ABSTRACT
When an author wanders into an illustrator's shop and idly fingers the galley proofs of another author's soon-to-be-published translations, and converts the characters in those proofs into his own literary characters, the authors might have an incident of (innocent) book-snatching. Dickens's book-snatching, however, may not be quite as guileless as Brownlow's. The parallels of characters, settings, linguistic traits and other narrative elements from Cervantes's Rinconete and Cortadillo suggest that the English author was more than slightly aware of the petty larceny he was engaged in. In spite of the overtones of satire aimed at the religious aspects of the trade guilds, it is very likely that Dickens, and Roscoe for that matter, would have missed, or ignored, the allusions played out in the Cervantine den of thieves. In both Dickens's and Cervantes's novels, members of the criminal 'fraternities' undergo name changes as part of the initiation into the world of thievery.
