Oliver Twist - the first chapters

I recently started reading Oliver Twist. I have several times heard that this was not one of Dickens' best, but actually I am enjoying it more than most of the others of his that I have read. The writing is not too convoluted; the story rattles along, and it is quite funny.

Poor little Oliver. He's just a bag of bones. The parish are quite content for him to just die so that they don't have to feed him. His mother kissed him before expiring and the next scrap of kindness he is shown is eight years later when a magistrate refuses to apprentice him as a chimney sweep. In chapter 6, it says the old nurses at the workhouse had talked kindly about his mother, so I suppose it is likely that some people had shown kindness to young Oliver. I doubt whether he would have grown up such a nice lad if no one had.

It's terrible to think there was a time when such a plot would be plausible, even if exaggerated a bit, which it seems it wasn't. The 19th century was a period of slow reform. Of course, society was much less wealthy as a whole and less able to address its problems, but it was also a time of widespread incompetence, callous indifference, dodgy self-serving economic theory, and prejudice. No doubt it was even worse before then.

The chapter in which Oliver is nearly apprenticed as a chimney sweep is an odd one. It's a chapter that does not lead anywhere. I wonder whether Dickens considered making Oliver a chimney sweep, but then decided against it.