let me
know what Sir Francis Burdett has been saying about him at some
Birmingham meeting. B. has just sent me the _Courier_ containing some
reference to his speech; but the speech I haven't seen."

[18] Reproduced as below, in large type, and without a word of
contradiction or even doubt, in a biography of Mr. Dickens put forth by
Mr. Hotten: "Dr. Shelton McKenzie, in the American _Round Table_,
relates this anecdote of _Oliver Twist_: In London I was intimate with
the brothers Cruikshank, Robert and George, but more particularly with
the latter. Having called upon him one day at his house (it was then in
Myddelton Terrace, Pentonville), I had to wait while he was finishing an
etching, for which a printer's boy was waiting. To while away the time,
I gladly complied with his suggestion that I should look over a
portfolio crowded with etchings, proofs, and drawings, which lay upon
the sofa. Among these, carelessly tied together in a wrap of brown
paper, was a series of some twenty-five or thirty drawings, very
carefully finished, through most of which were carried the well-known
portraits of Fagin, Bill Sikes and his dog, Nancy, the Artful Dodger,
and Master Charles Bates--all well known to the readers of _Oliver
Twist_. There was no mistake about it; and when Cruikshank turned round,
his work finished, I said as much. He told me that it had long been in
his mind to show the life of a London thief by a series of drawings
engraved by himself, in which, without a single line of letter-press,
the story would be strikingly and clearly told. 'Dickens,' he continued,
'dropped in here one day, just as you have done, and, while waiting
until I could speak with him, took up that identical portfolio, and
ferreted out that bundle of drawings. When he came to that one which
represents Fagin in the condemned cell, he studied it for half an hour,
and told me that he was tempted to change the whole plot of his story;
not to carry Oliver Twist through adventures in the country, but to take
him up into the thieves' den in London, show what their life was, and
bring Oliver through it without sin or shame. I consented to let him
write up to as many of the designs as he thought would suit his purpose;
and that was the way in which Fagin, Sikes, and Nancy were created. My
drawings suggested them, rather than his strong individuality suggested
my drawings.'"

[19] This question has been partly solved, since my last edition, by Mr.
Cruiksha