Dickens published Oliver Twist in serial form between 1837 and 1839, his second novel and his first work of sustained social criticism. The story follows Oliver, a workhouse orphan who asks for more gruel and is immediately punished by the horrified parish authorities, then sold as an apprentice to an undertaker, escapes to London, and falls in with Fagin's gang of thieves, a crew of young pickpockets operating out of a den in Saffron Hill. Oliver's situation improves through a series of coincidences that eventually reveal his parentage and restore him to the family and property that are rightfully his, but the novel's power lies less in this resolution than in the portrait of the criminal underworld and the institutional failures that fill it.
Dickens wrote Oliver Twist as a direct attack on the Poor Law Amendment Act of 1834, which had consolidated workhouses into deliberately unpleasant institutions on the theory that comfortable poverty relief would reduce the incentive to work. The workhouse scenes, the gruel, the board of directors, the beadle Mr. Bumble, are satirical rather than documentary, but they encode a genuine indictment of an administrative philosophy that treated poverty as moral failure requiring punishment rather than social condition requiring remedy. Fagin, the fence and teacher of thieves, is one of Dickens's most complex villains: fascinating, pragmatic, genuinely attached to his young pickpockets in his own way, and capable of inspiring a loyalty that the social system has conspicuously failed to earn.
The coincidences that resolve Oliver's story belong to the melodramatic conventions of early Victorian fiction and are less convincing to modern readers than the social observation that surrounds them. What Dickens achieves in Oliver Twist that he would refine in subsequent novels is the use of a sympathetic central figure to make visible the social machinery that grinds around him, the workhouse, the thieves' den, the magistracy, without sentimentalizing any of these institutions into simple villainy. The portrait of Sikes's flight after Nancy's murder, and of Sikes haunted by her eyes, is among the most psychologically acute sequences in Dickens's early work.
Jane Austen wrote all six major novels without a dedicated writing room, she hid her work under blotting paper whenever visitors arrived.
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