Charles Dickens Research Paper

Some conditions were needed to be reflected to represent the situation as deeply as possible and they were the ones which Dickens mentioned in the novel. At first, Dickens described the ineligible workhouse which Oliver is moved in at the age of almost 9 months. The workhouse is managed by Mrs Man who keeps the greater amount of the weekly allowance for herself “and gave the children hardly enough to keep them alive.”(17) Dickens gave a detailed description of the workhouse atmosphere, “… where twenty or thirty other young orphans rolled about the floor all day, without the inconvenience of too much food…”(17). Dickens described the workhouse for Oliver as the home “where not a single kind word or look had ever lightened the darkness of his

The boys polished them with their spoons till they shone again…”(21) Dickens described Oliver’s act of asking for more food as a “crime”, which represents the oppression that these workhouses were practising on the poor. As the events of the novel go on, Dickens shows his readers more of unbearable facts not only about the workhouses but also about the nature of some people there who were horribly greedy and stripper from mercy. When Mrs Sowerberry sees Oliver’s small body, she angrily replies when her husband said that he will grow up: “Ah! I dare say he will, on our food and drink. I see no use for workhouse children, not I; for the always cost more to keep than they are worth.”(39) Moreover, Mrs Sowerberry feeds Oliver the cold bits of meat which she puts earlier for the dog, and that may sound painfully humiliating for any human being. It has never been good news that Oliver will leave the workhouse, for what he endures in the Sowerberry’s company was much more torturing, that they evoke him, curse and beat him. The narrator tells the poor boy’s situation after the terrible night he faced, expressing in the following

He had listened to their insults with contempt, and he had suffered the beating without a cry. But now… he cried such tears, as, please God, few so young may ever have cause to pour it.(57)

These are some examples in the novel that accurately portrays the extent of suffering which people may not feel unless they undergo. It is not only the poverty that the poor suffer; they bear the humiliation of being poor and got oppressed as if never been. According to Kevin Rogers, Alexander Welsh argues that: The secret memory of the blacking warehouse explains a great deal in Dickens's life and fiction. It partially explains why, in the midst of his success with Pickwick, he should begin a fairy tale of the workhouse child, Oliver Twist. It explains the vein of self-pity that crops up again and again in the novels and particularly the childlike sentiment that if he had died or turned bad, it would have served the grown-ups