Oliver Twist has run away from, the cruel treatment he has received at the undertaker's shop where he was employed, and has set out to walk the seventy miles to London. On the outskirts of the city, at Barnet, he collapses, from fatigue and hunger, on a doorstep. A young boy notices him there, and, after a while, steps across to him:

‘Hullo, my covey! What's the row?’

The boy who addressed this inquiry to the young wayfarer was about his own age; but one of the queerest looking boys that Oliver had ever seen. He was a snubnosed, flat-browed, common-faced boy enough; and as dirty a juvenile as one would wish to see; but he had about him all the airs and manners of a man. He was short of his age: with rather bow legs, and little, sharp, ugly eyes. His hat was stuck on the top of his head so lightly, that it threatened to fall off every moment—and would have done so, very often, if the wearer had not had a knack of every now and then giving his head a sudden twitch which brought it back to its old place again. He wore a man's coat which reached nearly to his heels. He had turned the cuffs back, halfway up his arms, to get his hands out of the sleeves: apparently with the ultimate view of thrusting them into the pockets of his corduroy trousers; for there he kept them. He was, altogether, as roystering and swaggering a young gentleman as ever stood four feet six or something less in his bluchers.

‘Hullo, my covey! What's the row?’ said this strange young gentleman to Oliver.

This is our first meeting with Jack Dawkins, the Artful Dodger, and Charles Dickens has given us a skilful portrait of him. His appearance, what he wears, the way he stands and talks, all help us to learn not merely what he looks like but also what sort of a person he is. Long before the days of the cinema and television Dickens uses words in the way a producer might use a camera. First, the voice, before we even see the speaker.