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  • For me, this is where Dickens hits his all-time low point. I really hated this book. It displays very little of his characteristically superb irony and exquisite writing. The most that can be said for it is that it's easily accessible, but his shameful treatment of the Fagin character and the anti- ... Continue

    For me, this is where Dickens hits his all-time low point. I really hated this book. It displays very little of his characteristically superb irony and exquisite writing. The most that can be said for it is that it's easily accessible, but his shameful treatment of the Fagin character and the anti-semitism embodied therein is severely off-putting. (though Dickens atoned for this later by his fine speech given to the character of the Jewish gentleman in "Our Mutual Friend). Nevertheless, the character of Oliver himself is far from lovable - he's saccharine to point of cloying.

    Although OT is a standard of many middle-school English class curricula, it doesn't really display Dickens at his full power. (For a story about a sad-sack orphan you can actually like, try David Copperfield.)

    

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• ― guaddess said on May 30, 2007 about the Paperback edition| Add your feedback

This fiercely comic tale stands in marked  contrast to its genial predecessor, The Pickwick  Papers. Set against London's seedy back  street slums, Oliver Twist is  the saga of a workhouse orphan captured and thrust  into a thieves' den, where some of Dickens's most  depraved villains preside: the incorrigible  Artful Dodger, the murderous bully Sikes, and the  terrible Fagin, that treacherous ringleader whose  grinning knavery threatens to send them all to the  "ghostly gallows." Yet at the heart of this  drama is the orphan Oliver, whose unsullied  goodness leads him at last to salvation. In 1838 the  publication of Oliver Twist firmly established the  literary eminence of young Dickens. It was,  according to Edgar Johnson, "a clarion peal  announcing to the world that in Charles Dickens the  rejected and forgotten and misused of the world had a  champion."

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