Dickens was the great novelist of cities, especially London depicted at three

different social levels:

• the parochial world of the workhouses whose inhabitants belong to the
lower-middle classes;
• the criminal world made up of murderers, pickpockets living in squalid
slums;
• the Victorian middle class which consisted in respectable people believing
in human dignity.
Dickens moreover gives the reader a detailed description of ‘Seven Dials’, a
notorious slum district whose sense of disorientation and confinement is clearly
expressed in his novels.
He created caricatures of his characters. Indeed, he exaggerated and
ridiculed particular social characteristics of the middle, lower and lowest
classes. He described female characters as weak ones.
He was on the side of the poor, the outcast, the working-class.

The main themes he analyses in his novels are: family, childhood and
poverty.
Dickens’s children are either innocent or corrupted by adults.
Most of these children begin in negative circumstances and rise to happy
endings which resolve the contradictions in their lives created by the adult
world.
Dickens’s aim in his novels is to persuade the common intelligence of the
country to alleviate social sufferings.
He was a campaigning novelist and his books highlight all the great
Victorian controversies:
1. The faults of the legal system in Oliver Twist
2. The horrors of factory employment in Hard Times.
3. Scandals in private schools in David Copperfield.
4. The appalling living conditions in the slums in Bleak House.

The Adventures of Oliver Twist (1837-39)

The Adventures of Oliver Twist was published in instalments from 1837 to
1839. One of Dickens’ most popular works, it is a story of poverty, crime and
the horrors of the workhouse and the underworld. The novel shamed all those
who would cling to the idea of the workhouse system as a fair system, and
showed it in its disgusting reality. Bill Sikes, the reckless criminal that
murders Nancy, the young prostitute who tries to protect innocent Oliver, dies
in the mud of ‘Folly Ditch’ in Jacob’s island, a notorious slum on the south bank
of the River Thames.

Themes
●The evils of Victorian society

The book called the public’s attention to various contemporary evils, including
child labour, the recruitment of children as criminals, the presence of ‘street
children’ and the New Poor Law (→p. 19). Passed in 1834, the law encouraged
large-scale development of workhouses, where the poor were segregated into
four distinct groups: the aged and impotent, children, able-bodied males and
able-bodied females. They were run by groups of parishes and in theory they
offered help to those in need. In practice, the aim was to discourage the poor
from relying on parish relief: conditions in the workhouses were deliberately
harsh, with little food and clothing provided to ‘inmates’, and degrading, as the
‘charitable’ officials who ran the workhouses were usually greedy, lazy
and arrogant. Their brutal treatment of ‘inmates’ was deliberate as the poor
were held responsible for their misery – they did not have ‘industry’, the
hardworking quality of respectable middle-class citizens who saw in their
wealth the sign of God’s preference – and the harsh treatment was supposed
to encourage the poor to look for a better life. This was the spirit of the law,
but workhouses were humiliation and suffering, and Dickens struck his
blow at the inhumanity and unfairness of their conditions.

●The innocence of the child

Influenced by his own difficult childhood, Dickens often writes of the

importance of the preservation of goodness and innocence in children,
and equally condemns their corruption. With Oliver and the many children of
his novels, such as David Copperfield, Dickens depicts both their unfortunate
condition in the Victorian Age and the universal theme of the oppression of
theweak by the strong. With the character of Oliver, an orphan, Dickens shows
how the innocence of children may be tainted by the sinfulness of their
parents, or the cruelty of schoolmasters and strangers, such as Mr Fagin,
Oliver Twist’s final antagonist. Mr Fagin is an old Jew powerfully represented as
a devilish figure who wants to make a thief of poor, innocent Oliver, and tries to
corrupt the child’s nature. Children are always redeemed in the end, however,
because their original purity, a myth of perfectinnocence to Dickens, is never
really lost, and is rewarded by happiness. All suffering ends in the final
‘happy ending’, when Oliver is restored to those who love him, and he
and his new family settle in a small village, presented as an idealised
reality opposed to the urban reality that Dickens paints with incredible
realism

