Volume 36, Number 16 · October 26, 1989
Love in the Lower Depths
By Garry Wills
One of the first novels Dickens conceived, Oliver Twist, is both his most knowing and his most innocent book.[1] It is a Newgate School 'thriller,' lurid enough to provoke Victorian censors. It is also the classic 'boy's book,' written to a formula he put his stamp on forever. When Mark Twain and Robert Louis Stevenson use the formula they are imitating him, without ever surpassing him.
Feature, 7175 words
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