'Please, sir, I want some more.'

Nine-year-old Oliver has known nothing but hunger, cruelty, and the workhouse, until the night he dares to ask for a second helping of gruel and is promptly sold off in disgrace.

Escaping to London, he falls in with Fagin, a receiver of stolen goods who trains orphan boys into thieves, and Bill Sikes, whose violence Oliver is too young to fully understand until it is too late to escape it.

Nearly two centuries on, Oliver Twist by Charles Dickens still asks the question it began with, what a society owes its most defenceless children, and still refuses to let us look away.