Dickens's second novel follows a boy born in a parish workhouse, passed from the baby farm to the undertaker's shop, and driven by hunger and beatings to walk to London. There he falls in with the Artful Dodger and is taken into Fagin's household of child pickpockets, where Nancy and the housebreaker Bill Sikes hold their own kinds of power over him. The book moves between the comedy of Dickens's early manner and a flatly angry account of the Poor Law, criminal London and the treatment of pauper children.
This edition comes from M. D. Gunasena & Co., a Colombo publishing house, as part of its Timeless Classics series, which brings well-known works of fiction back into print for readers here. The text is in English.
It suits a reader meeting Dickens for the first time, a student working through nineteenth-century English fiction, or anyone returning to a story whose scenes — the asking for more, the Dodger's first appearance, Nancy's loyalty and its cost — have long since passed into general currency. The characters are among the most recognisable Dickens drew, and the novel remains a direct point of entry into his work.
- Author: Charles Dickens
- Publisher: M. D. Gunasena & Co. (Pvt) Ltd
- Language: English
- ISBN: 9789552132896
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