Oliver Twist: 9/24, Master Bates explains a professional technicality

Bates: ‘ He’ll come to be scragged, won’t he?' ‘I don’t know what that means’, replied Oliver. ‘Something in this way, old feller’, said Charley. As he said it, Master Bates caught up an end of his neckerchief: and, holding it erect in the air, dropped his head on his shoulder, and jerked a curious sound through his teeth; thereby indicating, by a lively pantomimic representation that scragging and hanging were one and the same thing. ‘That’s what it means’ said Charley. ‘Look how he stares, Jack.'. ‘You’ve been brought up bad’, said the Dodger, surveying his boots with much satisfaction when Oliver had polished them.’

George Cruikshank supplied twenty-four engravings for the first edition of Oliver Twist by Charles Dickens between February 1837 and April 1839. It was Dickens’s second novel published by Richard Bentley. After Dickens's death in 1870, Cruikshank made the claim that it was he who had originated Oliver Twist, a claim which Dickens's biographer and confidant, John Forster, refuted by referring to Dickens's letters. The plates for that novel certainly reflect Cruikshank's extensive knowledge of the London underworld.