David has based this sculpture on The Three Cripples pub, familiarly known to its patrons as The Cripples, in Oliver Twist. Dickens had a gift for making squalor and gloom almost tangible. His description of this sordid public house "in the filthiest part of Little Saffron Hill" make the reader shudder for poor Oliver.
   This pub is a meeting place for all the low life which Dicken's pen portrays in such merciless detail -- "cunning, ferocity and drunkenness in all its stages were there." You immediately know what sort of place it is from the fact that it is frequented by Fagin, as well as that arch-villain, Bill Sikes and his unsavoury dog.
   Surprisingly, however, it is not solely a den of drunken thieves. It has some pretensions to musical entertainment, and we're told: "a young lady proceded to entertain the company with a ballad in four verses, between each of which the accompanist played the melody all through, as loud as he could."