Oliver Twist
A boy asks for more food in a workhouse and the request is treated as a crime. Dickens wrote the novel while the New Poor Law was still new, and the early chapters are less a story than an indictment of a system that separated families in order to save money.
What follows is a melodrama: a criminal household, a stolen locket, a woman who regrets what she has done. Fagin and Nancy have been argued about for nearly two centuries, partly because Dickens loads them with so much that the novel's moral arithmetic becomes uncomfortable. That discomfort is worth noticing rather than smoothing over.
Public-domain status
First published in 1838. In the United States, works published before 1930 are in the public domain. In the European Union the general term is the life of the author plus 70 years; Charles Dickens died in 1870, so this work has been free to republish there since 1941.
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- Pride and Prejudice — Jane Austen, 1813
- Great Expectations — Charles Dickens, 1861
- The Time Machine — H. G. Wells, 1895
- Bleak House — Charles Dickens, 1853
- London — the city behind the books
- Reading lists — 19 ways through the collection
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