- Shopping Bag ( 0 items )
Oliver Twist (Barnes & Noble Classics Series) [NOOK Book]
( 544 )
In 1824, young Charles was withdrawn from school and forced to work at a boot-blacking factory when his improvident father, accompanied by his mother and siblings, was sentenced to three months in a debtor's prison. Once they were released, Charles attended a private school for three years. The young man then became a solicitor's clerk, mastered shorthand, and before long was employed as a Parliamentary reporter. When he was in his early twenties, Dickens began to publish stories and sketches of London life in a variety of periodicals.
It was the publication of Pickwick Papers (1836-1837) that catapulted the twenty-five-year-old author to national renown. Dickens wrote with unequaled speed and often worked on several novels at a time, publishing them first in monthly installments and then as books. His early novels Oliver Twist (1837-1838), Nicholas Nickleby (1838-1839), The Old Curiosity Shop (1840-1841), and A Christmas Carol (1843) solidified his enormous, ongoing popularity. As Dickens matured, his social criticism became increasingly biting, his humor dark, and his view of poverty darker still. David Copperfield (1849-1850), Bleak House (1852-1853), Hard Times (1854), A Tale of Two Cities (1859), Great Expectations (1860-1861), and Our Mutual Friend (1864-1865) are the great works of his masterful and prolific period.
In 1858 Dickens's twenty-three-year marriage to Catherine Hogarth dissolved when he fell in love with Ellen Ternan, a young actress. The last years of his life were filled with intense activity: writing, managing amateur theatricals, and undertaking several reading tours that reinforced the public's favorable view of his work but took an enormous toll on his health. Working feverishly to the last, Dickens collapsed and died on June 8, 1870, leaving The Mystery of Edwin Drood uncompleted.
Author biography from the Barnes & Noble Classics edition of David Copperfield.
Second novels separate the sheep from the goats, the possessors of enduring talent from the mere purveyors of flash-in-the-pan literary sensation. Many writers embark on a second novel with a good deal of trepidation, especially if their first book has achieved the kind of instant acclaim awarded to Charles Dickens's Pickwick Papers. If Dickens experienced any such anxiety when he set out to write Oliver Twist, he countered it with his lifelong drug of choice, a frenetic and compulsive productivity. Appearing in monthly installments, the usual mode of publication for novels until late in the nineteenth century, Oliver Twist was mostly written in tandem with other projects. When the first two chapters were published in Bentley's Miscellany in February 1837, Dickens was still writing Pickwick Papers as a serial for Chapman and Hall. With Pickwick Papers completed in November 1837, the twenty-five-year-old Dickens devoted himself to Oliver Twist for a mere four months before beginning a third novel, Nicholas Nickleby. Oliver Twist was finished and published in three volumes in November 1838, while the serial version in Bentley's still had five months to run. This frenzied pace of production was halted only once, in June 1837, when the intensity of his grief over the sudden death of his seventeen-year-old sister-in-law, Mary Hogarth, forced Dickens to postpone that month's installments of both Pickwick Papers and Oliver Twist. Mary Hogarth is memorialized as Rose Maylie in Oliver Twist.
Where many young writers would have been tempted to stay with a winning formula, Dickens's second novel was a total departure from the timeless comedic world of Pickwick Papers. The first three installments of Oliver Twist employed ferocious satire to address a contemporary social evil, the sufferings of the poor in the new workhouses mandated by the 1834 Poor Law Amendment Act. Then, with the introduction of Fagin and his gang of juvenile pickpockets in the fourth installment, Dickens's readers found themselves plunged into London's criminal underworld. The novel's final installment contained a gruesome murder, a manhunt, and a hanging. While a few readers, such as the Prime Minister, Lord Melbourne, were shocked by Dickens's turn to such sordid subject matter, many more, including nineteen-year-old Queen Victoria, were enthralled. Oliver Twist was every bit as popular as Pickwick Papers. Three dramatizations played in London theaters during the winter of 1838-1839. Perfectly complemented by George Cruikshank's quirky illustrations, the novel was in a third edition by 1841, and even spawned an imitation, Thomas Prest's Oliver Twiss. It remained a bestseller through Dickens's lifetime and beyond. The penny edition of 1871 sold 150,000 copies in three weeks. During the last decade of his life, Dickens toured England, Ireland, and America, giving public readings of favorite sections from his novels. "Sikes and Nancy," based on chapter XLVII of Oliver Twist, was a particular favorite of both author and audience. While Dickens's rendition of Nancy's brutal murder sent audiences into fits of screaming and fainting, a physician waited backstage to monitor the ailing author's pulse rate. Dickens's friend and biographer John Forster speculated that the energy and fervor with which Dickens threw himself into these performances may have contributed to his early death from heart disease in 1870.
