Born in a grim workhouse and orphaned at birth, young Oliver Twist grows up knowing only hunger, cruelty, and cold charity, until the day he dares to ask for a little more to eat and sets the whole parish against him. Cast out and mistreated, the gentle, innocent boy runs away to London, where a cunning young pickpocket sweeps him up and delivers him to Fagin, the sly old master of a gang of child thieves. Not fully grasping the danger closing around him, Oliver is drawn into the city's shadowy underworld. Dickens's powerful 1838 novel follows one small boy adrift in a hard and grasping world.