Reading Order
Oliver TwistCharles Dickens Early Novels Reading Order
Charles Dickens's Oliver Twist (1837–39) is the second novel by Dickens and the one that established his reputation as a social reformer as well as a storyteller — the story of the orphan Oliver, born in a workhouse and drawn into a London criminal gang led by the master criminal Fagin, that was the first English novel to take a child as its protagonist and to address directly the conditions of the urban poor and the New Poor Law of 1834.
Where to start
Oliver Twist
Complete Oliver Twist Book List
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Oliver Twist
Charles Dickens·1838·The novel — serialized in Dickens's own Bentley's Miscellany from 1837 to 1839; the novel that introduced the Victorian reading public to the London underworld and to child protagonists; shorter and simpler in plot than the later major novels, and the Dickens most often assigned to younger readers. - 2Buy
Great Expectations
Charles Dickens·1861·Dickens's most perfect novel — another orphan protagonist whose story begins in poverty and reaches beyond it; where Oliver Twist is a melodramatic rescue narrative, Great Expectations is a psychological study of class aspiration; the most natural progression from Oliver Twist in Dickens's catalog. - 3Buy
David Copperfield
Charles Dickens·1850·Dickens's most autobiographical novel — the orphan David's progress from childhood poverty through employment to literary success; Dickens called it his 'favourite child'; sharing Oliver Twist's interest in the vulnerability of the unprotected child in Victorian society and the cruelty of the institutions meant to help them. - 4Buy
Nicholas Nickleby
Charles Dickens·1839·Dickens's third novel — the story of a young man who has to make his own way in the world after his father's death; serialized immediately after Oliver Twist and sharing its social targets (the Yorkshire boarding schools are as grotesque as the workhouse), its melodramatic plots, and its gallery of comic and villainous secondary characters. - 5Buy
A Christmas Carol
Charles Dickens·1843·Dickens's most concentrated moral fable — the miser Scrooge's redemption by three visiting spirits; though not a novel, it is the distillation of Dickens's social argument in its most accessible form; reading it alongside Oliver Twist shows the same argument (that the poor are human beings whose suffering the rich are morally responsible to alleviate) in two completely different tonal registers. - 6Buy
Huckleberry Finn
Mark Twain·1885·Twain's American counterpart to the Dickens orphan tradition — Huck, the son of a drunk and abusive father, fleeing down the Mississippi with the escaped slave Jim; shares Oliver Twist's focus on a child's perspective on adult social arrangements, its use of the journey as a vehicle for social critique, and its portrait of institutional cruelty (slavery in Twain, the workhouse and criminal justice system in Dickens). - 7Buy
Les Misérables
Victor Hugo·1862·Hugo's French parallel to the Dickens social novel tradition — Jean Valjean, a man imprisoned for stealing bread, whose post-release life is defined by his relationship to the law and to an orphan girl Cosette; the most ambitious European counterpart to Dickens in its combination of social reform argument with melodramatic plotting and sympathetic treatment of the criminal poor.
Oliver Twist — Frequently Asked Questions
Is Oliver Twist a good introduction to Charles Dickens?
Oliver Twist is one of the most commonly recommended entry points to Dickens for younger readers or readers new to Victorian fiction, because of its relatively simple plot, its child protagonist, and its memorable villains (Fagin, Bill Sikes). For adult readers coming to Dickens for the first time, Great Expectations is generally more recommended because it is more psychologically complex and better constructed; but Oliver Twist is the Dickens novel that most directly announces his social reform agenda and introduces the London underworld that appears in many subsequent novels. The workhouse scenes ('Please, sir, I want some more') and the figure of Fagin have become cultural touchstones that most English-speaking readers recognize even without reading the novel.
Is Fagin an antisemitic character?
Yes — Dickens's portrayal of Fagin is the most seriously criticized aspect of the novel from a contemporary perspective. Fagin is identified as Jewish throughout the text, and his characterization draws on anti-Semitic stereotypes of the Jewish moneylender, fence, and corrupter of innocents. Dickens himself came to recognize this: in the 1867 Charles Dickens Edition of the novel, he removed many of the references to Fagin's Jewishness (the word 'the Jew' appears 257 times in the original text and very few times in the 1867 revision). In 1863, at the urging of his friend Eliza Davis (whose husband he had sold a house to), he also included the sympathetic Jewish character Riah in Our Mutual Friend as partial atonement. The character of Fagin cannot be separated from this history; contemporary readers and productions of the novel engage directly with the antisemitic dimension of the original characterization.
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