He rose from the table and, advancing to the master, bowl in hand,said.
"Please, sir, I want some more" said oliver
The master was a fat,healthy man, but he turned very pale.
He stared with horror and amazement at the small boy for some seconds.
"What!" He said finally in a faint voice.
"Please, sir," replied oliver,"I want some more"
Charles Dickens's delightful description of the poor, half-starved, nine-year-old Oliver Twist shocking the fat, healthy workhouse master by asking for more made his thousands of readers in mid-nineteenth century Britain laugh and cry.
The scene has been repeated on the stage, in films, and in television dramas countless times, and the little orphan Oliver with his empty bowl has become a part of British national culture.
The story of Oliver Twist had already been filmed six times before the famous version was made in 1948, directed by David Lean.
A stage musical by Lionel Bart, based on the story and called Oliver!, full of humour , dance and delightful songs, was a great success in the 1960s and is still regularly performed.
The film version, made in 1968, was an even greater success.
But there was a serious purpose to Dickens's original novel.
He wanted to show his readers the terrible conditions in the state workhouse of that time, where the poor and the sick were forced to live; this was his real attempt at a novel, and the first written under his own name.
But from his own difficult early life and his work as a journalist he had experience of the horrors of poverty.
