Oliver Twist – Charles Dickens (1880)

S$108.00

Oliver Twist – Charles Dickens (1880)

S$108.00

Title: Oliver Twist
Author: Charles Dickens, Illustrations By J. Mahoney
Publisher: Chapman and Hall Ltd, London, exact date unknown. Research reveals it to be 1880. The Household edition.
Condition: Decorative cloth, good. Some bumps and scratches to covers, especially to the top edge. Some foxing, and a small closed-tear to page 146, not affecting text. Binding tight.

SKU: oliver-twist-dickens-household Categories: ,

About the book (from wikipedia):

Oliver Twist, subtitled The Parish Boy’s Progress, is the second novel by English author Charles Dickens, published by Richard Bentley in 1838. The story is about an orphan, Oliver Twist, who endures a miserable existence in a workhouse and then is placed with an undertaker. He escapes and travels to London where he meets the Artful Dodger, leader of a gang of juvenile pickpockets. Naïvely unaware of their unlawful activities, Oliver is led to the lair of their elderly criminal trainer Fagin.

Oliver Twist is notable for Dickens’s unromantic portrayal of criminals and their sordid lives.The book exposed the cruel treatment of the many orphans in London during the Dickensian era.

An early example of the social novel, the book calls the public’s attention to various contemporary evils, including child labour, the recruitment of children as criminals, and the presence of street children. Dickens mocks the hypocrisies of his time by surrounding the novel’s serious themes with sarcasm and dark humour. The novel may have been inspired by the story of Robert Blincoe, an orphan whose account of hardships as a child labourer in a cotton mill was widely read in the 1830s. It is likely that Dickens’s own early youth as a child labourer contributed to the story’s development.

Oliver Twist has been the subject of numerous film and television adaptations, and is the basis for a highly successful musical play and the multiple Academy Award winning 1968 motion picture made from it.