Drama · Crime
Oliver Twist
An orphan who dares to ask for more runs away to London and falls in with a gang of child pickpockets.
Five levels, about 80 languages
- A2ElementaryShort sentences and everyday words.
- B1IntermediateYou follow clear stories about familiar things.
- B2Upper intermediateLonger sentences, richer vocabulary.
- C1AdvancedClose to the original, lightly condensed.
- C2ProficientThe complete novel.
One purchase is one book, in one language, at one level: $4.99. Another level of a book you own is $1.99. Editions nobody has asked for yet are written on request: chapter 1 in a few minutes, the rest while you read. How the levels work.
About the book
Please, sir
Oliver Twist is born in a workhouse, where his mother dies within minutes, and is raised on starvation rations under the pompous beadle, Mr Bumble. At nine, chosen by lot, he walks up to the master at supper and asks for more gruel. The scandal gets him apprenticed to an undertaker. Mistreated there, he runs away to London, where a sharp, swaggering boy called the Artful Dodger offers him a place to stay with an old man named Fagin, who is training a gang of boys to pick pockets. It began appearing in monthly parts in 1837, when Charles Dickens was still in his twenties, and came out as a book in 1838.
Why it works for learners
It’s one of Dickens’s shorter novels and one of his most plotted: a clear villain, an innocent hero, chases, a robbery, and a mystery about who Oliver really is. Scenes are vivid and easy to picture: the workhouse dining hall, the thieves’ den, a London crowd shouting “Stop thief”. The vocabulary is poverty and crime: hunger, workhouse, thief, pocket, handkerchief, police, court, prison.
Two things to know about the original. Its criminals talk in thieves’ slang that puzzled readers even in 1838. And Dickens’s portrait of Fagin, constantly called “the Jew”, draws on the antisemitic stereotypes of his time; after a Jewish reader challenged him in the 1860s, Dickens cut many of those references from later editions.
Which level to start at
B1 is the best start: the plot is clear and the story is gripping. A2 works for the main line of the story. At B2 and above you’ll enjoy Dickens’s satire of the workhouse system and of Mr Bumble. If the slang trips you up, a tap gives you the meaning of the whole phrase, not just the word.
Read next
- Great Expectations, Dickens’s later, deeper orphan story
- A Christmas Carol, Dickens’s London at its warmest
- Les Misérables, poverty and justice in Paris