344 Dickens, Charles
the novel’s realistic portrayal of pauperism and espe-
cially the exploitation of abandoned orphans by state
authorities and criminals, Dickens explores the bru-
tal effects of England’s industrialization and harsh
economic policies on its most vulnerable members.
By making such a topic the focal point of the social
commentary in his fiction, he sought to pique the
public’s interest in reforming the conditions that
bred poverty and crime in Victorian society.
The specific target of the work’s satirical critique
was the Poor Law of 1834, which isolated paupers
from the rest of English society by forcing them to
labor and eke out a bare existence in a workhouse.
This institutionalization of the working poor was
intended to remedy problems caused by an explod-
ing population of unemployed and unemployable
citizens. Instead, it became one of the most abusive
social measures of 19th-century Britain. The work-
house in Oliver Twist becomes a symbol of industrial
society’s worst evils, particularly its destruction of
the bonds of human relationships and sympathies.
Dickens depicts how the process of workhousing
paupers breaks up families and isolates an entire
stratum of society whose members are exploited
for their labor and treated as expendable com-
modities. Oliver Twist’s status as an orphan and
illegitimate child makes him especially vulnerable to
abuse within the workhouse and in society at large.
Born just as his mother dies, he is unprotected and
anonymous, a laboring ward of the state, whose rep-
resentative Bumble, the warehouse beadle, gives him
a name picked at random.
Like other workhouse inmates, Oliver loses ties
to family and community, and he becomes the
innocent victim of a government solution to the
problem of a so-called surplus underclass. Children
become especially vulnerable to those aspects of the
workhouse system that Dickens considered the most
reprehensible—lack of charity and corrupt operation.
Such evils are personified in Bumble, who starves the
wards for his own gain when he withholds and pock-
ets part of their rations. In a crucial episode, Oliver
becomes the voice for his fellow inmates when he is
chosen by them to ask Bumble for more food. The
beadle’s reaction to Oliver’s begging mirrors society’s
attitude toward its destitute working class. The boy’s
request for sustenance, like his poverty, is regarded as
criminal; as punishment, he is thrown into another
form of oppressive labor—bonded apprenticeship
to the local undertaker, Mr. Sowerberry. Dickens
stresses that it is the innate innocence projected by
Oliver’s gentle manners and appearance that induces
Sowerberry to employ him as a funeral attendant.
These qualities save the boy from being forced into
the dreaded work of chimney sweeping, a brutal
occupation that maimed and killed thousands of
child laborers in England during this period.
When Oliver escapes from his abusive employ-
ment and heads for London, he becomes vulnerable
to a worse form of labor bondage that ensnared
many paupers in the Victorian period, especially
children and women. He is lured into an urban
gang of thieves by the Artful Dodger, a youth who
has been hardened in appearance and character by
his corrupt life and work as a criminal. The values
of honest labor and its rewards, which were already
horribly subverted by the workhouse system, are
completely turned upside-down in the training
school for juvenile thieves operated by Fagin, who
is a fence and pimp. Oliver is presented with a
charade in which the theft of another’s possessions
is enacted as a useful and skillful occupation. Fagin
deceives his juvenile gang into believing that, by
profiting him, their thievery will help them all.
Thus, in a twisted sense, their criminal work seems
justifiable. His exploitation of these destitute boys
is as heinous as Beadle Bumble’s abusive and cor-
rupted management of the workhouse, which has
been spawned by the twisted economic logic of
the Poor Law. Fagin’s evil scheme to entrap Oliver
into a lifelong occupation as a criminal is eventu-
ally thwarted by those who are moved by the boy’s
innocence. Once his true identity is revealed, Oliver
regains his rightful status and occupation in society
as a gentleman’s son.
Dickens’s narrative of Oliver’s salvation from
a life of miserable servitude as an impoverished
laborer or as a criminal had a powerful effect on a
reading public who identified with this hero from a
genteel background. Oliver Twist became the first
in a succession of Dickens’s novels that influenced
the shaping of social reforms to improve life for the
British working class.
Diana Chlebek