Oliver Twist: 20/24,The meeting

'The steps…were those which, on the Surrey bank, and on the same side of the bridge as Saint Saviour’s Churdh, form a landing stairs from the river...Just below the end of the second, going down, the stone wall on the left terminates in an ornamental pilaster facing towards the Thames. At this point the lower steps widen; so that a person turning that angle of the wall is necessarily unseen by any others on the stairs who chance to be above him if only a step…there seemed no better place of concealment and the tide being out there was plenty of room, he slipped aside with his back to the pilaster...Scarcely breathing he listened attentively…‘ I told you before’, replied Nancy, ‘ that I was afraid to speak to you there. I don’t know why it is’, said the girl shuddering, but I have such a fear and dread upon me tonight that I can hardly stand’. ‘Speak to her kindly’, said the young lady to her companion.’ Poor creature! She seems to need it’.

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.