Oliver Twist remains one of the best known and most popular of Dickens's novels. Translated, adapted, dramatized, filmed (most notably by David Lean in 1948), and even turned into a musical, the story of Little Orphan Oliver and his grotesque tormentors has passed into popular culture. Millions of people who have never opened the nineteenth-century novel are familiar with the image of a ragged child holding out his porringer and asking for more. Like Robinson Crusoe or Huck Finn, Oliver has evolved from fiction into fable and archetype. Or perhaps he has simply returned to his roots. The characters and settings of Oliver Twist resonate so deeply and so variously because they echo a diverse collection of popular genres. The novel is at once social satire, thriller, melodrama, autobiography, fairy tale, moral fable, and religious allegory. While some of the specific texts that influenced Oliver Twist's composition are no longer familiar to contemporary readers and may require some literary excavation, each of the various genres whose competing voices create the novel's seductive energy survive and are easily recognizable in modern forms of entertainment.
Like its predecessor, Pickwick Papers, Dickens's second novel reflects his childhood passion for the eighteenth-century picaresque novels Tom Jones and Roderick Random. As in the novels by Henry Fielding and Tobias Smollett, the plot of Oliver Twist revolves around illegitimacy and disputed inheritance. Like his literary forebears, Oliver is unaware of his true identity and adrift in a world of rogues and schemers. Unlike the more robust heroes of Fielding and Smollett, however, Dickens's orphan does not grow up; he remains a frail and passive child throughout the novel, more victim than protagonist. Oliver's failure to reach adolescence preserves him from the sexual temptations that befall Tom Jones and Roderick Random, perhaps making it easier for Dickens to persuade his Victorian audience that "little Oliver" embodies "the purest good."
Anonymous
Posted January 23, 2001
Charles Dickens uses the novel Oliver Twist similarly to his many other novels to portray the life of the poor through the struggle of the main character. Oliver Twist is a bast@rd child who is forced into an orphanage (workhouse) for the poor. He eventually runs off and gets tangled up with a group of other poor children who steal for their leader in crime Fagin. While there, he learns the tricks of the trade and also discovers that it is not the life for him and struggles to get out. Charles Dickens does an excellent job of ridiculing the upper and middle class for their treatment of the poor, while delivering an excellent story about the adventures of Oliver Twist.
7 out of 7 people found this review helpful.
Was this review helpful? Yes NoThank you for your feedback. Report this reviewThank you, this review has been flagged.Anonymous
Posted November 20, 2000
This story is about a young boy named Oliver Twist born in a work house in the mid 1800's. A work house is like todays orphange. This work house was very dirty and their was never enough to eat. Oliver is just a shy boy who can not take the harsh conditions of the work house. Oliver runs to London only to fall in with a croud of a youth pickpocket gang led by the crimnal Mr. Fagin. Oliver befriends some one in the gang, and finds his true identity, and gets his long over due inhairtence. This book is a classic Dickens book filled with action and suspence. I would give it 4 stars.
5 out of 5 people found this review helpful.
Was this review helpful? Yes NoThank you for your feedback. Report this reviewThank you, this review has been flagged.9910707
Posted October 23, 2011
This version is only the first half of the book, I believe.
3 out of 3 people found this review helpful.
Was this review helpful? Yes NoThank you for your feedback. Report this reviewThank you, this review has been flagged.After years of people telling me how great this book was I decided to read it to see what all the fuss was about. It turned out that it lived up to my expectations. This book is well written and a classic story about an orphan and his surrounding characters. There is drama, fear, compasion, and so many more emotions Dickens put into this novel. It's a good read; you won't be disapointed!
3 out of 3 people found this review helpful.
Was this review helpful? Yes NoThank you for your feedback. Report this reviewThank you, this review has been flagged.Anonymous
Posted May 27, 2009
The book Oliver Twist written by Charles Dickens was very good. During the first semester of history I learned about the industrial revolution. Many children had to work long hours in factories or workhouses. The conditions were really bad. Oliver had to work in the workhouse from the time he was very young. I feel that it was unjust and cruel to make a little child work in a workhouse at such a young age. The children suffered greatly because food was scarce and also the work hours were so harsh it caused the children to become very weak and sick.
