Context: Oliver Twist is a foundling whose mother died without revealing her identity after she was found in the street. As an infant Oliver is farmed out to the branch-workhouse operated by elderly Mrs. Mann, who receives seven-and-a-half pence each week for his keep, most of which she pockets for herself, so that Oliver, like the other small boys in Mrs. Mann's care, grows up hungry. Oliver is luckier than some of her charges, for he is not smothered by accident, does not die by falling into the fireplace while unwatched, nor sickens and dies without any medical care. On Oliver's ninth birthday Mr. Bumble, the parish beadle, who gave Oliver Twist his name, arrives to take the boy to the workhouse itself. He removes him from Mrs. Mann's house and takes him for an appearance before the parish board, made up of fat, well-fed gentlemen, who examine the boy briefly and then consign him to the workhouse as an oakum picker. In the workhouse Oliver is the victim of slow starvation, his diet consisting of three small bowlfuls of oatmeal gruel per day, with an onion twice a week and a roll on Sunday. Under this regimen which reduces the boys to living skeletons, Oliver and his companions become voraciously hungry. At last they hold a council among themselves and resolve to choose by lot one of their number to ask the overseer for more gruel. The victim of the lottery is Oliver Twist: