Among other public buildings in a certain town, which for
many reasons it will be prudent to refrain from
mentioning, and to which I will assign no fictitious name,
there is one anciently common to most towns, great or small; to
wit, a workhouse; and in this workhouse was born, on a day and
date which I need not trouble myself to repeat, inasmuch as it can
be of no possible consequence to the reader, in this stage of the
business at all events, the item of mortality whose name is
prefixed to the head of this chapter.
For a long time after it was ushered into this world of sorrow
and trouble, by the parish surgeon, it remained a matter of
considerable doubt whether the child would survive to bear any
name at all; in which case it is somewhat more than probable that
these memoirs would never have appeared; or, if they had, that
being comprised within a couple of pages, they would have
possessed the inestimable merit of being the most concise and
faithful specimen of biography, extant in the literature of any age
or country.
Although I am not disposed to maintain that the being born in a
workhouse, is in itself the most fortunate and enviable
circumstance that can possibly befall a human being, I do mean to
say that in this particular instance, it was the best thing for Oliver
Twist that could by possibility have occurred.