The relationship between Oliver and Dodger is very strong. I think even though Dodger is a bad boy he is a good friend to Oliver. Dodger's personality is good though. He is very friendly and is a brother figure to Oliver. Oliver needs a friend like that because he an orphan, has been through a lot of harsh times working and living at the workhouse, and never met his family before.
I also liked the plot of the story. Oliver is on a search to find his family with the help of the locket that his mother left for him after she gave birth to him. Oliver's persistent personality helps him through out the journey. He meets many various people that affect his life forever. For example, Dodger.
I recommend this book to anyone that likes a book with suspense and a hint of history. I personally liked the book because I read it after I knew some information on the industrial revolution when this book takes place. The book made a lot of sense to me because I had a lot of knowledge of the industrial revolution and about the time period when the book takes place.
2 out of 2 people found this review helpful.
Was this review helpful? Yes NoThank you for your feedback. Report this reviewThank you, this review has been flagged.My second Dickens work was not quite the ecstatic experience my first was, but it was still amazing. He does have a different sentence structure and they do tend to run on, but when you're done and you reflect on what you just read ... it was well worth the effort!
2 out of 2 people found this review helpful.
Was this review helpful? Yes NoThank you for your feedback. Report this reviewThank you, this review has been flagged.ericho
Posted January 14, 2009
A young orphan born into a cruel world. Abused and mistreated by all of his peers, yet innocent at heart. Through good will the orphan finally finds his place in society, being accepted into his dream family. Sound a bit cliche? It should since this is a very common theme and plot that is present in many stories and novels. Although Oliver Twist, by Charles Dickens, has the same cliche plot, it offers so much more through Dickens' mastery of the English language and his effectiveness at writing with it. In the book, Dickens vividly portrays nineteenth century London and the harsh conditions that the majority of the population have to endure. At first, it was somewhat difficult to comprehend Dickens' writing style, but as I became more familiar with it, it started to become easier to understand. The book starts with Oliver's birth in a child labor workhouse. Unfortunately Oliver's mother dies shortly after giving birth and Oliver is left in the care of the caretakers of the workhouse. Oliver is forced to work for the undertakers for the good majority of his childhood, but after his famous, "Please may I have some more," line, he is traded away by the workhouse for his rebellion. From there, he is apprenticed by a coffin maker. After being provoked into a fight with another apprentice, Oliver leaves and is eventually picked up by a pick-pocketing gang in London. From there the plot thickens, more conflicts arise, and poor Oliver is caught between everything. Despite this, Oliver eventually receives the happy ending he deserves.
2 out of 2 people found this review helpful.
Was this review helpful? Yes NoThank you for your feedback. Report this reviewThank you, this review has been flagged.SimplyAmazing
Posted December 27, 2008
I Also Recommend:
I am a good, fast reader but the thing is with this book the senetences are paragraphs, so you know it is pretty hard to read. However this book is really good. It teaches good lessons and stuff like that. I would totaly recommend it (as long as you can read the LONGEST sentences in THE world)! If you are into good books with long sentences try The Adventures and the Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes. Just simply amazing books try Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows and Twilight (good higher level vocabulary).
Note I am a 11 year old so the vocab is higher level for me!
2 out of 7 people found this review helpful.
Was this review helpful? Yes NoThank you for your feedback. Report this reviewThank you, this review has been flagged.Anonymous
Posted December 2, 2007
I've read this book, probably, about ten times, and I still enjoy the Victorian setting, classic characters, and the message of hope and redemption in the world of crime and greed.
2 out of 2 people found this review helpful.
Was this review helpful? Yes NoThank you for your feedback. Report this reviewThank you, this review has been flagged.Anonymous
Posted July 22, 2001
Of all the wonderful books in the world, so far I have not read one that can top this classic! At sixteen years old I have just finished reading this masterpiece for the fifth time at least. It's an all-time-favorite. Though some people may argue that it is boring or childish, it is none of these. The characters are well developed with complex personalitys and the plot intriguing. Such a book is hard to find and ought to be appreciated!
2 out of 2 people found this review helpful.
Was this review helpful? Yes NoThank you for your feedback. Report this reviewThank you, this review has been flagged.Anonymous
Posted July 26, 2001
This story is a pretty much unabriged story compared to all the other Oliver Twist books I've read. A great book. Makes sense and does not have the word sense of Charles Dickens. I recommend this book for readers ages 9-23. As soon as you pick up this book you will not want to put it down.
2 out of 2 people found this review helpful.
