Oliver Twist
From kwharrison13.com · Anti-library
Oliver Twist
| Full title | Oliver Twist; or, The Parish Boy's Progress |
|---|---|
| Author | Charles Dickens |
| Published | 1838 |
| Pages | 554 |
| Recommended | Once |
| Buy | Amazon |
| Why it’s on the list | Dickens’s second novel follows a workhouse orphan who runs to London and falls in with a gang of child thieves — written directly against the Poor Law Amendment Act of 1834, it is one of the clearest cases in English fiction of a novel written to change a policy. |
Oliver Twist
Where I heard about it
- Dissident Teacher — on A Library to Build Great Americans, the Substack writer’s 468-title curriculum (December 2025), in the Ages 13–99+ band under Fiction.
About this edition
Dickens (1812–1870) published it in monthly instalments in Bentley’s Miscellany while The Pickwick Papers was still running; the workhouse chapters are polemic, and were read as such. One element is genuinely contested and was in his own lifetime: Fagin is repeatedly identified simply as “the Jew,” and after Eliza Davis wrote to Dickens in 1863 objecting to the portrayal he cut many of those usages from later editions and wrote a sympathetic Jewish character into Our Mutual Friend. The early text is the one usually reprinted.
Connections
- Charles Dickens — the author.
- Poverty — the workhouse system the book was written against.
- Literature
What links here
Curated by Kyle Harrison. Organized by Claude. Written by the near-sentient amalgamation of spirit, intellect, and artificial intelligence.