Today’s post is the first in our new weekly feature, Free Classic Fiction. Every Friday, Marilyn, who blogs at ClassicKindle.com, will bring us her recommendation of a free classic book to discover (or rediscover) on Kindle. Find more of Marilyn’s recommendations at her blog, ClassicKindle.com, a guide to the best free and inexpensive classic literature for the Kindle. You can also get Marilyn’s blog on Kindle and I recommend that you “Like” the Classic Kindle Facebook page as well so that you don’t miss a post. Here’s Marilyn’s post:

Oliver Twist, I believe, has attained a lighter image in recent decades. It may be the musical, “Oliver!,” has influenced the popular perception of the novel, so that it is now seen as a story about homeless boys larking about and picking pockets.

This was not the story by Charles Dickens that I read and could not put down for fear of what Bill Sikes might do to Oliver and Nancy! That part of the story was more gothic than Victorian and the dog’s behavior still haunts me. This was really my young introduction to violence against women; which was not a staple of television in those black & white days.

So pick up Oliver Twist and be prepared to be charmed by the Artful Dodger and to puzzle over whether Fagin is a sympathetic or an anti-Semitic portrayal, or whether he might even be a pedophile. It is the literary game within a game these days for this novel.

But if you read the book as I do, Bill and his brutality are as frightening as Hannibal Lecter. You may think this is overstatement, but some things that scared you as a child stick with you!

‘Dogs are not generally apt to revenge injuries inflicted upon them by their masters; but Mr. Sikes’s dog, having faults of temper in common with his owner, and labouring, perhaps at this moment, under a powerful sense of injury, made no more ado but at once fixed his teeth in one of the half-boots. Having given it a hearty shake, he retired, growling, under a form; just escaping the pewter measure which Mr. Sikes levelled at his head.

“You would, would you?” said Sikes, seizing the poker in one hand, and deliberately opening with the other a large clasp knife, which he drew from his pocket. “Come here, you born devil! Come here! D’ye hear?”’

I would like to say “Hello and thank you!” to the readers of the “BookLending.com Newsletter.” When I am not reading free classic books, I am borrowing and lending books via my Kindle, thanks to BookLending.com.

Download Oliver Twist for free here >>