The Nexus Archive
English Novel · Novel
Oliver Twist
by Dickens · The Conscience of the City · Victorian England, 1812-1870
Dickens follows an orphan through parish cruelty, criminal London, hidden kinship, and contested mercy.
- Intermediate
- ~11 hr 45 min read
- 4 chapter guides
- Public domain
Start reading · Read the CHAPTER X. OLIVER BECOMES BETTER ACQUAINTED WITH THE CHARACTERS OF HIS NEW ASSOCIATES; AND PURCHASES EXPERIENCE AT A HIGH PRICE. BEING A SHORT, BUT VERY IMPORTANT CHAPTER, IN THIS HISTORY guide free
Before the text
Editor's Prelude
A Child Among His Protectors
A hungry child asks for another helping, and the people charged with feeding him treat the request as an outrage. Oliver has no family to defend him and no money to make his wishes matter. Before he can understand the world, other people have decided what sort of boy he must be.
Dickens began publishing the novel in monthly installments in Bentley’s Miscellany in 1837. Its comedy gives the officials of the workhouse grand opinions of their own benevolence; its criminal adventures bring the same vulnerable child among adults who make a business of using children. A lodging, a meal or a promise of employment can carry a threat. The narrator’s jokes often leave Oliver standing alone inside the cruelty that makes everyone else laugh.
The story moves between crowded streets and sheltered houses, comic performances and sudden violence. Its secrets and coincidences belong to a melodrama whose urgency depends on whether anyone will believe a child’s account of himself. Dickens also makes Fagin’s Jewishness part of his villainous caricature, a prejudice within a novel so forcefully concerned with mercy. Compassion here has to become an action: someone must feed, shelter or defend the person whom respectable judgment has already condemned.
The opening pages
CHAPTER I. TREATS OF THE PLACE WHERE OLIVER TWIST WAS BORN, AND OF THE CIRCUMSTANCES ATTENDING HIS BIRTH
Among other public buildings in a certain town, which for many reasons it will be prudent to refrain from mentioning, and to which I will assign no fictitious name, there is one anciently common to most towns, great or small: to wit, a workhouse; and in this workhouse was born; on a day and date which I need not trouble myself to repeat, inasmuch as it can be of no possible consequence to the reader, in this stage of the business at all events; the item of mortality whose name is prefixed to the head of this chapter.
For a long time after it was ushered into this world of sorrow and trouble, by the parish surgeon, it remained a matter of considerable doubt whether the child would survive to bear any name at all; in which case it is somewhat more than probable that these memoirs would never have appeared; or, if they had, that being comprised within a couple of pages, they would have possessed the inestimable merit of being the most concise and faithful specimen of biography, extant in the literature of any age or country.
Although I am not disposed to maintain that the being born in a workhouse, is in itself the most fortunate and enviable circumstance that can possibly befall a human being, I do mean to say that in this particular instance, it was the best thing for Oliver Twist that could by possibility have occurred. The fact is, that there was considerable difficulty in inducing Oliver to take upon himself the office of respiration,—a troublesome practice, but one which custom has rendered necessary to our easy existence; and for some time he lay gasping on a little flock mattress, rather unequally poised between this world and the next: the balance being decidedly in favour of the latter. Now, if, during this brief period, Oliver had been surrounded by careful grandmothers, anxious aunts, experienced nurses, and doctors of profound wisdom, he would most inevitably and indubitably have been killed in no time. There being nobody by, however, but a pauper old woman, who was rendered rather misty by an unwonted allowance of beer; and a parish surgeon who did such matters by contract; Oliver and Nature fought out the point between them. The result was, that, after a few struggles, Oliver breathed, sneezed, and proceeded to advertise to the inmates of the workhouse the fact of a new burden having been imposed upon the parish, by setting up as loud a cry as could reasonably have been expected from a male infant who had not been possessed of that very useful appendage, a voice, for a much longer space of time than three minutes and a quarter.
