Oliver Twist

George Cruikshank drew the illustrations for one of the monthly issues.[1] Oliver Twist is considered the first novel in the English language to feature a child as its main character,[2] and is notable for Dickens's unromantic portrayal of criminals and their sordid lives.[3] The book's subtitle, The Parish Boy's Progress, is an allusion to Bunyan's The Pilgrim's Progress and a series of popular cartoons drawn in the 18th century by William Hogarth.[4] An early example of a social novel, the book sought to alert the public to a number of social ills of the time, including the Poor Law, which required the poor to work, child labour, and the recruitment of children as criminals. Dickens satirises the hypocrisy of his time by surrounding the serious themes of the novel with sarcasm and dark humour. Some believe that the novel was inspired by Robert Blincoe, an orphan whose accounts of the hardships of child labour in a textile mill were popular in the 1830s.