Oliver Twist: 23/24, Fagin in the condemned cell

‘He grew so terrible at last in all the tortures of his evil conscience that one man could not bear to suit there eyeing him alone and so the two kept watch together...He had been wounded with some missiles from the crowd on the day of his capture and his head was bandaged with a linen cloth. His red hair hung down upon his bloodless face; his beard was torn, and twisted into knots; his eyes shone with a terrible light, his unwashed flesh crackled with the fever that burnt him up. Those dreadful walls of Newgate which have hidden so much misery and such unspeakable anguish not only from the eyes but too often the thoughts of men never held so dread a spectacle as that...the condemned criminal was seated on his bed, rocking himself from side to side, with a countenance more like that of a snared beast than the face of a man. His mind was evidently wandering to his old life, for he continued to mutter without appearing conscious of their presence, otherwise than of part of his vision.'

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.