These exquisite and collectible editions are published as a part of Penguin’s beautiful hardback Clothbound Classics series. Designed by the multi-award-winning Coralie Bickford-Smith, the series features editions that are bound in high-quality, colorful, and tactile cloth with foil stamped into the design. When it was first published, the tale of Oliver, an orphan who escapes from the workhouse only to find himself taken in by a group of thieves, shocked readers. Dickens’s story about childhood innocence is threatened by evil depicts the seedy criminal underworld of a London that is populated by vivid and memorable characters, such as the master criminal Fagin, the artful Dodger, the menacing Bill Sikes, and the prostitute Nancy. Dickens created an entirely new kind of fiction by combining Gothic Romance, the Newgate Novel, and popular melodrama elements. This new kind of fiction was scathing in its indictment of a cruel society and was pervaded by an unforgettable sense of menace and mystery.
