“Please Sir, may I have a little more?” And with that request known to all who have any familiarity with Dickens’s second novel, Oliver Twist (1838), the author embodies the cry of the times in England when the Industrial Revolution had all but hijacked the prior world of manners, only to introduce a cold and cruel world overrun by production and commerce. Empires are built over time. They are man’s grand statements of power, wealth and influence. But, as with all national gigantism, those who would take refuge in the nooks and hidden corners of a society on fire are invariably passed over, left behind, forgotten and ultimately sacrificed for what is too often called “some greater good.” This is what Dickens confronts in the character of young Oliver, a little boy orphan who’s bounced from work house to mortuary to the streets of London. In the big city he meets the Artful Dodger, a pickpocket and informal leader of a gang of street kids skilled in the ways of theft. The Dodger is Oliver’s entre to a hard, decadent and crooked world of small time criminals overseen by an aqualung named Fagin and his dark colleagues, Monks, Bill Sykes and the kind prostitute, Nancy. Dickens indulges no sentimentality in his portrayal of the several characters who populate the underside of London’s brilliant and burgeoning city. It’s a book with a message and purpose, if only to remind all that orphans like Oliver deserve more than what they could hope to receive from a society in a race with itself to the top of the world.  (Summary by Michael Hogan)

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