Oliver Twist / Charles Dickens,

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Charles Dickens' Oliver Twist was an entirely new kind of a novel in early Victorian England which exposed the contemporary cruelties of the Industrial Revolution and the poor law of 1834. Part autobiographical and part based on the evils of early industrialisation, it is clothed in an unforgettable atmosphere of mystery and all-pervasive evil of the English underground of the early nineteenth century.
The workhouse in which Oliver is born is an anonymous town, and the London to which he escapes is a maze of mean streets and dark houses, each interchangeable with the other. Oliver Twist is more than a novel of social criticism. It represents the conflicts of good and evil, of innocence and experience. Its major characters - Fagin, bill Sikes and the 'Artful Dodger'- have become creatures of myth and its great scenes, often re-created on films and stage, have lost none of their power to terrify and move audience of all stages