London, February 1837. A boy with no name is born in a workhouse and almost immediately becomes an orphan. He asks for more, gets beaten for it, and is offered for sale to anyone who will take him off the parish. He ends up in the back rooms of a city that will either absorb him or kill him.
Dickens wrote it in monthly instalments while running a magazine, and it reads that way. The pacing is theatrical, the dialogue immediate, the cruelty funny until it stops being funny. Fagin courts Oliver like a salesman. The Artful Dodger is the best company in the book. Sikes is one of the few characters in nineteenth century fiction you would not want to be alone with.
The novel asks whether a child born to nothing can stay who he is. The answer the plot gives is not the same answer the prose gives, and both of them are worth reading.
This edition sets all fifty three chapters entire, in the order Dickens published them, with all twenty six of George Cruikshank's original steel etchings. Nothing is abridged. The etchings are placed on verso pages facing the chapter text they belong to, as they appeared in the first Chapman and Hall edition of 1838, so you meet each plate at the scene it draws instead of hunting for it in a gathering at the back.
This is the Civil Savage Society edition, newly typeset in a 6 by 9 inch US Trade format, 514 pages, set in EB Garamond and printed on 60# cream stock. Complete and unabridged.
Hardcover: casewrap edition, built for the shelf and the long haul.
Paperback: perfect bound, the same interior, meant to be carried and read to pieces.
Print editions are produced on demand. Nothing warehoused, never out of print.
