Oliver Twist Summary

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Oliver Twist Summary Oliver Twist is born in a workhouse in 1830 England. His mother, whose name no one knows, is found on the street and dies just after Oliver’s birth. Oliver spends the first nine years of his life in a badly run home for young orphans and then is transferred to a workhouse for adults. After the other boys bully Oliver into asking for more gruel at the end of a meal, Mr. Bumble the parish beadle offers five pounds to anyone who will take the boy away from the workhouse. Oliver slowly escapes being apprenticed to a brutish chimney sweep and is eventually apprenticed to a local undertaker, Mr. Sowerberry. When the undertaker’s other apprentice Noah Claypole makes rude comments about Oliver’s mother he attacks him and runs away at dawn and travels toward London. Outside London Oliver starved and exhausted, meets Jack Dawkins, a boy his own age. Jack offers him shelter in the London house of his benefactor, Fagin. It turns out that Fagin is a career criminal who trains orphan boys to pick pockets for him. After a few days of training, Oliver is sent on a pick pocketing mission with two other boys. When he sees them swipe a handkerchief from a man, Oliver is horrified and runs away. He is caught but ends up running away. Mr. Brownlow the man whose handkerchief was stolen, takes the Oliver who has fever at this point to his home and nurses him back to health. Mr. Brownlow is shocked that Oliver is attracted to a young woman in a portrait that hangs in his house. Oliver is now comfortable in Mr. Brownlow’s home, but two young adults in Fagin’s gang, Bill Sikes and his lover Nancy, capture Oliver and return him to Fagin. Fagin sends Oliver to assist Sikes in a robbery. Oliver is shot by a servant of the house and after Sikes leaves is taken in by the women who live there, Mrs. Maylie and her beautiful adopted niece Rose. They grow to like Oliver and he

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