The workhouse system

The Poor Law Act of 1834 sought to change the organisation and basis of
English poverty relief policy. Central to the New Poor Law was the reduction of
the authority of local parishes and the elimination of external relief for the
able-bodied through the use of the workhouse test. Workhouses were large,
centralised institutions for housing and feeding paupers. The cruelty of the
‘New’ Poor Laws of England in the 1830s was illustrated by Charles Dickens in
Oliver Twist; he wrote the novel specifically to shine a light on new and brutal
laws and the state’s assault on the integrity of the family.
In 1834, a Royal Commission issued a report insisting that poverty was almost
always a result of “fraud, indolence or improvidence.” At the centre of the
recommendations of the commission was a core idea: the poor should be cared
for in conditions so abject, so truly humiliating, that only the really desperate
would turn to them. The ‘New’ Poor Laws of the 1830s were designed to ‘solve’
what was believed to be a common problem: the existence of a body
of weak, lazy people leeching off the state. How could the government
end abuses of the system? How could money be saved, diverted back to the
honest hard-working citizens who paid their way? The new rules went into
effect on June 1, 1835, two years before Victoria became Queen. Under
the ‘workhouse test’, relief would only be given to those willing to relinquish
their independence, their human dignity, their spouses and their
children. Children forced into the workhouse system were either housed
in separate buildings from their parents or sent miles away, to live in
government-run district schools. The ‘reformers’ proudly trumpeted that
children could be fed less than adults when families were separated. They also
argued children would learn new and better values once isolated from
their parents. Many families were never reunited. Dickens was appalled.
Oliver Twist exposes, on every page, the hypocrisy of those who
brutalized vulnerable children and claimed to be virtuous in the
process. In an early scene, Oliver sobs when the Board of the Workhouse
condemns him because he does not know how to pray. Oliver has never been
taught to pray – has never been shown kindness, sympathy or compassion of
any kind. “What a noble illustration of the tender laws of this favored
country,” Dickens remarks bitterly, as Oliver weeps himself into
unconsciousness. “They let the paupers go to sleep!” The depiction of paupers
as suffering people, not just leeches on the system, helped shock the
population and precipitate social change. With deliberate use of sentiment
and tear-jerking scenes of tragedy and loss, Charles Dickens gave a human
face to those who were being treated with profound inhumanity. Dickens was
not the only writer to expose the horrors of the poor laws. The
separation of children from their parents was a flashpoint then, as now. A
famous 1843 cartoon in “Punch”, called The Milk of Poor-Law ‘Kindness’,
was the Victorian equivalent of the recent photo of a sobbing two-year-old
by her immigrant mother’s knees. It showed a crone-like workhouse
matron dragging a baby from its horrified mother, as a devil sneers and an
angel hides its face in horror.

I WANT SOME MORE : ANALYSIS

Oliver Twist, an orphan, is in a workhouse, part of a system introduced on

a wide scale by the Poor Law of 1834. Conditions in workhouses were
deliberately harsh and degrading in order to discourage the poor from relying
on parish relief.
In workhouses children were separated from their parents, did not go to school
and lived in miserable conditions. Dickens uses Oliver’s case to criticise this
system.
Conflict is centered on the issue of food and on Oliver, the protagonist. The
narrator exposes the children’s slow starvation and highlights the injustice of
the system and of the individuals governing it.
At the workhouse children are separated from their parents; they do not go to
school and live in miserable conditions, and the food is so meager that they are
all desperately hungry all the time. Oliver and the other children are starved;
they are served a very small bowl of gruel a day, which is not very nutritious.
The diet approved by the Poor Law commission “consisted mostly of gruel
diversified by the odd ounce of cheese and pound of potatoes”, but these
children’s diet is even worse, as it is not diversified at all, and only bread is
allowed on special occasions.
The narrator insists on the children’s hunger by presenting various details that
summarise their conditions clearly.

Characters
Mr Bumble, Oliver’s antagonist, is the master and has the power over the
children’s food. The contrast child-master/protagonist-antagonist is
clear; Oliver is a small child, presumably weakened by the lack of food, while
the master is fat and healthy.
Mr Limbkins and the other members of the board strongly disapprove of
Oliver’s request and are horrified; Mr Limbkins even predicts that the boy is
destined to be hung as if he were a hardened criminal. If we weren’t smiling
here and there, we would be crying in pain for poor Oliver.

Style
The narrator uses his best weapons, irony and hyperbole, to side with the most
innocent victims by definition, children.
Stylistically irony, both situational and verbal, dominates the passage. There
are two examples of situational irony: the first lies in the discordance between
reality and Oliver’s request. He asks for more food but is not granted it;
instead, he receives a blow from the master. The second example lies in the
discordance between Olivier’s request as is reported to the board, and the
general reaction of horror. It is as if Oliver had committed a terrible crime, and
this is confirmed by the board’s final verdict; Oliver will die as a criminal on the
gallows. Verbal irony consists of saying one thing to mean its opposite, as
happens with the expression describing Oliver, his hunger, his request and the
board. “The small rebel” is a starving child and “the boys” that “polished [the
bowls]” were actually eating up all “the festive composition”, which is the
meager food, while the “solemn conclave” of the board is nothing more than an
ordinary meeting of these pompous gentlemen.

The narrator uses his best weapons, irony and hyperbole, to side with the most
innocent victims by definition, children.
Hyperbole greatly contributes to meaning, and it reinforces the reality of the
starving children: “[the boys] could have devoured the very bricks” reveals the
intensity of the children’s hunger, as do the words of the tall boy who declares
he “might eat” someone if he doesn’t get more food. The issue is so
dramatically important to the children – to them it really is a matter of life and
death, despite the light tone adopted by the narrator – that their meeting is
hyperbolically defined a “council” which is “held” to find the ideal candidate for
the request for food: poor innocent Oliver.