• After being abandoned by Sikes, the wounded Oliver makes it back to the house and ends up under the care of the people he was supposed to rob: Miss Rose and her guardian Mrs.
  Maylie, both of whom treat Oliver well, moved by the tragic stories he tells them.

• Dickens (who had extensive knowledge of London street life and child exploitation) explained that he had made Fagin Jewish because “it unfortunately was true, of the time
  to which the story refers, that that class of criminal almost invariably was a Jew.

• Rose Maylie’s adoptive aunt • Harry Maylie – Mrs. Maylie’s son • Mr. Losberne – Mrs. Maylie’s family doctor • Mr. Giles – Mrs. Maylie’s butler • Mr. Brittles – Mrs. Maylie’s
  handyman • Duff and Blathers – two incompetent policemen • Fagin – fence and boss of a criminal gang of young boys and girls • Bill Sikes – a professional burglar • Bull’s Eye – Bill Sikes’s vicious dog • The Artful Dodger – Fagin’s most adept
  pickpocket • Charley Bates – a pickpocket in Fagin’s gang • Toby Crackit – an associate of Fagin and Sikes, a house-breaker • Nancy – one of Fagin’s gang, now living with Bill Sikes • Bet – a girl in Fagin’s gang, sometime friend to Nancy
  • Barney – a criminal cohort of Fagin • Agnes Fleming – Oliver’s mother • Mr. Leeford – father of Oliver and Monks • Old Sally – a nurse who attended Oliver’s birth • Mrs. Corney – matron for the women’s workhouse • Monks – a sickly criminal,
  an associate of Fagin’s, and long-lost half-brother of Oliver • Monks’s mother – an heiress who did not love her husband • Mr. Fang – a magistrate • Tom Chitling – one of Fagin’s gang members, returned from abroad at the time of the murder
  Major themes and symbols In Oliver Twist, Dickens mixes grim realism with merciless satire to describe the effects of industrialism on 19th-century England and to criticise the harsh new Poor Laws.

• “[14] However, Oliver and his name may have been based on a young workhouse boy named Peter Tolliver whom Dickens knew while growing up.

• “[23] Eliza Davis, whose husband had purchased Dickens’s home in 1860 when he had put it up for sale, wrote to Dickens in protest at his portrayal of Fagin, arguing that he
  had “encouraged a vile prejudice against the despised Hebrew”, and that he had done a great wrong to the Jewish people.

• On the way to this happy ending, Dickens explores the kind of life an outcast, orphan boy could expect to lead in 1830s London.

• [30] • Saban’s Adventures of Oliver Twist, a 52 episode animated American-French co-production that aired between 1996 and 1997, where the story is downplayed for younger
  viewers, where Oliver loses his mother in a crowd rather than being dead and the characters are represented by anthropomorphic animals.

• The novel may have been inspired by the story of Robert Blincoe, an orphan whose account of working as a child labourer in a cotton mill was widely read in the 1830s.

• While Dickens first reacted defensively upon receiving Davis’s letter, he then halted the printing of Oliver Twist, and changed the text for the parts of the book that had
  not been set, which explains why after the first 38 chapters Fagin is barely called “the Jew” at all in the next 179 references to him.

• • Twist (2003), an independent film loosely based on Charles Dickens’s novel Oliver Twist • Boy Called Twist (2004), a South African film which resets the story in modern-day
  Cape Town and turns Fagin into an Ethiopian Rastafarian.

• [5] The story takes place in modern-day New York City, with Oliver (voiced by Joey Lawrence) portrayed as an orphaned kitten, the Dodger as a street-wise mongrel with a mix
  of terrier (voiced by Billy Joel), and Fagin (voiced by Dom DeLuise) as a homeless bum who lives on the docks with his pack of stray dogs that he trains to steal so he can survive and repay his debt to loan shark Sykes (voiced by Robert Loggia).

• Oliver flees from the Sowerberrys’ house and later decides to run away to London to seek a better life.

• Oliver Twist; or, The Parish Boy’s Progress, is the second novel by English author Charles Dickens.

• Later, we see a shift in his perspective as he redeems the image of Jews in Our Mutual Friend[18] Film, television and theatrical adaptations Film[edit] • Oliver Twist (1909),
  the first adaptation of Dickens’s novel, a silent film starring Edith Storey and Elita Proctor Otis.

• The “merry old gentleman” Fagin, for example, has satanic characteristics: he is a veteran corrupter of young boys who presides over his own corner of the criminal world;
  he makes his first appearance standing over a fire holding a toasting fork, and he refuses to pray on the night before his execution.

• She wants to save Oliver from a similar fate; at the same time, she recoils from the idea of turning traitor, especially to Bill Sikes, whom she loves.

• As one of Fagin’s victims, corrupted but not yet morally dead, she gives eloquent voice to the horrors of the old man’s little criminal empire.

• All the members of Fagin’s gang suffer unhappy endings, except for Charley Bates; revolted by Nancy’s murder, he turns against Fagin and becomes an honest citizen, moves to
  the country, and eventually becomes prosperous.

• In the midst of corruption and degradation, the essentially passive Oliver remains pure-hearted; he steers away from evil when those around him give in to it, and in proper
  fairy-tale fashion, he eventually receives his reward – leaving for a peaceful life in the country, surrounded by kind friends.

• She is one of the few characters in Oliver Twist to display much ambivalence.

• Oliver owes his life several times over to kindness both large and small.

• Oliver, an innocent child, is trapped in a world where his only options seem to be the workhouse, a life of crime symbolised by Fagin’s gang, a prison, or an early grave.

• Paul Vallely writes that Fagin is widely seen as one of the most grotesque Jews in English literature, and one of the most vivid of Dickens’s 989 characters.

• The first edition was titled: Oliver Twist, or, The Parish Boy’s Progress.

• In an early chapter, Oliver attends a pauper’s funeral with Mr Sowerberry and sees a whole family crowded together in one miserable room.

• Oliver Twist unromantically portrays the sordid lives of criminals, and exposes the cruel treatment of the many orphans in London in the mid-19th century.

• It is likely that Dickens’s own experiences as a youth contributed as well, considering he spent two years of his life in the workhouse at the age of 12 and subsequently,
  missed out on some of his education.

• [3] In an early example of the social novel, Dickens satirises child labour, domestic violence, the recruitment of children as criminals, and the presence of street children.

• Bill Sikes by Fred Barnard Fagin, fearing Oliver might tell the police about his criminal gang, sends a young woman named Nancy, and her abusive lover, the robber Bill Sikes,
  to bring Oliver back to Fagin’s lair.

• • Oliver & Company (1988), Disney full-length animated feature inspired by the story of Oliver Twist.

• • Oliver Twist (1933), the first sound production of Dickens’s novel.

• The Dodger provides Oliver with a free meal and tells him of a gentleman in London who will “give him lodgings for nothing, and never ask for change”.

• [32] The original cast featured Ron Moody as Fagin (he would reprise the role for the film adaptation), and boys who alternated in the juvenile lead of the Artful Dodger included
  Phil Collins and Davy Jones.

• Although Nancy is a full-fledged criminal, indoctrinated and trained by Fagin since childhood, she retains enough empathy to repent her role in Oliver’s kidnapping, and to
  take steps to try to atone.

• Characters • Oliver Twist – an orphan child whose mother died at his birth; father is dead when Oliver’s paternity is revealed.

• Monks had spent years attempting to find and kill Oliver to secure their father’s fortune.

• [4] Oliver Twist has been the subject of numerous adaptations, including a highly successful musical, Oliver!, the multiple Academy Award-winning 1968 motion picture, Disney’s
  animated film Oliver & Company in 1988 and the 1948 film, starring Alec Guinness as Fagin.

• The robbery goes wrong, and the people in the house shoot Oliver in his left arm.

• Fagin in his cell, by British caricaturist George Cruikshank Mr. Brownlow forces Monks to divulge his secrets: his real name is Edward Leeford, and he is Oliver’s paternal
  half-brother.

• [1] The story follows the titular orphan, who is subject to deprivation and vexation in the workhouse where he was left following the death of his mother.

• In this way, Oliver falls in with an infamous criminal known as Fagin, who trains the boys as pickpockets.

• In the tradition of Restoration Comedy and Henry Fielding, Dickens fits his characters with appropriate names.

• Fagin by ‘Kyd’ (1889) “Monks”, a man of whom nothing is known, teams up with Fagin, but reproaches him for failing to make a criminal out of Oliver and sully his reputation.

• Oliver himself, though “badged and ticketed” as a lowly orphan and named according to an alphabetical system, is, in fact, “all of a twist.

• His unidentified mother, found on the street without a wedding ring, had died in childbirth, and his father is not even mentioned.

• Oliver in this version is a young dog.

• [25] • Twisted (1996), an independent film based on Charles Dickens’s novel Oliver Twist set in the gay underground sub-culture of New York City in the 1990s and starring
  Emmy Award, Tony Award, Grammy Award winner Billy Porter and Academy Award nominee William Hickey (actor) directed by Seth Michael Donsky.

• [33] Many songs are well known to the public, such as “Food, Glorious Food”, “Consider Yourself” and “I’d Do Anything”.

• Haunted by Nancy’s ghost and increasingly consumed with fear as news of the murder spreads throughout the countryside, Sikes returns to London in search of a hiding place.

• Monks reports to Fagin of the deed, but Nancy, racked with guilt for her role in Oliver’s kidnapping and having surreptitiously overheard their scheme to seize him, immediately
  leaves to inform Rose Maylie, who tells Mr. Brownlow.

 

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Photo credit: https://www.flickr.com/photos/dcjohn/10791227/’]