Saffron Hill was a desperately poor neighborhood at the time Dicken’s was writing – a rookery, so called – with a lot of crime. It was also, to an extent, an Italian neighborhood. Here Padroni, organizers of a human trafficking scheme which brought poor Italian children to London to beg on the streets (at least according to anti-immigrant news reports of the time), ran groups of semi-criminal urchins which resembled Fagin’s. Oliver Twist was “ripped from the headlines.”