An old man with a straggling beard sits hunched on a bench in a stone cell, a hand at his mouth and his eyes staring, beneath a small barred window. A bowl rests on the bench beside him and notices are pinned to the wall. Below the etching are the artist's signature, the engraved title Fagin in the Condemned Cell, and the line "London, Published by Richard Bentley, 1838." George Cruikshank etched it for Charles Dickens's Oliver Twist, serialized in Bentley's Miscellany from 1837 and published in three volumes by Richard Bentley in 1838.

It shows Fagin, condemned to hang, on his last night alive in Newgate Prison, biting his fingernails. Cruikshank made 24 plates for the novel. By a story he later repudiated, he found the pose only when he caught sight of himself in a mirror, sitting up in bed with his fingertips between his lips. G.

K. Chesterton said the plate looks less like a picture of Fagin than a picture by Fagin. After Dickens died in 1870, Cruikshank claimed he had originated Oliver Twist, a claim Dickens's biographer John Forster refuted by citing Dickens's letters.

It is in the Yale Center for British Art in New Haven.