Birth of Oliver Twist

Chapter-1

In a certain town, there was a workhouse. In that workhouse, a child by the name Oliver Twist was born. There was nobody by but a pauper old woman who was rendered rather misty by an unwonted allowance of beer, and a parish surgeon.
As Oliver gave his first cry, 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 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.’
‘Lord 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, ‘Lord bless her dear heart, when she has lived as long as I have, sir, and had thirteen children of her own, and all of them dead except two, and them in the wurkus with me, she’ll know better than to take on in that way, bless her dear heart! Think what it is to be a mother, there’s a dear lamb, do.’
Apparently this consolatory perspective of a mother’s prospects failed in producing its due effect. The patient shook her head, and stretched out her hand towards the child.
The surgeon deposited it in her arms. She imprinted her cold white lips passionately on its forehead, passed her hands over her face, gazed wildly round, shuddered, fell back—and died. They chafed her breast, hands and temples; but the blood had stopped for ever.
‘It’s all over, Mrs Thingummy!’ said the surgeon at last. ‘She was a good-looking girl, too. Where did she come from?’
‘She was brought here last night,’ replied the old woman, ‘by the overseer’s order. She was found lying in the street. She had walked some distance, for her shoes were worn to pieces; but where she came from, or where she was going to, nobody knows.’
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!’
Oliver cried lustily. If he had known that he was an orphan, left to the tender mercies of churchwardens and overseers, perhaps he would have cried the louder.
The parish authorities magnanimously and humanely resolved that the child should be ‘farmed’, or, in other words, that he should be despatched to a branch workhouse some three miles off, where twenty or thirty other juvenile offenders against the poor-laws rolled about the floor all day, without the inconvenience of too much food or too much clothing, under the parental superintendence of an elderly female, who received the culprits at, and for the consideration of seven-pence half-penny per small head per week.
It cannot be expected that this system of farming would produce any very extraordinary or luxuriant crop. Oliver Twist’s ninth birthday found him a pale, thin child, somewhat diminutive in stature and decidedly small in circumference. He was keeping this day of celebration in the coal-cellar with a select party of two other young gentlemen, who, after participating with him in a sound thrashing, had been locked up for atrociously presuming to be hungry, when Mrs Mann, the good lady of the house, was unexpectedly startled by the apparition of fat Mr Bumble, the beadle, striving to undo the wicket of the garden gate.
‘Goodness gracious! Is that you, Mr Bumble, sir?’ said Mrs Mann, thrusting her head out of the window in well affected ecstasies of joy.
‘Mrs Mann, I come on business, and have something to say.’
Mrs Mann ushered the beadle into a small parlour with a brick floor, placed a chair for him, and officiously deposited his cocked hat and cane on the table before him. Mr Bumble wiped from his forehead the perspiration which his walk had engendered, glanced complacently at the cocked hat, and smiled.
‘Now, don’t you be offended at what I’m going to say,’ observed Mrs Mann, with captivating sweetness. ‘You’ve had a long walk, you know, or I wouldn’t mention it. Now, will you take a little drop of something, Mr Bumble?’
‘What is it?’ inquired the beadle.
‘It’s gin. I’ll not deceive you, Mr Bumble It’s gin.’
Mr Bumble swallowed half the glass.
‘And now about business,’ said the beadle, taking out a leather pocket-book. ‘The child that was half-baptized Oliver Twist, is nine years old today.’
‘Bless him!’ interposed Mrs Mann, inflaming her left eye with the corner of her apron.
‘And notwithstanding a offered reward of ten pounds, which was afterwards increased to twenty pounds,’ said Bumble, ‘we have never been able to discover who is his father, or what was his mother’s settlement, name, or condition.’
Mrs Mann raised her hands in astonishment, but added after a moment’s reflection, ‘How comes he to have any name at all, then?’
The beadle drew himself up with pride, and said:
‘I invented it.’
‘You, Mr Bumble!’
‘I, Mrs Mann. We name our foundlings in alphabetical order. The last was a S-Swubble, I named him. This was a T-Twist, I named him. The next one as comes will be Unwin, and the next Vilkins. I have got names ready made to the end of the alphabet, and all the way through it again when we come to Z.’
‘Why, you’re quite a literary character, sir’ said Mrs Mann.
The beadle, evidently gratified with the compliment, finished the gin-and-water, and added, ‘Oliver being now too old to remain here, the board have determined to have him back into the house. I have come out myself to take him there. So let me see him at once.’
Oliver was led into the room by his benevolent protectress.
‘Will you go along with me, Oliver?’ said Mr Bumble.
Oliver was about to say that he would go along with anybody with great readiness but, catching sight of Mrs Mann’s furious countenance, he had sense enough to make a feint of feeling great regret at going away. Then, with a slice of bread in his hand, and the little brown-cloth parish cap on his head, Oliver was led away by Mr Bumble from the wretched home where one kind word or look had never lighted the gloom of his infant years. And yet he burst into an agony of childish grief as the cottage gate closed after him. Wretched as were the little companions in misery he was leaving behind, they were the only friends he had ever known; and a sense of his loneliness in the great wide world sank into the child’s heart for the first time.
Oliver had not been within the walls of the workhouse a quarter of an hour when Mr Bumble informed him that the board had said he was to appear before it forthwith.
Not having a very clearly defined notion of what a live board was, Oliver was rather astounded by this intelligence. He had no time to think about the matter, however; for Mr Bumble conducted him into a large whitewashed room, where eight or ten fat gentlemen were sitting around a table. At the top of the table, seated in an armchair rather higher than the rest, was a particularly fat gentleman with a very round, red face.
‘Bow to the board,’ said Bumble. Oliver, seeing no board but the table, fortunately bowed to that.
‘What’s your name, boy?’ said the gentleman in the high chair.

Oliver was frightened at the sight of so many gentlemen, and the beadle gave him another tap behind, which made him cry. These two causes made him answer in a very low and hesitating voice, whereupon a gentleman in a white waistcoat said he was a fool which was a capital way of raising his spirits and putting him quite at his ease.
‘Boy,’ said the gentleman in the high chair, ‘listen to me. You know you’ve got neither father nor mother, and that you were brought up by the parish, don’t you?’
‘Yes, sir,’ replied Oliver, weeping bitterly.
‘Well! You have come here to be educated and taught a useful trade,’ said the red-faced gentleman in the high chair.
‘So you’ll begin to pick oakum tomorrow morning at six o’clock,’ added the surly one in the white waistcoat.
Oliver bowed low by the direction of the beadle, and was then hurried away to a large ward, where, on a rough, hard bed, he sobbed himself to sleep. What a noble illustration of the tender laws of England! They let the paupers go to sleep.

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