One aspect of the novel, Oliver Twist, is the fact that he is faced with constant injustices from the moment he is born. At first the fact that Oliver is met with injustice after injustice can seem frustrating as a reader who is waiting for a good outcome to happen to the main character at some point, but further evaluation of Dickens’ motives help lead to the realization that this could have been Dickens’ point that people who begin their lives with wealth, which had passed Oliver by at the fault of the doctor and nurse who aided in his birth, are living at the complete opposite side of the spectrum as compared to those who are born poor orphans, as the doctor and nurse determined Oliver would be. Many of Oliver’s injustices come from social institutions of the time period including the Church and the workhouse welfare system that existed in England in the nineteenth century. The injustice I found to stand out the most was the fact that Oliver would have had a family if his mother was able to identify herself. His family was in fact quite wealthy and could have helped Oliver avoid most all of the tragedy that he experiences during his upbringing. This injustice technically could be blamed on Sally, the nurse who helped deliver Oliver, since she stole the locket from Agnes which was her only chance of being identified. I believe that the actual blame is to be placed on the circumstances that existed in Victorian culture which led Agnes to make the choices that she did, that being choosing to give birth in a workhouse instead of facing the social consequences that came with having a child out of wedlock and the shame that would bring upon her family. 

Although I was planning on responding to this prompt before the trip occurred, I am glad I decided to save this response for after our return. The trip heightened my appreciation for Dickens’ works, and with the added knowledge from our tours, visits, and sessions, I think this response will be more whole than it ever could have ever possibly been before.

Dickens rarely shies away from touching on social themes in his fictional works. He develops characters and fictional plots to represent real injustices and horrors of those living in his time. Although these characters can sometimes come off as flat, they are still effective at illuminating the conditions of the lower classes to the often ignorant upper classes. One common theme he focuses on in two of his most famous works, “A Christmas Carol” and Oliver Twist, is social injustice, specifically towards children. In the time of his texts, lower class children often found themselves trapped by their parents’ debts and were forced to work. This exact thing happened to Charles Dickens due to the debts of his father, John Dickens. Due to Charles Dickens experiences with poverty and child labor, I think it is safe to say he had a particular soft spot in his heart for children trapped in these positions, and his own experiences strongly influenced his choice to focus on these subjects. For this reason, he represented social injustices towards children, and he created ignorant characters of upper class citizens to represent what he saw happening.

In “A Christmas Carol,” Scrooge is not condemned for being a miserable member of society, but rather he is condemned for ignoring the poor, refusing to help, and caring only about his own wellbeing. In one of the most famous scenes of the text, Scrooge denies charity collectors.

“Are there no prisons?” asked Scrooge.

“Plenty of prisons,” said the gentleman, laying down the pen again.

“And the Union workhouses?” demanded Scrooge. “Are they still in operation?”

“They are. Still,” returned the gentleman, “I wish I could say they were not.”

This scene speaks to the position of the upper social classes towards the poor. To them, the issue of poverty was not one they were involved in nor obligated to assist in relieving. From here, Dickens later uses these exact words against Scrooge as the Spirit of Christmas Present illuminates the insensitivity of his comments while showing him suffering children. Scrooge asks, “Have they no refuge or resource?” The Spirit responses only with Scrooges own inhumane responses from before. These two scenes particularly work well at drawing the connections between the insensitivity of the upper class and the unjust conditions of poor children at the time.

In Oliver Twist, Dickens similarly presents injustices towards children in poverty by members of the upper classes. Child labor in the workhouse is one of the main focuses of Oliver Twist. Dickens illustrates the dark, unbearable conditions children were forced to endure all throughout the novel. Mr. Bumble represents the larger population of people running the workhouses as well as larger populations involved in the mistreatment of children. Although Mr. Bumble is a working man, he cannot comprehend the situations the children below his power are in. He is ignnorant to their suffering entirely. Mr. Bumble threatens all different kinds of cruel punishments on Oliver for asking for more food. Mr. Bumble expects for Oliver and other victims of the workhouse to be delinquents and unworthy of better treatment. These misconceptions have been fed to people of the upper classes as well as to the enforcers of the unjust rules. At the end of the novel, Mr. Bumble ironically meets his fate by being forced to live in the workhouse he used to rule over. By presenting this twist of fate, Dickens show what he thinks justice would be. By ending Mr. Bumble’s role in the story in this way, Dickens implies that the horror that has been placed upon these vulnerable children will come back to haunt those that enforced the cruel treatments. This also includes the bystanders who did nothing to help. I cannot imagine a more just ending for Mr. Bumble’s storyline as it perfectly places him with what he deserves.

Mr. Bumble’s fate is a bit harsher than Scrooge’s fate, but this is because of Mr. Bumble being unable to realize the truth about the poor. Scrooge is able to change his stance when faced with the suffering children and help part of the poor population, while Mr. Bumble continues to agonize the children. Both “A Christmas Carol” and Oliver Twist work to present the mistreatment of the poor and illustrate the role of upper class ignorance in the injustices.

While the entirety of the text is very packed-full of surprising and gruesome events for poor Oliver’s life, the baby farm that he is sent to right after he is found from his abandonment, stood out to me right away, and wasn’t something I could seem to forget. In the multiple times I have studied this time in literary history, I have never heard of Baby Farms, and I wanted to learn more.

In the novel, it talks about the reason that children are sent to these farms being: “where twenty or thirty other juvenile offenders against the poor-laws, rolled about the floor all day, without the inconvenience of too much food or too much clothing, under the parental superintendence of an elderly female” (Dickens 30). This situation is kind of what you could deem a modern day “day care” but it’s more of a permanent residency for these children, and there is no fairness on how they are treated or their food levels. The old lady that Dickens mentions who runs this specific farm in the story is a very corrupt one. She takes most of the money that is supposed to be for the children and uses it for personal allowance, while only feeding the children what they need to survive. This is yet another reason why reader’s could imagine this being a horrible place.

These farms were a frequented place for misfit children around the 19^th century, especially in higher populated regions. The concept even reached across the ocean, as American society picked up the same idea. My biggest question is how we somehow went from these lethal traps for children to orphanages. That is not to say that all orphanages were necessarily good, but at least there were opportunities for the children to become adopted. It seems that for these baby farms, the only way you get out is if the Parishioners come to take you to work somewhere else, outside of the farm.

Nonetheless, I’m glad that this country now has proper child welfare laws to prevent businesses like these from ever existing again.

Charles Dicken’s Oliver Twist is described by the narrator as a melodrama of the tale of an orphan boy named Oliver Twist. His tale is one big series of unfortunate and fortunate events. The theme of death runs throughout the entire book. For Oliver, even when the chapter entails fortunate events for him, he still has death or deathly omens around him that foreshadow his future.

A less fortunate time for Oliver was in the fifth chapter of the book. Oliver is taken to the Sowerberry’s where he is to be an apprentice for an undertaker:

“But his heart was heavy, notwithstanding: and he wished, as he crept into his narrow bed, that there his coffin, and that he could be laid in a calm lasting sleep in the churchyard ground, with the tall grass waving gently above his head, and the sound of the old deep bell to soothe him in his sleep” (Dickens, 34-35)

At this moment in the book, Oliver had to leave all of his friends and people he knew at the workhouse. Oliver being taken by the undertaker is interesting not just for the storyline, but for Dickens. First, Oliver being the Undertaker’s apprentice got him closer to death than he had ever been before. As an apprentice, Oliver views funerals with Sowerberry. Oliver at this point in the story is working with death and since he sleeps under the counter with the coffins, he is seeping among death as well. This is one of the times in Oliver’s life where he is trapped by death. As for Dickens, it is interesting that he decided to have the undertaker buy Oliver from the workhouse. This mirrors the undertaker at the beginning of “A Christmas Carol”, the Undertaker is at Marley’s funeral. Another similarity between Oliver Twist and “A Christmas Carol” pertaining to death is how both of the stories begin. In “A Christmas Carol”, the first line in the short story is: “Marley was dead”. Dickens opens with what some authors have as the rising action or climax to other stories. However, this isn’t Marley’s story. In Oliver Twist, Dickens begins with the death of Oliver’s mother. This adds another layer to Oliver’s character throughout the book: the death of Oliver’s mother after birth lurks in his brain. This is a metaphorical shadow that follows Oliver in his tale.

Although I do not particularly consider myself a Charles Dickens fan, Oliver Twist is one of the most impactful novels I have ever read. I can vividly remember being horrified the first time I read it in high school. Dickens powerfully describes some of the most gruesome conditions faced by the poor in nineteenth-century London, and by doing so, his novel provides modern-day readers at a glimpse of how dehumanized the lower classes were in England at the time. Dickens develops a realistic tale, and through his vivid descriptions, the horrific results of extreme social stratification are highlighted as a key theme.

The representations presented in Oliver Twist substantially relate to the British Poor Laws of the nineteenth-century. These laws forced families in poverty into workhouses, which were comparable to prisons. Despite a decent size of the English population experiencing poverty, the general gap between classes created a lack of understanding which created the laws of the time. Dickens is sure to create a bold distinction between the classes through his characters. As represented in the novel, Dickens believed workhouses amplified the worst attributes in people of power. This is illustrated by characters like Sowerberry and Mr. Bumble. The power is used by them to hold the lower classes hostage. Descriptions of Sowerberry do not necessarily paint him as inherently evil, but rather as a character who is insensitive to people grieving and he does nothing to help those who he watches to suffer. This makes him a very human character and relates him to many readers of both then and now. Sowerberry thinks of Oliver in terms of profit rather than thinking of what would best help Oliver. Mr. Bumble likes power and outwardly uses it to manipulate people. As he reigns over the workhouses, he does so in an inhumane way. He meets his fate at the end of the novel, but he ultimately represents the hypocritical “charitable” institutes.

In contrast, Dickens paints a more sympathetic image of those experiencing poverty and those who have no other choice, this is mainly developed through Oliver. Oliver’s spirit remains although he is forced to live on unsustainable amounts of food and sleep in shameful sleeping quarters. Dickens highlights Oliver’s spirit and innocence in a manner that illustrates the good nature of the poor, despite the cruel treatment from the other classes. When Oliver is born, the narrator says he could be the “the child of a nobleman or a beggar.” When the authorities intervene and wrap him in the identity-erasing parish clothes he is “badged and ticketed, and fell into his place at once—a parish child—the orphan of a workhouse.” This illustrates clearly that Oliver had no chance against the authorities, and they stepped in when he was vulnerable to force him into a life where he has no other choice. Oliver develops into a realistic symbol for those suffering in poverty at the time, and he serves as a symbol of nineteenth-century poverty for modern-day readers.

Dickens also does not glorify the conditions the boys in Oliver Twist are forced through, rather he describes them for what they were: filthy and miserable. This keeps poverty from looking desirable, and it shows the desperate need for change, pulling on the hearts of nineteenth-century readers. From the beginning of the book, readers are set with the conditions when they read about how the children are treated. Dickens writes parish children

“had contrived to exist upon the smallest possible portion of the weakest possible food, it did perversely happen in eight and a half cases out of ten, either that it sickened from want and cold, or fell into the fire from neglect, or got half-smothered by accident; in any one of which cases, the miserable little being was usually summoned into another world.”

Although this is only one of the many descriptions Dickens provides of the conditions in Oliver Twist, and it speaks to the nature of poverty in London at the time. Dickens does not shy away from showing the grueling nature of these conditions, highlighting the raw reality of poverty through his use of characters representing social classes and grueling descriptions of workhouse conditions.

Works Referenced:

Dickens, Charles. Oliver Twist. 1838.  <http://literatureproject.com/oliver-twist/index.htm>.

Richardson, Ruth. Oliver Twist and the Workhouse. 2014. Web. <https://www.bl.uk/romantics-and-victorians/articles/oliver-twist-and-the-workhouse>.