Stories of societally sanctioned child abuse are strewn through Charles Dickens' oeuvre, but it's in Oliver Twist, only his second novel, that the author got the most mileage out of the vicissitudes of fortune that affected his own youth. His familial idyll ended abruptly at age 12, when his father was thrown into debtors' prison and he was sent off to work in a blacking factory. Sill, Dickens' situation was not quite so dire as that of the novel's namesake foundling, who survives a horrific workhouse, falls in with a gang of street thieves, and is ultimately clasped to the bosom of a loving, bourgeois family.

Neil Bartlett's delightful adaptation of
Oliver Twist, now playing at Boston's A[...]