Berners Street a job as a result in 1827. One of the lodgers was a young lawyer called Edward Blackmore, who was impressed by the youngster and employed him as a solicitor’s clerk at Ellis & Blackmore in Grays Inn at the age of 15 (for more than twice the pay of the dreaded blacking factory job). It was in Berners Street that, as a boy, Dickens' saw a wandering woman, upon whom the character Miss Havisham from Great Expectations was clearly based. Dickens described her as "a conceited old creature, cold and formal in manner" who was "dressed entirely in white
Monks (Oliver Twist) to outwardly be associated with any form of crime (this is not because he is a moral being, but because he fears being caught). Dickens keeps his motives and his true identity a total secret until nearly the end of the novel, thus surprising the reader with an unexpected revelation that adds complications to the plot. Monks does not appear at all in "Oliver!", the musical adaptation of the novel, nor in several film versions of the novel which seek to simplify the story, including Roman Polanski's 2005 adaptation of "Oliver Twist". He does, however, appear in several mini-series versions