Complete and unabridged, with 48 full-page plates by John Atkinson Grimshaw, Marianne North and John Everett Millais. A workhouse boy asks for more, is sold to an undertaker, runs to London and falls in with a gang of child thieves. Dickens was twenty-five and still writing it in instalments when the outcry began about the workhouses it described; he answered his critics in a preface insisting that Nancy's life was drawn from the streets, not softened. Forty-eight plates of painting, from Delacroix to Grimshaw, trace the roads, rivers and city streets that carry a parish boy through his progress.