Oliver Twist
Vocabulary

This flood of tears left Mr. Sowerberry no alternative. If he had hesitated for one instant to punish Oliver most severely, it must be quite clear to every experienced reader that he would have been, according to all precedents in disputes of matrimony established, a brute, an unnatural husband, an insulting creature, a base imitation of a man, and...

alternative = other possibility

Shadows on the wall have caught your whispers, and brought them to my ear; the sight of the persecuted child has turned vice itself, and given it the courage and almost the attributes of virtue.†

attributes = characteristics

It had had plenty of room to expand, thanks to the spare diet of the establishment; and perhaps to this circumstance may be attributed his having any ninth birth-day at all.

attributed = credited (pointed to as the cause of)

Mrs. Corney, the matron of the workhouse to which our readers have been already introduced as the birthplace of Oliver Twist, sat herself down before a cheerful fire in her own little room, and glanced, with no small degree of complacency, at a small round table: on which stood a tray of corresponding size, furnished with all necessary materials for the most grateful meal that matrons enjoy.†

corresponding = proportional

Oliver, quite elated and honoured by a sense of his importance, faithfully promised to be secret and explicit in his communications.†

explicit = clear and detailed

and pulling the collar up over his ears so as completely to obscure the lower part of his face:

obscure = hide (make less visible)

Just pausing to observe which appeared the most crowded streets, and consequently the most to be avoided, he crossed into Saint John's Road, and was soon deep in the obscurity of the intricate and dirty ways, which, lying between Gray's Inn Lane and Smithfield, render that part of the town one of the lowest and worst that improvement has left in the midst of London.

obscurity = the condition of being unknown to most people and undistinguished

Apparently this consolatory perspective of a mother's prospects failed in producing its due effect.†

perspective = way of seeing and thinking about things

He had been poring over them for some time; and, as the day had been uncommonly sultry, and he had exerted himself a great deal, it is no disparagement to the authors, whoever they may have been, to say, that gradually and by slow degrees, he fell asleep.

sultry = hot and humid