Chapter guides · 4
CHAPTER X. OLIVER BECOMES BETTER ACQUAINTED WITH THE CHARACTERS OF HIS NEW ASSOCIATES; AND PURCHASES EXPERIENCE AT A HIGH PRICE. BEING A SHORT, BUT VERY IMPORTANT CHAPTER, IN THIS HISTORY
The Thieves Join the Chase
Oliver recognizes the theft just as the crowd mistakes him for a thief.
The game becomes real
After days indoors, Oliver is allowed out with the Dodger and Charley Bates. At a bookstall, the Dodger takes an old gentleman’s handkerchief and passes it to Charley; both boys run away. Oliver suddenly understands the pocket-picking game and the valuables in Fagin’s room. Frightened by what he has seen, he runs too.
The wrong boy
The gentleman sees Oliver fleeing and assumes he is the thief. The Dodger and Charley emerge from hiding to join the pursuit, shouting with the crowd before slipping away. Their performance turns the innocent witness into the apparent culprit. Dickens gives the chase a terrible comic energy: the pursuers enjoy a certainty that the reader knows is false.
Dragged away
A man knocks Oliver down and proudly claims the credit. The old gentleman begins to pity the injured boy, but the policeman seizes Oliver’s collar and tears his jacket half off his back while ordering him to stand. Oliver’s insistence that two other boys did it meets disbelief. The chapter closes with him dragged through the streets beside the gentleman and the officer, as members of the crowd run ahead to stare back at him and boys shout in triumph.
CHAPTER XXI. THE EXPEDITION
A Journey Without a Choice
Sikes controls the route, while Oliver fears what waits at its end.
Through the waking city
Sikes takes Oliver through Smithfield’s crowded cattle market and westward out of London, keeping hold of his wrist. When a cart driver asks whether the boy is his, Sikes invents a family relationship and calls him Ned. A threatening touch to the pocket holding his pistol keeps Oliver quiet. The journey can pass for an ordinary outing because the adult supplies the explanation.
Food, sleep and another cart
They leave the first cart at Isleworth, walk on through the day and stop at Hampton for food. Oliver falls asleep while Sikes drinks and smokes. After dark, another driver takes them toward Shepperton in return for ale. Meals and brief shelter relieve Oliver’s exhaustion while carrying him farther from anyone who might protect him.
The dark house
Past Shepperton, they keep walking through muddy lanes and open wastes. As they approach a bridge, Sikes turns down a bank on the left. Oliver sees the water and fears that he will be murdered there. Instead, they reach a solitary, ruined house. Sikes raises the latch and they enter together, as Oliver’s fear deepens in a place whose purpose he cannot understand.
CHAPTER XXXI. INVOLVES A CRITICAL POSITION
Belief and Evidence
Oliver’s friends believe him, but his history can still look like evidence against him.
CHAPTER XLIII. WHEREIN IS SHOWN HOW THE ARTFUL DODGER GOT INTO TROUBLE
The Dodger’s Reputation
Fagin’s circle turns an arrest into a performance of criminal distinction.
Questions readers ask
- How long does it take to read Oliver Twist?
- About 11 hr 45 min in total.
- How difficult is Oliver Twist?
- Intermediate. A long novel; about 12 hours of reading.
- Can I read Oliver Twist for free?
- Oliver Twist is part of Nexus Premium, so reading it needs an account and a Premium subscription. The opening above and two chapter guides on this page are free to read.
- How many chapter guides are there?
- 4 chapter guides, written by the Nexus editors. Two open in full here; the rest show their opening line.
About Dickens
Charles Dickens was a Victorian novelist whose works explore class, poverty, childhood, debt, law, memory, and moral change.
“What does society do to the vulnerable, and who becomes responsible?”
Dickens shaped the modern social novel and gave popular fiction lasting moral force.
Source text: public domain. Chapter guides: original Nexus writing. Oliver Twist is part of The Nexus Archive, guided Quests through the great works.