INTRODUCTION

Charles Dickens was born near Portsmouth in 1812, one of a family of six. His parents were very poor. His father ran heavily into debt and when Charles was twelve, he had to go and work in a factory for making boot polish. These were the kind of conditions in which Charles Dickens grew up and, as a result, the only formal education he received was two years at a very poor school. In fact, he had to teach himself all he knew. He worked for a time as a junior clerk in a lawyer's office, and was then employed by a newspaper as a parliamentary reporter in the House of Commons.

It was at the age of twenty-four that Dickens began to write the novels for which he is now famous. He was a great observer of people and places and, in particular, he was attracted by life and conditions in mid-nineteenth century London. He writes at his best when he is describing the characters of people, particularly those of the lower-middle class, or those of little education. Many of his novels like Oliver Twist, Nicholas Nickleby and David Copperfield drew attention to the unsatisfactory social conditions that existed in England over a hundred years ago, and in a few cases they helped to have them improved.

Oliver Twist is probably the best known of all Dickens's novels. Oliver Twist's parents are dead and he is brought up under the terrible conditions of the Workhouse, to which, in the early nineteenth century, were sent those too poor to live by themselves. When he is nine years old, he is sold to an undertaker, but runs away and is trapped by Fagin and the cruel Bill Sikes who try and teach him to become a thief. In the book everything ends happily as Oliver is rescued by the kindly old Mr. Brownlow, but in 1837 when Oliver Twist was first published, people were very upset to think that the things described in this novel could happen, for they knew that in real life they did not often have a happy ending.