Poverty Through The Eyes Of Dickens In Oliver Twist

“There are dark shadows on the earth, but its lights are stronger in contrast”. Despite the darkness in his early life, Charles Dickens and his ability to take his reader to unbelievable places with his realistic stories lighted his way to being considered one of the most popular English novelists of the 19th century. Dickens has entertained his readers for many years with his down-to-earth stories about people forced into unfavorable situations, drawn directly from his own personal experiences. Overtaken by financial difficulties, the Dickens family was forced to move into a very rundown and old area of Camden town from a much wealthier town in Chatham. There, Dickens was removed from school and forced to work degrading jobs, among other rough and cruel employees, in an effort to help his struggling father put food on the table. Shortly after Dickens started working in the factory his father was thrown into jail for failure to pay his debts, only to be released three months later. Dickens' sympathy for the victimized, his experience with poverty and homelessness, and his idea of London as an awesome, lively, and threatening environment all reflect the experiences he had during his time on his own. The unforgettable events endured by Charles Dickens as a child led him to take his experiences and write well-known stories that revealed many issues the lower class had to face during the early 1800’s in England.

Through the characters in Oliver Twist, Dickens depicted what life was like for those facing poverty incorporating his own first-hand experiences. Oliver Twist follows the tough journey of a nine-year-old orphan boy, Oliver, who is born an orphan. Oliver spends most of his childhood living in an orphanage with an unfair child: food ratio. When Oliver one day asks for an extra serving of “gruel” he is sent to work for an mortician because asking for an extra serving is unacceptable. He then works for a cruel man named Fagin as a pickpocket. It seems that Oliver has nothing going for him and his life just keeps getting more difficult. He is misplaced time after time and even after being shot in the arm, he does not give up his hope for a bright future for himself if he just gets through this rough patch in his life. Later on, Oliver is informed that one of the men who treated him so poorly was his half-brother and is now dead. He is entitled to a large fortune and moves in with two new kind-hearted people to the countryside where he is finally treated properly.

The nature of Dickens’ own encounter with facing poverty in his childhood becomes evident through the journey of Oliver in his novel Oliver Twist. In Oliver Twist Dickens indirectly depicts how the New Poor Law of 1834 has an affect on many families. The New Poor Law was put into place in an attempt to provide public relief under a system which allowed for the impoverished to reside in workhouses. These workhouses where institutions in which the poor were housed and worked in order to receive enough to live off of. At the workhouses, one could find women, men, children, the old, and even the sick. According to the Poor Law Act itself, there is no section stipulating the extent of brutality allowed against the poor. These laws were supposed to provide aid and assistance to impoverished people. However, this system had serious flaws. The system was designed with the idea that the workhouses would be unpleasant. The food in the workhouses was putrid and meals were to be eaten in silence. Upon entering the workhouse families were separated and assigned to same-sex quarters. The children were separated from the adults. Infants were sent to “baby farms”. Rather than finding this treatment motivational, it broke the spirit of many people forced to live there. The adventures of young Oliver Twist make this point. Oliver Twist is forced to spend the first nine years of his life in a badly run home for young orphans and then is transferred to a workhouse for adults. He is alone through most of his childhood and is forced to mature much quicker than a normal child. He shows the boys neglected, ill-treated, and experiencing hunger so bad that one child threatens to eat one of the others if he isn't better fed. Oliver is malnourished and eats barely a bowl of oatmeal a day. Oliver is mistreated, threatened with being hanged, starved, caned, and beaten, confined in the dark for days, kicked and cursed at, fed on animal scraps, taunted, and forced to sleep with coffins. Through the various characters presented in Oliver Twist Dickens is able to voice his views on the devastation the poor class had to face, more specifically those so impoverished that they had to stay at workhouses. Dickens is able to highlight the inhuman conditions the New Poor Laws imposed on many people. Even though the laws were put into place to help the underprivileged, not much aid was truly provided to them.

Dickens does speak to the conditions the severely poverty-stricken families had to face, but he focuses more on the effects the children had to face. Although the Industrial Revolution fostered urban growth, it is unfortunate that the number of the poor also increased. Many of them lived under squalid conditions with poor sanitation leading to fatal diseases and even death. As a result of the financial hardships that families faced, the kids were stripped of an education and instead forced to become child laborers. As defined by Google: child labor is the employment of children under the age of eighteen working under conditions which harm them physically, mentally, morally and deprive them access to education. Not only were many deprived of an education, but many were deprived of natural human rights. The child labor system increased illiteracy rates, poverty, caused disease to spread, and created unsafe lifestyles for many young innocent children. Without an education, it did not give these children much hope for a brighter future. As an industrially developing nation, Britain needed a large amount of cheap human laborers despite the age, in order to bring productivity and development to the country. The British government, in the eyes of Dickens, was more concerned with the economic growth than that of the safety and care of children as he experienced first hand. In Oliver Twist, the young boy is stripped of any opportunities to receive any education at all. Similarly, Dickens was overworked in a factory while facing homelessness or orphanry, I know that’s not a word shush. The government seemed to be so caught up in their booming economy that they did not notice the struggling, impoverished individuals that were being tortured, eh, the reason for the successful economy. I am so done. I can’t think.

Oliver Twist successfully portrays the misery and degradation of destitute children and adults. Being a socially conscious writer, Dickens depicts the world in which he lives, as to raise awareness in his readers of what was really happening, and hopefully, to bring social reforms. Child labor during the 1800’s was a brutal and gruesome system which robbed children of their childhood, education, health, and even their lives.