Orphaned at birth, Oliver Twist is brought up in the workhouse and sold into apprenticeship to an undertaker. Rebelling against starvation and ill-treatment he flees to London, only to be taken up by a gang of child-pickpockets led by the rascally Fagan, assisted by the Artful Dodger. Oliver is rescued temporarily but then snatched again by thieves, and it becomes plain that the secret of Oliver's birth and background is of deep interest to a large number of people.

In its raking condemnation of contemporary attitudes towards the poor, the claustrophobic horror and comic invention of its portrait of the Victorian underworld, and its sharp, sympathetic insight into the condition of the innocent and the outsider, Oliver Twist remains one of the most powerful and relevant of all nineteenth-century novels.