Crime was prevented by encouraging informers. A man could get £40 ($200) for information which led to a capital conviction, and he could sell the exemption which he also gained from serving in a public office in the parish for a similar sum. It became actually in the interest of the thief takers to allow young persons and even children to commit minor crimes in the hope that sooner or later they would be guilty of worse offences. It was naturally the prime object of the informer to obtain a conviction. Fagin combined the work of a receiver of stolen goods with that of a thief taker. The administration of the workhouse system was equally bad. The humour with which Dickens describes Mr. Bumble the beadle, his pomposity, his courtship of the matron, and his fall, is delightful; but Mr. Bumble, the visiting magistrates, and the overseers of the poor represented a state of things almost unthinkable in its brutality. Oliver himself was nearly being apprenticed to a sweep who would certainly have treated him much as Crabbe’s “Peter Grimes” treated his apprentice, and this dialogue between Mr. Bumble and Mrs. Mann, the nurse of the pauper children, reveals the spirit with which the indigent poor were treated. “Mrs. Mann, I am going to London.” “Lawk, Mr. Bumble,” said Mrs. Mann, starting back. “To London, ma’am,” resumed the inflexible beadle, “by coach. I and two paupers, Mrs. Mann! A legal action is a-coming on, and the board has appointed me--me, Mrs. Mann--to depose to the matter at Clerkenwell....” “You are going by coach, Sir? I thought it was always usual to send them paupers in carts.” “That’s when they’re ill, Mrs. Mann,” said the beadle. “We put sick paupers in carts in rainy weather, to prevent their taking cold.” “Oh,” said Mrs. Mann. “The opposition coach contracts for these two; and takes them cheap,” said Mr. Bumble. “They are both in a very low state, and we find it would come two pounds cheaper to move ’em than to bury them--that is, if we can throw ’em upon another parish, which I think we shall be able to do, if they don’t die upon the road to spite us. Ha! Ha! Ha!” When Mr. Bumble had laughed a little his eyes again encountered the cocked hat; and he became grave.[29] Here is fiction: let us turn to facts as we find them in a history of the England of the period: