Oliver Twist—After the Edit

Oliver Twist—After the Edit In this PDF version the original text is underlined; the remainder is Dickens's assumed compliance with “John Ross's” editorial notes CHAPTER 1 Treats of the place where a male child was born ; and of the circumstances surrounding his birth A thorn tree arched over the path across Fellgate Moor. The pitiless north wind keened through its bare branches, shaking them across the face of a gibbous moon. Its gnarled trunk afforded neither landmark nor shelter to the poor woman who laboured up that path, tricing her swollen but enfeebled body into the wind and keeping her leeward eye fixed on the light ahead—the only sign of human habitation in all that vast moorland waste. Nine months earlier that solitary thorn would have burst into blossom; then it would have made a cheerful bridal arch for that same woman. Indeed, it was not unlike the arch under which she had, at that very time, hoped to walk on her way into church and up to the very altar, there to seal in sacred vows the love she bore for one whose death had robbed her of that pledge. Your stern moralist would therefore say that its present deflowered state was most apt to her present condition—to which I reply that such a moralist had better hold his or her tongue, for an even sterner lesson is in store. When her feet wanted a good half-mile of the tall iron gates before which that solitary lantern swung in the wind, a bank of clouds scudded southward, extinguishing the moon and sprinkling a few tentative pellets of sleet among the heather and the dry, yellow sedge. The young woman had nothing for a coat beyond a half-rotten corn sack, which, with one corner folded into the other, she had draped over her head like a monk’s cowl. She bent even lower than the pains of her labour had already brought her, but the boisterous wind could lift the sleet as nimbly as if it were so much goosedown—a double cruelty when the melting of it on her skin was chill beyond bearing. Moments later, as the skies darkened to the black of pitch, the sleet turned to hail and rain. The hailstones, as big as pebbles, tumbled down with a ferocity that compelled her to link her fingers above and behind her head, where they accepted a bruising that would surely have stunned her and left her to die where she dropped. The rain, which now fell in gouts as thick as six-inch nails, soaked through the sacking in no time at all. She felt it run in icy rilles between her fingers, down her neck, into her clothing, seeking any flesh where some insignificant warmth yet lingered, chilling it to the point where death at last 1 seemed easeful. Two things, and two alone, kept one foot in front of the other over the last furlong of her three-hundred-mile trudge from autumn into winter: the lantern, with its promise of shelter, food, and warmth, and the child she might deliver there if only she reached the place in time. The dainty shoes that had brought her all that way disintegrated at last over those final yards. But her bare feet were by then too numb with the cold to feel the sharp chippings of millstone grit that shredded her soles beneath her. The Recording Angel himself could not have told you how she covered the final twenty paces. The lantern, swinging wildly in the gale and flaring up with each new gust, picked out the name above the gate in gleaming wet letters of iron: Fellgate District Union Workhouse—at the sight of which she let out an eldritch cry: “Mercy! Have pity!” and collapsed in a heap at the foot of the massive gatepost. If she had not accidentally clutched at the bell-pull as she fell, they would have found her there the following dawn, as cold as the stone of which the institution itself was built—colder than which it is not given to many stones to be. But the jangling of the bell was heard above the howling of the storm and so she was discovered, and brought at length into the room where such unfortunates were delivered. There an old crone in twelfth-hand clothes, her brain somewhat misty from an unexpected allowance of ale, alternately stretched her hands toward the hearth (where a minute glow of twigs and slack brown coal understudied a fire), and rubbed her knuckles in its feeble warmth. Every now and then she sipped from a handy green bottle, to keep alive the spirit engendered by the ale. In the rest of that gaunt stone chamber the air was distinguishable from that on the moor outside only by the moderation of its blast and its almost total lack of hail, sleet, or rain. As the porters stretched the unconscious woman upon the bed, this pauper female rose wearily to fetch Doctor Lydd, the parish surgeon. It was no heroic chore for the man lived in the workhouse, where he doled out physic and delivered babies by contract. He came at once, examined the poor woman, and rolled up his sleeves, saying, “So she wants to beat us to it!”—for the crown of the baby’s head was already born. The rest of it followed in a bag-o’-bones welter of tumbled red jelly. “Am I?” moaned the young woman as she surfaced briefly into consciousness. “You’re safely delivered of a fine young boy, my dear,” the good doctor replied. The woman breathed in short, shallow gasps but did not otherwise move, much less respond. “Bathe him.” Doctor Fell tied off the cord and handed the baby to the old crone. “ ’Tis nobbut cold watter,” she warned. “The sooner he gets used to it the better,” the doctor replied mildly. “Kill or cure is our motto here.” At the kiss of the icy water the baby gave out a howl that was enough to warn all hundred and sixty-three inmates of the house that their number had just been augmented by one. It also roused the young woman once more. Her eyes rolled this way and that, seeming to focus on nothing until at last they settled on the 2 gaunt, tired face of the surgeon. “Am I?” she asked again. “Are you what, my dear?” he replied. “Dying?” He smiled bravely rather than confirm her fears. “You wouldn’t be the first new mother to believe that. Let’s have no talk of dying with such a fine young man to call you mother! What’ll you call him, eh?” “Bless us!” the old woman put in as she laid the baby, still howling lustily, on the bed and swaddled him in a calico robe, now yellow with age and long service. Then, having fortified herself with a swig from the green bottle, she added, “When she’s seen as many winters as what I have, seetha, and dropped as many bairns as what I have ...” “And how many, pray, is that, Old Sal?” the doctor asked as he felt the baby’s pulse and examined its form for signs of abnormality. “Thirteen,” she replied complacently. “All reared?” “All dead, sir, ’cepting two as bides ’ere along of me in the workus ... why then she’ll know better than to talk of dying.” Uncomforted, the young woman raised her head an exhausting inch or two above the mattress and stretched a feeble arm toward her child. The surgeon laid the baby boy tenderly on her breast and covered them both with what had once been a blanket; in the same movement of his hand he pulled a louse from her neck and flung it toward the hearth. The woman planted a passionate kiss on her baby’s forehead and fell back in a swoon. Seconds later her breathing was forever stilled. For a moment neither onlooker moved. The anguish of death was, briefly, enough to overtop its commonplace, even in that grimmest of dwellings, whose inmates—even the most robust among them—are scarcely more substantial than the vapours of despair they daily breathe. “It’s over and done with her, Old Sal,” the doctor said. “Find a crib for the baby and lay her out before she grows stiff. If the little man cries, try him with a teaspoon or two of thin gruel. If he persists, do not hesitate but send for me.” As he was on the point of leaving he paused by the bed. “She was a good- looking girl,” he said. “She never told us what she wanted him called.” “Maister Bumble will do that for him, sir.” She cackled. “According to his famous system.” “Ah, yes! What was the last one called?” “Swubble. Nathan Swubble, poor mite.” “An N and an S. Then it’ll be something beginning with an O and a T. Obidiah Tomkins? Ormerod Trelawney? Well, well! We shall see.” He smiled at his flight of fancy and gazed again at the dead woman. A strange reluctance to leave her touched him. “Have you any idea where she came from?” “Nay, maister. She fell at the gate not an hour since. As to what they called her, I know not, but she was bound hither from a great way off by the look of her shoes. That I can vouchsafe.” “The old story!” The surgeon nodded and put on his hat. “No wedding ring, I see.

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