Oliver Twist

Charles Dickens

Oxford Bookworms LibraryLevel 6

A level 6 Oxford Bookworms Library graded reader. Retold for Learners of English by Richard Rogers.

London in the 1830s was no place to be if you were a hungry ten-year-old boy, an orphan without friends or family, with no home to go to, and only a penny in your pocket to buy a piece of bread.

But Oliver Twist finds some friends – Fagin, the Artful Dodger, and Charley Bates. They give him food and shelter, and play games with him, but it is not until some days later that Oliver finds out what kind of friends they are and what kind of 'games' they play…

Charles Dickens

Oliver Twist

OLIVER TWIST

When Oliver Twist was first published in 1838, it was not fashionable to write novels that showed life in all its miserable reality. But Dickens wanted to shock his readers. He wanted to show criminals as they really were, and to reveal all the horrors and violence that hid in the narrow, dirty backstreets of London. So he gives us the evil Fagin, the brutal Bill Sikes, and a crowd of thieves and robbers, who lie and cheat and steal, and live in fear of prison or the hangman’s rope around their necks.

Dickens also had another purpose. He wanted to show that goodness can survive through every kind of hardship. So he gives us little Oliver Twist – an orphan thrown into a world of poverty and crime, starved and beaten and unloved. He gives us Nancy – poor, miserable, unhappy Nancy, who struggles to stay loyal in a cruel world.

And, as in all the best stories, goodness triumphs over evil in the end.

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ISBN 978 0 19 479266 0

A complete recording of this Bookworms edition of

Oliver Twist is available on audio CD ISBN 978 0 19 479246 2

Printed in Hong Kong

Illustrations by: George Cruikshank courtesy of the Bodleian Library,

from the engravings in the 1846 edition

Word count (main text): 26,560 words

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e-Book ISBN 978 0 19 478628 7

e-Book first published 2012

PEOPLE IN THIS STORY

Oliver Twist

Mrs Mann, in charge of the �baby farm’

Mr Bumble, the beadle

Mrs Corney, a widow, in charge of the workhouse

Old Sally, a woman in the workhouse

Mr Sowerberry, an undertaker

Mrs Sowerberry, his wife

Charlotte, the Sowerberrys’ ser