Oliver Twist, perhaps Charles Dickens’ most famous book, was written by the Portsmouth-born author in 1838, a time of turbulent change in Britain, with industrialisation creating both new heights of wealth and new depths of poverty. While the upper classes lavished in their newfound riches, the poor languished in squalor. Oliver, Dickens’ unfortunate hero, is born into a world of workhouses, child labour and children being forced into a life of crime by severe poverty.
The Poor Law Amendment Act of 1834 demonstrates some of the callous attitude towards the poor; it was stipulated that conditions in workhouses should be made so awful that even those facing starvation might think twice about going there. Similar conditions in France, however, had led to the French Revolution at the turn of the century, and the upper classes feared a similar uprising in Britain. So they further oppressed the poor, and ended any dissenting with force.
Charles Dickens wrote this book to bring the plight of the poor to the public attention. The first chapter of Oliver Twist describes his birth at the workhouse, almost immediately after which he is orphaned by the death of his mother and the absence of his father. As Oliver struggles to take his first breath, Dickens describes the ‘office of respiration’, with irony, as ‘a troublesome practice’.
Describing something so necessary to survival with such indifference implies that the authorities didn’t much care whether or not they practiced it or not, and in actuality found the fact that they did troublesome. On the final page of the chapter, Dickens describes the nurse dressing Oliver in rags, and how this instantly transforms him into a lower class child, whereas before it would have ‘been hard for even the haughtiest stranger to assign him his proper place in society’.
I think that this may be Dickens showing that he believed that all children were born equal, and that any differences were material or financial. The beginning of chapter two describes the authorities trying to find a place for Oliver to go. The use of such phrases as ‘inquired with dignity’ and ‘magnanimously resolved’ highlights the detachment between the classes and shows that the well off are more concerned with maintaining their dignity than helping the poor.
The chapter goes on to describe the way in which Mrs Mann steals money from the allowance for the children’s food- ‘she knew what was good for the children; and she had a very accurate perception of what was good for herself. ‘ It is compared with the story of the horse, to which the owner gives just one piece of straw a day, and feels sure that it would be a great horse had it not died. This is a metaphor for the attitude of the authorities.
