The opening page of Bos's "Oliver Twiss" piracy

The opening page of Bos's January 1838 piracy

Thomas Peckett Prest, 1810-1859

Part 1, January 1838

Wood-engraving composite block

For the first monthly instalment of Life and History of Oliver Twiss. Edited by "Bos".

This pirated edition's opening number for January 1838 shows the opening of the story at the "Musanshush" (i. e., Mudfog) Workhouse, with Oliver's mother on her death-bed. The supporting characters are directly derived from Dickens's novel, including the Beadle, the attending surgeon, the master of the workhouse, and the old midwife (Sally Thingummy, with an alcoholic's nose). However, whereas Dickens's opening paragraphs read like a story, these opening lines suggest that this will be a narrative essay describing the evils of the New Poor Law of 1834, currently being applied to union workhouses in the metropolis.

Scanned image and text 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.].

Passage realised from the pirated text

Chap. I. Parish officers during a carousal. — an overseer with too much humanity. — Mr. Gammon and his speech. — a row. — tumult quelled by the arrival of a great ma — Mr. Mumble the beadle — birth of our hero announced.

It was a bitter, frosty evening, in the month of December, that the overseers, and other gentlemen connected with the affairs of Mudanshush, were assembled in the comfortable parlour of The Goat and Ninepins, to discuss the propriety or impropriety of affording certain little necessaries to the starving poor, whom circumstances had placed under their control. At that period, it is true, the Poor Laws had not been amended. (Heaven save the mark!) Overseers possessed discretionary powers to relieve causes of urgent necessity, and fewer unfortunates were suffered to perish through absolute want, than in the present more refined age in which it is our happiness to live.

Passage from the opening chapter of Dickens's novel realised

As Oliver gave this first proof of the free and proper action of his lungs, the patchwork coverlet which was carelessly flung over the iron bedstead, rustled; the pale face of a young woman was raised feebly from the pillow; and a faint voice imperfectly articulated the words, "Let me see the child, and die."

The surgeon had been sitting with his face turned towards the fire: giving the palms of his hands a warm and a rub alternately. As the young woman spoke, he rose, and advancing to the bed's head, said, with more kindness than might have been expected of him:

"Oh, you must not talk about dying yet."

. . . . The surgeon leaned over the body, and raised the left hand. "The old story," he said, shaking his head: "no wedding-ring, I see. Ah! Good-night!"

"Lor bless her dear heart, no!" interposed the nurse, hastily depositing in her pocket a green glass bottle, the contents of which she had been tasting in a corner with evident satisfaction.

[Chapter One, "Treats of the Place where Oliver Twist was Born and of the circumstances attending his Birth"]

Commentary

As Oliver Twist deals with unsavoury characters and decidedly unpleasant scenes in the manner of melodrama, in sharp contrast to the genial character and situational comedy of the Pickwick Papers, it seems to have attracted far fewer pirates. The most celebrated piracy of Dickens's Newgate novel was Oliver Twiss, The Workhouse Boy. Edited by Bos, a numbers between 1839 and 1841 by shady Bloomsbury publisher Edward Lloyd, pioneer of quasi-makeover of Dickens's novel issued in seventy-nine penny fiction for the labouring classes. The present text is from yet another piracy, the Life and History of Oliver Twiss. Edited by "Bos". Notably absent from the title is "the workhouse," so that one may assume that the plagiarist did not wish his version to be apprehended solely as a piracy of the Dickens work.

Apparently each penny number has two such illustrations as this Oliver at the Milestone. "Pos" or "Bos," the author of the plagiarized edition was none other than Thomas Peckett Prest (1810-1859), co-creator with James Malcolm Rymer of Sweeney Todd, The Demon Barber of Fleet Street, in The String of Pearls: A Romance (1846). Judging by the illustration the opening page, one may surmise that Prest's piracy was equal parts parody and penny and the text on dreadful, of which he was a prolific generator. Having lampooned Boz's first novel in 1839 as The Penny Pickwick, Prest went to the Dickens well again in David Copperful and Nickelas Nicklebery in 1841.

Twiss ran for 78 weeks, with some success. It was closer to the original than The Penny Pickwick, for Twist told the story of Oliver's progress, and offered less scope for deviation. 'Bos' exploited Oliver Twist's links with the popular traditions of Gothic melodrama, crime reporting, and stage comedy. Banks (Monks) is a complete Gothic villain, living in a ruined castle; a mysterious gypsy appears to tell Oliver's fortune. The melodramatic love of Polly (Nancy) for Jem Blount (Bill Sikes) is drawn out, and Poll goes to jail to save her lover. The comic element in Mumble (Bumble) courting Mrs. Stint'em (Mrs. Corney) is played up as a slapstick farce, although 'Bos' [Prest] also introduces more realistic elements, for Mumble marries because the Poorhouse Guardians want a married man for beadle (see Poor Relief).

Throughout, 'Bos' adds more background about the criminal world than does Dickens, and the Jewish identity of Solomans (Fagin) is never disguised. 'Bos' evidently knew his criminal law. In Dickens's version Fagin hangs for being an accessory to Nancy's murder, though as he was absent at her actual death this was legally unlikely at the time. Solomans is hanged for the actual murder of a gypsy, dying with a flourish of a repentant broadsheet villain, acknowledging 'the fate I have been condemned to undergo has been richly merited'. Twiss retires to live out a happy life in a country mansion, with Mr. Beaumont (Brownlow). [James, 453]

The plagiarist, Prest, strikes both Newgate and picaresque chords as Oliver, like Tom Jones in Fielding's novel (and countless real-life young men), sets out for London on the high road as the first stage of a Hogarthian "progress."

References

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.

Last modified 29 March 2015