Oliver Twist: 1/24, Oliver asking for more

'The room in which the boys were fed was a large stone hall, with a copper at one end, out of which the master dressed in apron for the purpose; and assisted by one or two women ladled the gruel at mealtimes…The bowls never wanted washing...Oliver Twist and his companions suffered the tortures of slow starvation for three months…Child as he was, he was desperate with hunger, and reckless with misery…the master gazed in stupefied astonishment on the small rebel for some seconds and then clung for support to the copper.'

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.