SYNOPSIS

Oliver Twist is the name given by the parish beadle, Mr Bumble, to a boy born in the workhouse to an unknown mother, who dies directly afterwards.

At the age of ten Oliver famously ‘asks for more’ food at the workhouse and is put up for sale by the parish authorities the very next day. He is eventually taken on my Mr Sowerberry, the undertaker, but after harsh treatment runs away to London.  There he falls in with Fagin and his bunch of child thieves, including The Artful Dodger. He also meets Nancy, the mistress of Bill Sikes, a hardened criminal.  Oliver is wrongly accused of pick pocketing but faints in court and is taken away by his alleged victim, Mr Brownlow, who declines to press charges after a witness swears Oliver is innocent. 
Fagin, meanwhile, has been contracted by an evil man called Monks, who wants Oliver got out of the way by being wrongly convicted of a crime. With the help of Nancy, the gang kidnaps Oliver back from Mr Brownlow’s protection and Sikes forces him to help them in a robbery which goes horribly wrong. Oliver is shot but is taken in by the intended victims, Mrs Maylie and her protégée Rose, who take pity on him and nurse him  back to health.

Nancy discovers the truth about Monks, that he is Oliver’s half brother and wants to retain all his father’s property rather than share it (a condition of the will being that Oliver has no criminal record) and in an attempted act of redemption for a life badly spent tells Rose the truth about her part in Oliver’s recent history and kidnapping, and also tells her that there is a connection between Rose and Oliver but she doesn’t know what it is. With Mr Brownlow’s help they track down Monks and force him to confess, but in the meanwhile the gang has discovered Nancy’s treachery and Bill Sikes savagely murders her and goes on the run.  He is run to earth and accidentally hangs himself while trying to evade arrest. Fagin is arrested and executed and The Artful Dodger transported.

It then transpires that Rose is in fact the sister of Oliver’s mother, and that Mr Brownlow was the best friend of Oliver’s father, Oliver having been conceived out of wedlock and therefore bringing disgrace on Rose’s family.  Mr Brownlow adopts Oliver, and Monks is sent abroad, where he later dies in prison.  In an act of exquisite justice Mr Bumble, the beadle who so mistreated Oliver as a child, loses his parish position because of his involvement in the plot with Monks, and spends the rest of his days in the very workhouse he once presided over.

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CHARACTERS & THEMES

Key Characters:

Oliver Twist - the hero of the tale, born in a workhouse. Mother dies at birth, her name was Agnes
The Artful Dodger - also called Jack Dawkins. Fagin’s most skilled thief and pickpocket
Charley Bates - another member of Fagin’s gang. Escapes punishment at the end
Bill Sikes - thief and ruffian. Murders his lover Nancy for betraying him and dies while trying to evade capture
Mr Brownlow - Oliver’s benefactor, adopts him at the end of the story
Mr Bumble - the parish Beadle. Marries Mrs Corney, Matron of the workhouse, and
through their own dishonesty they eventually end up in poverty in the same workhouse themselves
Monks - the evil half-brother of Oliver, who plots with Fagin to have Oliver done away with
Fagin - the evil Jewish thief who runs the gang of pickpockets. Caught and hanged
Nancy - a prostitute and the live-in lover to Bill Sikes, who murders her for betraying them

Themes:

Evil
Child exploitation
Kindness and belief
Goodness shining through
Redemption
Murder and thievery

Locations:

Peterborough or Grantham in Lincolnshire
London
Surrey

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“You sometimes just have to sit back and wonder why no-one has ever done this before? They are so, so useful.” Bill D, Teacher

SNAPSHOT GUIDE SAMPLE

Chapter I
TREATS OF THE PLACE WHERE OLIVER TWIST WAS BORN; AND OF THE CIRCUMSTANCES ATTENDING HIS BIRTH
Opens in the local workhouse, where the baby Oliver Twist is born.  The worn out mother raises herself weakly on her pillow and asks for the child before she dies. The surgeon (unnamed) attending the mother hands her the baby boy, whereupon she kisses him once and dies. The child is then removed from the mother’s arms by the nurse (whom the surgeon calls Mrs Thingummy) The mother is unknown to them, having walked into the town and found passed out in the street the previous day. 

Chapter II
TREATS OF OLIVER TWIST’S GROWTH, EDUCATION, AND BOARD
For the next ten months, Oliver is brought up by hand in the workhouse, the equivalent of an orphanage today, and also where the aged and infirm were sent when they could no longer afford to look after themselves. When the workhouse does not have a female who can look after him properly, he is sent (‘farmed out’) to a branch-workhouse some three miles away.  This branch workhouse has twenty or thirty other children in the care of a Mrs Mann, the overseer (and one of her servants, Susan).  She receives sevenpence-halfpenny a week per head from the parish rates to look after her little charges, but uses most of it to keep herself fed and in drink, and there is a high mortality rate.
The tale then jumps to Oliver’s ninth birthday (in some editions Dickens wrote this as Oliver’s eighth birthday) and he has come to the end of his time at the branch-workhouse. Mr Bumble the fat and pompous parish Beadle arrives to take Oliver off to the workhouse proper, and during a drink with Mrs Mann tells her that Oliver Twist was named by himself.  His method was to name the parish foundlings in alphabetical order. The last to be named was an S, hence Swubbles, then T became Twist. The letter U will be Unwin, and so on to the end of the alphabet. He also tells Mrs Mann that not even a reward of ten pounds, later raised to twenty, had brought forward any news of Oliver’s origins.
Mr Bumble then takes Oliver away from the branch-workhouse, where Oliver has never received a kind word in his short life to date, to the workhouse proper, where he is brought before the board of governors that evening.  The board of governors is made up of local merchants and other worthies. Nothing is free in the workhouse if the parish can help it, so Oliver is tasked by the board to start unpicking oakum at six o’clock the following morning.

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“The whole of the National Curriculum in this format, please!” T. Moss, Deputy Head