Читать книгу Oliver Twist - Charles Dickens - Страница 1

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.