Was this review helpful? Yes NoThank you for your feedback. Report this reviewThank you, this review has been flagged.Anonymous
Posted December 28, 2011
Thisvis the whole book and if you say you believe it is but you arent sure, figure out the facts if you have never read this book before and you arent so sure find someone who does bc im tired of peeps trying to vsay that something isnt the full thing and they dont know if it is or not if u rnt sure find someone who does. Gosh im tiref of this mess.
1 out of 2 people found this review helpful.
Was this review helpful? Yes NoThank you for your feedback. Report this reviewThank you, this review has been flagged.Anonymous
Posted December 28, 2011
I read this book before, but I don't remember how many capters it has..... Can anyone tell mr?
1 out of 2 people found this review helpful.
Was this review helpful? Yes NoThank you for your feedback. Report this reviewThank you, this review has been flagged.Anonymous
Posted December 13, 2011
Good
1 out of 2 people found this review helpful.
Was this review helpful? Yes NoThank you for your feedback. Report this reviewThank you, this review has been flagged.Anonymous
Posted December 12, 2011
Diet book
1 out of 2 people found this review helpful.
Was this review helpful? Yes NoThank you for your feedback. Report this reviewThank you, this review has been flagged.Anonymous
Posted December 1, 2011
I liked this book very much. I love Oliver; I feel so much sympathy for him. He had such
a terrible life growing up. I felt like I wanted to just jump into the book and give Oliver a hug. I
also love how surprising the ending is. I was not expecting to find out that Monks was Oliver¿s
half brother. I had no clue at all. It was amazing how all of the people in the story matched up in
some way. I was not expecting Rose to be the sister of Oliver¿s mother at all! Rose did
say something about how she had a strange background, but I was not thinking that she was
related to Oliver. What I didn¿t like was that all the surprising things happened so close together
at the end of the book. It was kind of hard to take each shock one after another.
One of my favorite parts of this book was the romance between Rose and Harry Maylie. I
was not expecting this to be in a book about an orphan. I loved how it was worked into the story,
because I am always attracted to books and movies that have a love story. It was a pleasant
surprise to see it in this book.
My favorite characters were Mr. Brownlow and Oliver. I loved Oliver because he is just
such a sweet human being and he always does what he thinks is right. Even when he did attack
Noah, he did it for a justified reason! No one should be talking badly about someone else¿s
mother; especially when that person¿s mother is not alive and the person never got to meet their
mother.
I loved Mr. Brownlow because he saw the good in Oliver. Mr. Brownlow took Oliver in
and nursed him to health, even though he was the suspect for stealing a handkerchief that
belonged to him. He saw that Oliver was an innocent little boy and a good person. When Oliver
was kidnapped, Mr. Brownlow still wanted to find Oliver. He wanted to get proof that Oliver
was the good person that he thought he was. He eventually did find him. Overall, I really liked
this book. It was nothing like I expected it to be, full of so many surprises.
1 out of 1 people found this review helpful.
Was this review helpful? Yes NoThank you for your feedback. Report this reviewThank you, this review has been flagged.Anonymous
Posted November 25, 2011
If you loved the book see the play
1 out of 2 people found this review helpful.
Was this review helpful? Yes NoThank you for your feedback. Report this reviewThank you, this review has been flagged.Anonymous
Posted October 2, 2011
Oliver goes from tragedy to triumph in this heartwarming book
1 out of 1 people found this review helpful.
Was this review helpful? Yes NoThank you for your feedback. Report this reviewThank you, this review has been flagged.8952317
Posted September 3, 2011
This book was very good. I liked the part where Oliver said that he wanted more to eat. I also liked the part where he was balking at becoming a chimmney sweep, and I also liked the part where he was recovering from fever.
1 out of 1 people found this review helpful.
Was this review helpful? Yes NoThank you for your feedback. Report this reviewThank you, this review has been flagged.TamBaig
Posted August 14, 2011
A true classic
1 out of 1 people found this review helpful.
Was this review helpful? Yes NoThank you for your feedback. Report this reviewThank you, this review has been flagged.
LendMe™
![Oliver Twist [Illustrated]](http://img2.imagesbn.com/images/119930000/119933805.GIF)
Overview
Oliver Twist, by Charles Dickens, is part of the Barnes & Noble Classics series, which offers quality editions at affordable prices to the student and the general reader, including new scholarship, thoughtful design, and pages of carefully crafted extras. Here are some of the remarkable features of Barnes & Noble Classics: