If we turn to our edition of _Oliver Twist_, so long as it does not happen to be one published subsequently to 1845, or one containing the suppressed plate, we shall find Rose standing with her {50} arm on Oliver’s shoulder before a tablet put up to his mother’s memory, and we shall find that Rose’s dress is light in colour save for a dark shawl or lace fichu, which is thrown across her shoulders and bosom. In the 1846 edition of the book, the plate has been largely touched up and shaded, and Rose’s dress turned into a black one.[16] Now, it is perfectly evident that it is the old plate altered and used over again and not a new plate copied from the old, for every line and every dot in the illustration to the earlier editions reappears in this. The perplexing matter that I have to draw your attention to, however, is that, in the same lot (145) at the Bruton sale mentioned above, there was sold a proof of this plate with Rose Maylie in the black dress, and this _a proof before letters_, an impossible nut for the amateur to crack who does not know that the lettering of plates may be stopped-out or burnished away or covered up for the striking off of misleading impressions; from which the moral may be drawn that it is better to believe in proof impressions after letters where they are well {52} authenticated, than to presume that a proof is before letters merely because those letters do not appear. _Verb. sat sap._ The plate in this state is here reproduced for the sake of comparison. [Illustration: Rose Maylie and Oliver at Agnes’s Tomb. (_The substituted plate in two states_)] [16] The dress is also black in a reprint of the first edition published by Messrs. Macmillan in 1892, and in the large edition with the illustrations coloured, published by Messrs. Chapman and Hall in 1895. Before passing from _Oliver Twist_, it should be pointed out that the first issue of 1838, which contains the suppressed plate, is also differentiated from the second issue of the same year by what is sometimes alluded to as the “suppressed title-page,” which runs as follows:—“Oliver Twist; / or, the / ‘Parish Boy’s Progress;’ / by ‘Boz,’ / in three volumes, / Vol. I (II. or III.) / London: / Richard Bentley, New Burlington Street. / — — / 1838.” The second issue, with the substituted plate, has:—“Oliver Twist / By / Charles Dickens, / Author of ‘The Pickwick Papers,’” the rest of the title being as in the first. It is curious to notice, further, that in a later edition the original title is resumed. So much for _Oliver Twist_. We must not, however, quit Dickens without mentioning one or two other items, which more or less of right find their place in a treatise on “Suppressed Plates.” {53}