One of the most swiftly moving and unified of Chrles Dickens' great novels, Oliver Twist is also famous for its recreation - through the splendidly realized figures of Fagin, nancy, the Artful Dodger, and the evil Bill Sikes - of the vast London underworld of pickpockets, thieves, prostitutes, and abandoned children. Victorian critics took Dickens to task for rendering this world in such a compelling, believable way; but readers over the last 150 years have delivered an alternative judgment by making this story of the orphaned Oliver Twist one of its author's most loved works.
