Oliver Twist

The orphaned Oliver Twist falls in with thieves and pickpockets in Charles Dickens' novel of adventure, escapades, and some of the most beloved characters in literature. Full color illustrations.

As chief parliamentary correspondent for CTV News, Craig Oliver is one of Canada’s most recognized and respected journalists, a newsman who has reported on the major political figures and news stories of our times with passion, insight, and bracing candour. He brings those same qualities to this many-layered memoir of an extraordinary professional and personal life. The only child of two alcoholics, he spent his childhood and adolescence in the homes of strangers. A chance summer job with the local CBC station launched his broadcasting career, taking Oliver from Prince Rupert, B.C. to Ottawa, Washington, and Central America. He witnessed up close the follies, foibles and occasional brilliance of the men and women who shaped our history over four decades. At the same time, Oliver pursued a personal passion for Canada’s wilderness rivers. For 30 years, he and a close company of companions—all political and media figures, from Tim Kotcheff and John Macfarlane to Eddie Goldenberg and Pierre Trudeau—paddled some of the remotest waters in western and northern Canada. Most surprising is the revelation that this comfortable television performer has been legally blind for a decade.

An adaptation of the Charles Dickens story in which Oliver, an orphan, escapes the workhouse and flees to London where he falls in with a gang of thieves.

'The power of Dickens is so amazing, that the reader at once becomes his captive' WILLIAM MAKEPEACE THACKERAY The story of the orphan Oliver, who runs away from the workhouse to be taken in by a den of thieves, shocked readers with its depiction of a dark criminal underworld peopled by vivid and memorable characters - the arch-villain Fagin, the artful Dodger, the menacing Bill Sikes and the prostitute Nancy. Combining elements of Gothic romance, the Newgate novel and popular melodrama, Oliver Twist created an entirely new kind of fiction, scathing in its indictment of a cruel society and pervaded by an unforgettable sense of threat and mystery. Edited with an Introduction and notes by PHILIP HORNE

From a parish workhouse to the heart of the industrial revolution, from debtors' jail to Cambridge University and a prestigious London church, Robert Blincoe's political, personal and turbulent story illuminates the Dickensian age like never before. In 1792 as revolution, riot and sedition spread across Europe, Robert Blincoe was born in the calm of rural St Pancras parish. At four he was abandoned to a workhouse, never to see his family again. At seven, he was sent 200 miles north to work in one of the cotton mills of the dawning industrial age. He suffered years of unrelenting abuse, a life dictated by the inhuman rhythm of machines. Like Dickens' most famous character, Blincoe rebelled after years of servitude. He fought back against the mill owners, earning beatings but gaining self-respect. He joined the campaign to protect children, gave evidence to a Royal Commission into factory conditions and worked with extraordinary tenacity to keep his own children from the factories. His life was immortalised in one of the most remarkable biographies ever written, A Memoir of Robert Blincoe. Renowned popular historian John Waller tells the true story of a parish boy's progress with passion and in enthralling detail.

"Oliver Twist; or, the Parish Boy's Progress is Charles Dickens's second novel, and was first published as a serial 1837-39.[1] The story centres on orphan Oliver Twist, born in a workhouse and sold into apprenticeship with an undertaker. After escaping, Oliver travels to London, where he meets ""The Artful Dodger"", a member of a gang of juvenile pickpockets led by the elderly criminal, Fagin.Oliver Twist is notable for its unromantic portrayal by Dickens of criminals and their sordid lives, as well as for exposing the cruel treatment of the many orphans in London in the mid-19th century.[2] The alternative title, The Parish Boy's Progress, alludes to Bunyan's The Pilgrim's Progress, as well as the 18th-century caricature series by William Hogarth, A Rake's Progress and A Harlot's Progress.[3]In this early example of the social novel, Dickens satirises the hypocrisies of his time, including child labour, the recruitment of children as criminals, and the presence of street children. The novel may have been inspired by the story of Robert Blincoe, an orphan whose account of working as a child labourer in a cotton mill was widely read in the 1830s. It is likely that Dickens's own youthful experiences contributed as well.Oliver Twist has been the subject of numerous adaptations for various media, including a highly successful musical play, Oliver!, and the multiple Academy Award-winning 1968 motion picture. Disney also put its spin on the novel with the animated film called Oliver & Company in 1988"

Great Stories in Easy English