Who wrote Oliver Twist?

Charles Dickens, serialised from 1837, and the serial form shaped the book more than most readers realise. It came out monthly, Dickens was writing it while also finishing The Pickwick Papers, and he could and did respond to what readers were reacting to - which is why the plotting lurches and why almost every instalment ends on a hook.

It was written from close experience. At twelve his father was imprisoned for debt and Dickens was sent to work in a blacking factory pasting labels onto pots, an episode he concealed for the rest of his life and told nobody but his biographer. Almost everything he wrote about childhood poverty is written by someone who was briefly in it and never stopped being frightened of it.

The book had teeth. It appeared the year after the New Poor Law created the workhouse system, and the opening chapters are a direct attack on it - the whole point of a boy asking for more is that the diet was deliberately set below what an independent labourer could earn. Dickens also went back and revised Fagin, removing hundreds of instances of the Jew after a Jewish reader wrote to him about it, which is a rare instance of a Victorian novelist being told he had done harm and acting on it.