Oliver Twist

Oliver Twist; or, The Parish Boy's Progress is the second novel by the English author Charles Dickens. It was originally published as a serial between 1837 and 1839 and as a three-volume book in 1838.

The plot is an orphan's progress through institutions. Oliver grows up in a workhouse, runs away to London, meets a gang of child pickpockets run by Fagin, and eventually learns who his parents were. The alternative title alludes to Bunyan's The Pilgrim's Progress and to the eighteenth-century caricature series by William Hogarth, which places the book in a tradition of moral narrative about a young person's passage through a corrupt city.

It is an early example of the social novel, and Dickens uses it to satirise child labour and the treatment of the poor as well as to tell a story. The targets are institutional rather than personal: the workhouse, the parish and the courts are all shown as systems that treat children as administrative problems. It was published in instalments before it was collected into three volumes, so its first readers met the work a part at a time.