Oliver Twist

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…