From Chapter X "Stephen Blackpool"

     It was a room, not unacquainted with the black ladder under various tenants; but as neat, at present, as such a room could be.  A few books and writings were on an old bureau in a corner, the furniture was decent and sufficient, and, though the atmosphere was tainted, the room was clean.
     Going to the hearth to set the candle down upon a round three-legged table standing there, he stumbled against something.  As he recoiled, looking down at it, it raised itself up into the form of a woman in a sitting attitude.
     "Heaven's mercy, woman!" he cried, falling father off from the figure. "Hast thou come back again!"
     Such a woman! A disabled, drunken creature, barely able to preserve her sitting posture by steadying herself with one begrimed hand on the floor, while the other was so purposeless in trying to push away her tangled hair from her face, that it only blinded her the more with the dirt upon it.  A creature so foul to look at, in her tatters, stains and splashes, but so much fouler than that in her moral infamy, that it was a shameful thing even to see her (103).

From Chapter 2, "Murdering the Innocents"

"The square finger, moving here and there, lighted suddenly on Bitzer, perhaps because he chanced to sit in the same ray of sunlight which, darting in at one of the bare windows of the intensely whitewashed room, irradiated Sissy.  For, the boys and girls sat on the face of the inclined plane in two compact bodies, divided up the centre by a narrow interval; and Sissy, being at the corner of a row on the sunny side, came in for the beginning of a sunbeam, of which Bitzer, being at the corner of a row on the other side, a few rows in advance, caught the end.  But, whereas the girl was so dark-eyed and dark-haired, that she seemed to receive a deeper and more lustrous colour from the sun, when it shone upon her, the boy was so light-eyed and light-haired that the self-same rays appeared to draw out of him what little colour he ever possessed.  His cold eyes would hardly have been eyes, but for the short ends of lashes which, by bringing them into immediate contrast with something paler than themselves, expressed their form.  His short-cropped hair might have been a mere continuation of the sandy freckles on his forehead and face.  His skin was so unwholesomely deficient in the natural tinge, that he looked as though, if he were cut, he would bleed white" (44).

Dickens Writes Back

Dickens wrote back to the critics of Oliver Twist in his 1841 Preface to the Third Edition of the novel.  He address the question of what makes a fit subject for art (in his case, fiction).  While you can speak to this issue (as you began to do in your Letter to the Editor), pay attention here to the specific language and images  (repetition, tone, sentence structure) he uses to make his argument.

     "What manner of life is that which is described in these pages, as the every-day existence of a Thief?  What charms has it for the young and ill-disposed, what allurements for the most jolter-headed of juveniles?  Here are no canterings upon moonlit heaths, no merry-makings in the snuggest of all possible caverns, none of the attractions of dress, no embroidery, no lace, no jack-boots, no crimson coats and ruffles, none of the dash and freedom with which 'the road' has been, time out of mind, invested.  The cold, wet, shelterless midnight streets of London; the foul and frowsy dens, where vice is closely packed and lacks the room to turn; the haunts of hunger and disease, the shabby rags that scarcely hold together: where are the attractions of these things?  Have they no lesson, and do they not whisper something beyond the little-regarded warning of a moral precept?
     But there are people of so refined and delicate a nature, that they cannot bear the contemplation of these horrors.  Not that they turn instinctively from crime; but that criminal characters, to suit them, must be, like their meat, in delicate disguise.  A Massaroni in green velvet is quite an enchanting creature; but a Sikes in fustian is insupportable.  A Mrs. Massaroni, being a lady in short petticoats and a fancy dress, is a thing to imitate in tableaux and have in lithograph on pretty songs; but a Nancy, being a creature in a cotton gown and cheap shawl, is not to be thought of.  It is wonderful how Virtue turns from dirty stockings; and how Vice, married to ribbons and a little gay attire, changes her name, as wedded ladies do, and becomes Romance."