Oliver Twist: 7/24, Oliver claimed by his affectionate friends

‘You see he knows me!’, cried Nancy, appealing to the by-standers. ‘He can’t help himself. Make him come home, there’s good people, or he’ll kill his dear mother and father, and break my heart!’. ‘What the devil’s this? Said a man bursting out of a beer-shop, with a white dog at his heels; ‘young Oliver! Come home to your poor mother, you young dog! Come home directly’. ‘I don’t belong to them. I don’t know them. Help! help!, cried Oliver struggling in the man’s powerful grasp...’What books are these? You’ve been a-stealing ‘em have you? Give ‘em here’. With these words, the man tore the volumes from his grasp and struck him on the head’.

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.