This pessimistic case study of bourgeois society’s ills after the French Revolution tells the intertwined stories of Eugène de Rastignac, an ambitious but penniless young man, and old Goriot, a father who sacrifices everything for his children.

Oliver Twist; or, The Parish Boy’s Progress, is the second novel by English author Charles Dickens. Oliver Twist unromantically portrays the sordid lives of criminals, and exposes the cruel treatment of the many orphans in London in the mid-19th century.