Summary
Fog-choked avenues of a London that never quite existed hum with soot-slicked urchins who move like marionettes whose strings are yanked by a grinning, corpulent puppeteer named Fagin; into this shadow-boxed labyrinth wanders wide-eyed Oliver Twist, Jr.—his linen cap always a fraction too big, his gaze always a fraction too trusting—carrying nothing but a locket of his dead mother and a melody of innocence he cannot stop humming. The boy’s first collision with the city’s underbelly is literal: a fleet-footed pickpocket—hands quicker than candle-flame—strips him of the locket and vanishes into the crush of Borough Market, leaving Oliver clutching air and a sudden, vertiginous knowledge that the world has teeth. The thief, a scamp with soot for freckles, ushers the orphan through crooked back-alleys into a crumbling rookery where attic floorboards sag like tired elders and every rafter drips candle-grease; here, boys gamble with buttons instead of coins and rehearse sleight-of-hand as if it were catechism. Their maestro, Fagin, crooks a nicotine-stained finger, promising warm gruel and a bed of straw in exchange for nimble fingers that can lift silk handkerchiefs from gentlemen who smell of lavender and empire. Oliver’s resistance—an aching, almost physical recoil from larceny—lasts exactly until hunger gnaws his belly into a drum; then, under the tutelage of the Artful Dodger and the brutal syllabi of Bill Sikes, he learns to turn pockets inside-out like prayers. Yet each stolen coin weighs on his conscience like a cathedral stone, and when a botched robbery on a rain-lashed night spills blood across cobblestones, Oliver’s fragile allegiance to this surrogate family fractures. A benevolent bookseller, Mr. Brownlow—whose spectacles reflect gaslight like twin halos—offers the boy an impossible mirage: legitimacy, books, a window that looks onto gardens instead of gallows. The final reel becomes a feverish chiaroscuro pursuit through Thames-side warehouses and graveyards where headstones lean like drunken sentinels; Fagin’s clammy grip tightens, Sikes’s pistol barks, and Oliver must choose between the devil he knows and the angel he barely dares to believe. In the last, frost-bitten dawn, the orphan stands on London Bridge clutching the reclaimed locket, river mist coiling round his ankles like the last chains he must break; behind him, the city still grinds its children between cobblestones, ahead, a horizon smudged with hesitant gold that may or may not be hope.
Synopsis
An orphan named Oliver Twist meets a pickpocket on the streets of London. From there, he joins a household of boys who are trained to steal for their master.
