attack upon the scandal of the workhouse system came as something of a surprise to readers enjoying the last episodes of Pick- wick Papers. Dickens believed, however, that ' to draw a knot of such associates in crime as really did exist ; to paint them in all their deformity, in all their wretched- ness, in all the squalid misery of their lives, to show them as they really were ... would be a service to society.' His non-romantic treatment of Fagin, Bill Sikes and Nancy, and his powerfully evoca- tive picture of London slums in the 1830s also did a service to the art of fiction, by enlarging the range of subjects permitted to the novelist, and by introducing a new realism in approach.
This edition contains 24 illustra- tions by George Cruikshank.