Cruikshank's London ideas were further realised in "Oliver Twist" (1838), a novel to which he contributed etchings so documentary as well as imaginative that he attempted to deprive Dickens of the glory of authorship, by claiming the origination of the story. The fact was, he had grown to be a collector: he was collecting fame, and in the passion of his hobby he felt that he might claim to have originated the novel which owed local colour and a formative idea to his suggestions. The subject really belongs to the pathology of egoism. Cruikshank gained nothing by seeking laurels in the field of literature except the impression on paper of a weakness one prefers to call juvenile rather than puerile. [Illustration: THE LAST CAB-DRIVER. From "Sketches by Boz," Second Series, 1837.] Yet he had much to give Boz, if that gentleman was minded to write of rogues. Cruikshank knew all about Buzmen and Adam-tilers; the days when he drank bene bowse had not been wasted, if low life be worth depicting. We may accept as portraits his Fagin and Sikes and Artful Dodger, without digesting the statement that Fagin condemned is himself in perplexity, and Fagin uncondemned the image of Sir Charles Napier. Undoubtedly, the workhouses in England of the third decade of the nineteenth century are in popular fancy all ruled by the nameless master in cook's uniform, of whom Oliver asked more, but it is not Boz's master, it is Cruikshank's. All beadles are one Mr Bumble--the Bumble of Boz and Cruikshank, though without the shadow of the sack with which the novelist eclipsed him. The etched scene where Fagin, frying sausages, receives Oliver in a den of thieves, has a squalid comfortableness--a leering charity--which praises Hell. The etched scene of Sikes's desperation on the roof of a house in Jacob's Island, Bermondsey, is in essence Misery itself, vermicular as well as violent. The etched scene where Fagin sits with blazing eyes in the condemned cell at Newgate under a window which shows him up like the Day of Judgment has been called "a picture by Fagin," for rhetoric exhausts itself in confessing its horror. In "Jack Sheppard," Cruikshank drew Newgate with particularity, he drew Bedlam with a maniac in it; for "A Journal of the Plague Year," he drew _The Great Pit in Aldgate_, but Fagin in his extremity belittles other horrors in Cruikshank's gallery of art. London is ashamed to see and acknowledge him; he makes her long for rain, and soap in the rain; he makes her remember her river. The reader will therefore look sympathetically at the powerful etching here reproduced from Angus B. Reach's "Clement Lorimer" (1849). It is a kidnapping scene; there is a drugged girl in the boat; the pier against which an oar has snapped supports an arch of London Bridge.