WRITTEN BY CHSRLES DICKEN

4. Oliver Twist

5. Author
Charles dickens

6. Main Characters
• Oliver Twist
Is the child hero of a melodramatic novel
of social protest. On many levels, Oliver is
not a believable character, because although
he’s raised in corrupt surrounding, his purity
and virtue are absolute. Throughout the novel,
Dickens uses Oliver’s character to challenge the Victorian
idea that paupers and criminals are already evil at birth,
arguing instead that a corrupt environment is the source of
vice. At the same time, Oliver’s incorruptibility undermines
some of Dickens’s assertions.

7. • Nancy
The narrator’s reference to her “free
agreeable…manners” indicates that
she is a prostitute. She is immersed
in the vices condemned by her
society but she also commits perhaps
the most noble act in the novel when
she sacrifices her own life in order to
protect Oliver. Nancy is good and evil.
Her ultimate choice to do good at a great personal cost is
a strong argument in favor of the incorruptibility of basic
goodness, no matter how many environmental obstacles it
may face.

8. • Fagin
Although Dickens denied that anti-Semitism
had influenced his portrait of Fagin, the
Jewish thief’s characterization does seem
to owe much to ethnic stereotypes. He is
ugly, simpering, miserly, and avaricious.
Constant references to him as “the Jew” seem to
indicate that his negative traits are intimately
connected to his ethnic identity. However, Fagin is
more than a statement of ethnic prejudice. He is a
richly drawn, resonant embodiment of terrifying
villainy. Fagin is meant to inspire nightmares in child
and adult readers alike. The gallows, and the fear
they inspire in Fagin, are a specter even more
horrifying to contemplate than Fagin himself.

9. Other Characters
• Mr.Brownlow
A well-off, erudite gentlemen who serves as Oliver’s
first benefactor. Throughout the novel, he behaves
with compassion and common sense and emerges as
a natural leader.
o Mr.Bumble
The pompous, self important beadle-a minor church
official- for the workhouse where Oliver is born-
Though Mr-Bumble preaches Christian morality, he
behaves without compassion toward the paupers
under his care. Dickens mercilessly satirizes his self
righteousness, greed, hypocrisy, and folly, of which is
name is an obvius symbol.

10. •SUMMARY

11. OlIVER GOES ON THE
BOOK SHOP
Oliver told to MR. Brownlow about workhouse

12. AT THIEVES’ INN
NANCY AND
SIKES CATCH OLIVER

13. NANCY AND OLIVER
Nancy and sikes brought oliver to Fagin's house

14. Monks
Fagin meets monks
He wants a boy

15. OLIVER GOES BACK
TO HOUSE
Thieves lose the oliver
Monks also wants news of oliver

16. Oliver at Mrs. Maylie’s

20. he nd

22. uestions??