The novel opens with the birth of an unnamed orphan in a parish workhouse, where his mother dies immediately after his arrival into the world. Raised under the brutal farming system overseen by cruel parish authorities, the boy suffers years of semi-starvation and neglect before being brought back to the main workhouse at nine years old. Placed on a strict diet of thin gruel, he and his starving companions reach a desperate breaking point, culminating in the famous scene where the terrified child dares to ask for more food.
Faced with this audacity, the board brands him a criminal and offers a reward to anyone willing to take him off the parish hands. After narrowly escaping an apprenticeship to a brutal chimney-sweep, he is apprenticed to an undertaker named Sowerberry. Here he endures constant torment from an older charity boy named Noah Claypole, eventually provoking a violent clash when Noah insults his dead mother's memory.
Fleeing the undertaker's roof, the boy sets out on a grueling foot journey toward London, driven by the desperate hope that a great city will offer anonymity and refuge. Exhausted, starving, and bleeding at the feet, he arrives in the capital only to fall straight into the clutches of the artful Dodger, a young pickpocket who introduces him to the criminal underworld.
Taken in by Fagin, a shrivelled old jew who trains destitute children in the art of theft, the boy learns to pick pockets and navigate the squalid alleys of Saffron Hill. His introduction to active crime ends in disaster when he is falsely accused of a bookstall theft committed by his companions, leading to a dramatic pursuit through the crowded streets and a subsequent appearance before a harsh magistrate.
Rescued from immediate imprisonment by the benevolent Mr. Brownlow, the boy is taken to a quiet Pentonville home where he experiences genuine kindness, comfort, and care for the first time in his life. However, his newfound peace is violently shattered when Fagin's associates, desperate to prevent him from exposing their operations, track him down and drag him back into the criminal den.
The narrative darkens as Fagin and the brutal housebreaker Bill Sikes conspire to use the captive boy in a dangerous burglary at a country house in Chertsey. Despite the frantic attempts of Nancy, a conflicted young woman of the underworld, to protect him from the worst of their cruelty, the boy is thrust toward a perilous midnight expedition that will seal his fate.
