Oliver TwistCharles Dickens second novel, Oliver twist, or the parish boys progress, was first published as a serial in the magazine bentleys miscellany from February 1837 to April 1839. The novel was inspired by Robert blincoes account of his childhood spent in a cotton Mill. Oliver twist, an orphan, is born in a Workhouse and later sold off into an apprenticeship. Dickens situates his protagonist amid the squalid lives of beggars, criminals and petty thieves.