342 Dickens, Charles
authorities who regard the pauper children under
their protection as mere sources of labor, at best, and
as expendable burdens on the state, at worst.
Victorian culture is often noted for nurturing
childhood as a special stage of human development,
particularly through its depictions of angelic chil-
dren in works of literature and art that were aimed
to accommodate the tastes of the English middle
and upper classes. Dickens shocked these same
audiences when Oliver Twist portrayed the grim
realities of how poverty-stricken and abandoned
children from the lower orders of society were
victimized and abused by government institutions,
such as the workhouse, that were supposed to care
for them or, at the least, give them a livelihood. An
early incident in Oliver’s life that illustrates such
brutal treatment by his caretakers has become one
of the most famous scenes in the novel. When he
is chosen by the other children at dinnertime to be
their representative to ask for more rations from the
workhouse authorities, the master responds to the
orphan’s piteous request, “Please, sir, I want some
more,” by viciously beating Oliver and throwing him
into solitary confinement. As further punishment
for his audacity in pleading for more food on behalf
of himself and his equally starving companions, Oli-
ver is ejected from the workhouse and farmed out as
a laborer through a process that handles him like a
felon. Dickens deliberately uses such an exaggerated
scenario to underscore the harmful roles played by
adults who oversee the upbringing of vulnerable
children left to the care of the state. For it is through
abuse from figures of authority such as Bumble the
beadle, who assists at Oliver’s workhouse “trial,” and
the undertaker Sowerberry, who exploits him as a
laborer, that the orphan flees to London, where he
ends up in a gang of child thieves headed by the evil
criminal Fagin.
The depictions of corrupted childhoods played
out against a grim urban setting that Dickens
presents at this stage of Oliver’s story were based
on the real-life experiences of young felons whom
the author had observed during his early career as
a reporter at trials in the London courts. When the
orphan is introduced into Fagin’s gang, the young
members who are presented as models to follow are
the Artful Dodger, a streetwise urchin of Oliver’s
age, and Nancy, a teenage prostitute whom Fagin
has given as a mistress to Bill Sikes, a brutal thief
and colleague of Fagin’s. Having been transformed
into hardened criminals at an early age by evil adults
who have lured them off the city streets, these two
young characters come to represent a whole class of
children who have been robbed of their young inno-
cence. Dickens presents them both as prematurely
adult, especially the Dodger, who, with his pipe and
outsized man’s clothes, appears almost grotesque. By
contrast, Oliver’s childish purity is portrayed as a
mantle of security that ultimately protects him from
this tragic childhood of corruption and crime on the
London streets that traps the Dodger, Nancy, and
other young paupers.
Oliver’s young innocence ultimately helps to
save him, for it is this aspect of his character that
attracts the sympathies of Mr. Brownlow and of the
Maylie family, all of whom he is forced to rob by
Fagin’s orders. Nancy is also moved by the orphan’s
vulnerability so that, at the cost of her own life,
she reveals to these benefactors that the child is
being forced into a criminal life under the orders
of his evil stepbrother Monks, who wants to him
disinherited. By a series of coincidences, Oliver is
revealed to be related and connected with these
families, and thus the solution to the mystery of
his birth and origins becomes the critical factor
that works to bring him both the care of his true,
“good” family and the material well-being afforded
through the recovery of his inheritance. Ultimately,
it was Dickens’s memories of his own deprived
childhood as well as his keen observations of Vic-
torian culture that fueled Oliver Twist’s artistry and
its passionate call for reform in the treatment of
that most neglected sector of 19th-century British
society—the child pauper.
Diana Chlebeksur vival in Oliver Twist
Charles Dickens approaches the theme of survival
in Oliver Twist from several perspectives. In his
portrayal of pauperism in Victorian England and
its brutalizing effects, he strives to expose a shock-
ing reality to his middle-class readers. He reveals
that dire social conditions in Britain have forced its
population of laboring poor, particularly children, to