This fiercely comic tale stands in marked  contrast to its genial predecessor, The Pickwick  Papers. Set against London's seedy back  street slums, Oliver Twist is  the saga of a workhouse orphan captured and thrust  into a thieves' den, where some of Dickens's most  depraved villains preside: the incorrigible  Artful Dodger, the murderous bully Sikes, and the  terrible Fagin, that treacherous ringleader whose  grinning knavery threatens to send them all to the  "ghostly gallows." Yet at the heart of this  drama is the orphan Oliver, whose unsullied  goodness leads him at last to salvation. In 1838 the  publication of Oliver Twist firmly established the  literary eminence of young Dickens. It was,  according to Edgar Johnson, "a clarion peal  announcing to the world that in Charles Dickens the  rejected and forgotten and misused of the world had a  champion."