Oliver Twist

OLIVER TWIST needs little introduction; it remains one of the most popular and widely read classics of all time. This new edition from Cardenio, with reproductions of the original illustrations by George Cruikshank, follows the exact text with which Dickens first introduced the story of Oliver Twist, publishing it in serial form in Bentley’s Miscellany between February 1837 and April 1839. The Bentley edition is the only edition in which Dickens, famously, in the very opening line of the novel, lets us know the town of Oliver Twist’s birth, by assigning it the fictitious name he had invented as the location for his anthology of stories known as The Mudfog Papers. Shocking in its revelations of a seedy underworld teeming with ruthless characters such as the arch-villain Fagin and Bill Sikes, Oliver Twist is the first of Dickens’ novels to speak out against the deplorable inhumanity of Victorian society.