It is likely that Dickens's own youthful experiences contributed as well. The novel may have been inspired by the story of Robert Blincoe, an orphan whose account of working as a child laborer in a cotton mill, was widely read in the 1830s. In this early example of the social novel, Dickens satirizes the hypocrisies of his time, including child labor, the recruitment of children as criminals, and the presence of street children. The alternate title, The Parish Boy's Progress, alludes to Bunyan's The Pilgrim's Progress, as well as the 18th-century caricature series by William Hogarth, A Rake's Progress and A Harlot's Progress. Oliver Twist is notable for its unromantic portrayal by Dickens of criminals and their sordid lives, as well as for exposing the cruel treatment of the many orphans in London in the mid-19th century. He escapes from there and travels to London, where he meets the Artful Dodger, a member of a gang of juvenile pickpockets, led by the elderly criminal, Fagin.

The story is of the orphan Oliver Twist, who is born in a workhouse, and then sold into apprenticeship with an undertaker. Dickens fiction reflects London both as a center of international power, as a city consisting of small neighborhoods, and of a city made up of the rich and those clinging to new and tenuous economic circumstances.Oliver Twist, or The Parish Boy's Progress, is the second novel by English author Charles Dickens, and was first published as a serial, 1837 - 39. London was not just a hub for English workers, writers, artists, and thinkers-it was a multinational cosmopolis, the like of which the world had never seen (or had not since the far different Roman Empire, 1800 years previous).

England was also the crown jewel of an Empire 'on which the sun never set,' meaning it extended across much of the known world, including Australia and New Zealand, the Indian subcontinent, and interests in Africa. A whole host of other industries sprang up to support these new modes of production (including coal energy and railroad infrastructure development), and cities grew to include vast tenements of workers recently relocated from the country. The high-point of the Industrial Revolution took place, more or less, at the time of Oliver Twist's writing the production of goods had transitioned from 'cottage industries' in the countryside to centralized factories in London and in the newer cities of Manchester and Birmingham. The Victorian Period coincides with a series of political, economic, and social changes in England that are inseparable from the nature of the fiction produced.

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