<b>Oliver Twist by Charles Dickens</b>&nbsp;<i><b>Oliver Twist,</b>&nbsp;or the&nbsp;<b>Parish Boy&#39;s Progress</b></i>,&nbsp;Charles Dickens&#39;s second novel, was published as a&nbsp;serial&nbsp;from 1837 to 1839, and as a three-volume book in 1838.<br /><br />Born in a&nbsp;workhouse, the orphan&nbsp;Oliver Twist&nbsp;is sold into apprenticeship with an&nbsp;undertaker. After escaping, Oliver travels to London, where he meets the &quot;Artful Dodger&quot;, a member of a gang of juvenile pickpockets led by the elderly criminal&nbsp;Fagin.<br /><i>Oliver Twist</i>&nbsp;unromantically portrays the sordid lives of criminals, and exposes the cruel treatment of the many orphans in London in the mid-19th century.<br /><br />The alternative title,&nbsp;<i>The Parish Boy&#39;s Progress</i>, alludes to&nbsp;Bunyan&#39;s&nbsp;<i>The Pilgrim&#39;s Progress</i>, as well as the 18th-century caricature series by painter&nbsp;William Hogarth,&nbsp;<i>A Rake&#39;s Progress</i>&nbsp;and&nbsp;<i>A Harlot&#39;s Progress</i>.<br /><br />In an early example of the&nbsp;social novel, Dickens satirises&nbsp;child labour,&nbsp;domestic violence, the recruitment of children as criminals, and the presence of street children. The novel may have been inspired by the story of&nbsp;Robert Blincoe, an orphan whose account of working as a child labourer in a cotton mill was widely read in the 1830s. It is likely that Dickens&#39;s own experiences as a youth contributed as well.<br /><br /><i>Oliver Twist</i>&nbsp;has been the subject of numerous adaptations, including a highly successful musical,&nbsp;<i>Oliver!</i>, the multiple&nbsp;Academy Award-winning&nbsp;1968 motion picture, Disney&#39;s animated film&nbsp;<i>Oliver &amp; Company</i>&nbsp;in 1988 and the&nbsp;1948 film, starring&nbsp;Alec Guinness&nbsp;as Fagin.