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Oliver Twist by Charles Dickens and works by Shakespeare and Chaucer have been given alerts at 10 institutions – including three from the elite Russell Group.

Others include novels by Jane Austen, Charlotte Bronte and Agatha Christie to ensure undergraduates are not upset by “challenging” content.

Pulitzer Prize-winning novel about slavery, The Underground Railroad by Colson Whitehead, and August Strindberg’s Miss Julie, which features suicide, have been censored.

Almost 300 freedom of information requests sent to all 140 UK universities asked about trigger warnings and removal of texts due to content concerns.

Russell Group members Warwick, Exeter and Glasgow are among those to have made texts optional, with the investigation uncovering 1,081 examples of trigger warnings on courses.

The University of Exeter’s stated students of 18th and early 19thcentury literature can opt not to read The History of Mary Prince as it contains “racism, slavery and extreme violence”.

They are “encouraged to contact the convenor to discuss alternatives”, though a spokesman said none had done so to date.

The Underground Railroad has been removed permanently from an Essex University course reading list because of its “graphic description of violence and abuse of slavery”.

And the University of Sussex has permanently withdrawn Miss Julie from an undergraduate literature module due to its discussion of suicide – after students complained about the potential psychological and emotional effects of the material.

The two universities are thought to be the first in the UK to have banned books altogether.

Conservative leadership candidate Liz Truss said: “Life doesn’t come with a content warning —we can’t protect people from difficult ideas for their whole lives, nor should we try to.”

Trevor Phillips, chairman of the Index on Censorship, said withdrawing books to protect students from difficult content, such as descriptions of slavery, was “fatuous, patronising and profoundly racist”.

An Essex University spokesman told an investigation that The Underground Railroad was still available in its library.

A Department for Education spokesman said: “We want universities to focus on high-quality teaching instead of spending time on trigger warnings or removing challenging content.”

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