Poor Oliver Twist has quite a tough life in the beginning. He is an orphan who is brought up in one bad home after another with pretty much no love at all. Like Harry Potter and many other sympathetic characters, Oliver's youth is not one to be envied. The tale primarily deals with his early life for the first half until he is drawn in with a band of criminals and makes a few friends and meets a few good people along the way until befalling a near tragedy. The second half of the book is more about the other characters involved in his saga.