The most swiftly-moving and unified of Dickens’s great novels, Oliver Twist is famous for its re-creation of the London underworld of pimps, thieves and prostitutes – and especially for the characters of Fagin, Bill Sikes, Nancy and the Artful Dodger. Contrasting them with the orphan Oliver’s friends and family, Dickens combines vivid realism and fairy-tale brilliance in a study of innocence betrayed and then triumphant. This edition reprints the original Everyman introduction by G. K. Chesterton and includes twenty-four illustrations by George Cruikshank.