The opening page of James Pattie's lampoon "Oliver Twiss"

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First page of an 1838 piracy

January 1838

Wood-engraving composite block

For the first monthly instalment of Oliver Twiss, The Workhouse Boy. Edited by Bos.

The most celebrated piracy of Dickens's Newgate novel was Oliver Twiss, The Workhouse Boy. Edited by Bos, a quasi-makeover of Dickens's novel issued in seventy-nine numbers between 1839 and 1841 by shady Bloomsbury publisher Edward Lloyd, pioneer of penny fiction for the labouring classes. However this title-page comes from the serial of the same name published by James Pattie. This version only consisted of 4 numbers, i.e. 32 pp. Authorship is generally attributed to Gilbert Abbot à Beckett. Indeed his entry is the first in the Oxford Reader's Companion to Dickens.

Scanned image by Philip V. Allingham.

[You may use this image without prior permission for any scholarly or educational purpose as long as you (1) credit the person who scanned the image and (2) link your document to this URL in a web document or cite the Victorian Web in a print one.].

This pirated edition's opening number shows Oliver at a milestone with a triple X, indicating the workhouse boy is now thirty miles from London, roughly the distance from Rochester ("Mudfog") to London. The illustration of the long-headed, blonde workhouse boy is clearly a visual satire of Cruikshank's many illustrations of the eponymous character. — Philip V. Allingham

Bibliography

Bentley, Nicolas, Michael Slater, and Nina Burgis. The Dickens Index. New York and Oxford: Oxford U. P., 1990.

Davis, Paul. Charles Dickens A to Z: The Essential Reference to His Life and Work. New York: Facts On File, 1998.

Dickens, Charles. The Adventures of Oliver Twist; or, The Parish Boy's Progress. Il. George Cruikshank. London: Bradbury and Evans; Chapman and Hall, 1846.

Dickens, Charles. The Adventures of Oliver Twist; or, The Parish Boy's Progress. Il. George Cruikshank. London & New York: Macmillan, 1892 [contains reproductions of the 1846 wrapper, of the first page of the 1838 Bentley volume, and of the first page of the Prest serial, Oliver Twiss].

James, Louis. "Plagiarisms of Dickens." Oxford Reader's Companion to Dickens. Ed. Paul Schlicke. Oxford and New York: Oxford U. P., 1999. Pp. 452-54.

Kitton, Frederic G. "George Cruikshank." Dickens and His Illustrators: Cruikshank, Seymour, Buss, "Phiz," Cattermole, Leech, Doyle, Stanfield, Maclise, Tenniel, Frank Stone, Topham, Marcus Stone, and Luke Fildes. 1899. Rpt. Honolulu: U. Press of the Pacific, 2004. Pp. 1-28.

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Last modified 27 December 2018