Fagin the Thief

"Fagin the Thief by Allison Epstein tells the story of the villain of Charles Dickens’s Oliver Twist from his point of view. We follow Fagin as he grows up in the Jewish community in East London and, despite his mother’s best efforts, gradually turns to pickpocketing as the only way of getting by. His father is already dead, but we see his desperate—and unsuccessful—efforts to save his mother after she gets sick, and being ripped off by doctors. We see how he starts taking in street boys more out of altruism and loneliness than anything else. It’s a really sad tale, of the hardships of life in 19th-century London, but also occasionally comradeship and friendship. If you enjoy the setting of Fagin the Thief, you might want to read Moll Flanders (1722) by Daniel Defoe, in its sympathetic portrayal of life as a petty criminal in London, and partly based on a real person."