Charles Dickens was born on
February 7, 1812, in Portsea, England. His
parents were middle-class, but they suffered financially as a result
of living beyond their means. When Dickens was twelve years old,
his family’s dire straits forced him to quit school and work in
a blacking factory, a place where shoe polish is made. Within weeks,
his father was put in debtor’s prison, where Dickens’s mother and
siblings eventually joined him. At this point, Dickens lived on
his own and continued to work at the factory for several months.
The horrific conditions in the factory haunted him for the rest
of his life, as did the experience of temporary orphanhood. Apparently,
Dickens never forgot the day when a more senior boy in the warehouse
took it upon himself to instruct Dickens in how to do his work more
efficiently. For Dickens, that instruction may have represented
the first step toward his full integration into the misery and tedium
of working-class life. The more senior boy’s name was Bob Fagin.
Dickens’s residual resentment of him reached a fevered pitch in
the characterization of the villain Fagin in Oliver Twist.
After inheriting some money, Dickens’s father got out
of prison and Charles returned to school. As a young adult, he worked
as a law clerk and later as a journalist. His experience as a journalist
kept him in close contact with the darker social conditions of the
Industrial Revolution, and he grew disillusioned with the attempts
of lawmakers to alleviate those conditions. A collection of semi-fictional sketches
entitled Sketches by Boz earned him recognition
as a writer. Dickens became famous and began to make money from
his writing when he published his first novel, The Pickwick
Papers, which was serialized in 1836 and
published in book form the following year.
In 1837, the first installment
of Oliver Twist appeared in the magazine Bentley’s
Miscellany, which Dickens was then editing. It was accompanied
by illustrations by George Cruikshank, which still accompany many
editions of the novel today. Even at this early date, some critics
accused Dickens of writing too quickly and too prolifically, since
he was paid by the word for his serialized novels. Yet the passion
behind Oliver Twist, animated in part by Dickens’s own
childhood experiences and in part by his outrage at the living conditions
of the poor that he had witnessed as a journalist, touched his contemporary
readers. Greatly successful, the novel was a thinly veiled protest
against the Poor Law of 1834, which dictated
that all public charity must be channeled through workhouses.
In 1836, Dickens married Catherine
Hogarth, but after twenty years of marriage and ten children, he
fell in love with Ellen Ternan, an actress many years his junior.
Soon after, Dickens and his wife separated, ending a long series
of marital difficulties. Dickens remained a prolific writer to the
end of his life, and his novels—among them Great Expectations,A
Tale of Two Cities,A Christmas Carol,David
Copperfield, and Bleak House—continued
to earn critical and popular acclaim. He died of a stroke in 1870,
at the age of 58, leaving The Mystery
of Edwin Drood unfinished.
The Poor Laws: Oliver Twist’s Social Commentary
Oliver Twist opens with a bitter invective
directed at the nineteenth-century English Poor Laws. These laws
were a distorted manifestation of the Victorian middle class’s emphasis
on the virtues of hard work. England in the 1830s
was rapidly undergoing a transformation from an agricultural, rural
economy to an urban, industrial nation. The growing middle class
had achieved an economic influence equal to, if not greater than,
that of the British aristocracy.
In the 1830s, the middle class
clamored for a share of political power with the landed gentry,
bringing about a restructuring of the voting system. Parliament
passed the Reform Act, which granted the right to vote to previously
disenfranchised middle-class citizens. The middle class was eager
to gain social legitimacy. This desire gave rise to the Evangelical
religious movement and inspired sweeping economic and political
change.
In the extremely stratified English class structure,
the highest social class belonged to the “gentleman,” an aristocrat
who did not have to work for his living. The middle class was stigmatized
for having to work, and so, to alleviate the stigma attached to
middle-class wealth, the middle class promoted work as a moral virtue.
But the resulting moral value attached to work, along with the middle class’s
insecurity about its own social legitimacy, led English society to
subject the poor to hatred and cruelty. Many members of the middle
class were anxious to be differentiated from the lower classes, and
one way to do so was to stigmatize the lower classes as lazy good-for-nothings.
The middle class’s value system transformed earned wealth into a
sign of moral virtue. Victorian society interpreted economic success
as a sign that God favored the honest, moral virtue of the successful
individual’s efforts, and, thus, interpreted the condition of poverty
as a sign of the weakness of the poor individual.
The sentiment behind the Poor Law of 1834 reflected
these beliefs. The law allowed the poor to receive public assistance
only if they lived and worked in established workhouses. Beggars
risked imprisonment. Debtors were sent to prison, often with their
entire families, which virtually ensured that they could not repay
their debts. Workhouses were deliberately made to be as miserable
as possible in order to deter the poor from relying on public assistance. The
philosophy was that the miserable conditions would prevent able-bodied
paupers from being lazy and idle bums.
In the eyes of middle-class English society, those who
could not support themselves were considered immoral and evil. Therefore, such
individuals should enjoy no comforts or luxuries in their reliance
on public assistance. In order to create the misery needed to deter
immoral idleness, families were split apart upon entering the workhouse.
Husbands were permitted no contact with their wives, lest they breed
more paupers. Mothers were separated from children, lest they impart
their immoral ways to their children. Brothers were separated from
their sisters because the middle-class patrons of workhouses feared
the lower class’s “natural” inclination toward incest. In short,
the state undertook to become the surrogate parents of workhouse
children, whether or not they were orphans. Meals served to workhouse
residents were deliberately inadequate, so as to encourage the residents
to find work and support themselves.
Because of the great stigma attached to workhouse relief,
many poor people chose to die in the streets rather than seek public
aid. The workhouse was supposed to demonstrate the virtue of gainful employment
to the poor. In order to receive public assistance, they had to
pay in suffering and misery. Victorian values stressed the moral
virtue of suffering and privation, and the workhouse residents were
made to experience these virtues many times over.
Rather than improving what the middle class saw as the
questionable morals of the able-bodied poor, the Poor Laws punished the
most defenseless and helpless members of the lower class. The old,
the sick, and the very young suffered more than the able-bodied benefited
from these laws. Dickens meant to demonstrate this incongruity through
the figure of Oliver Twist, an orphan born and raised in a workhouse
for the first ten years of his life. His story demonstrates the
hypocrisy of the petty middle-class bureaucrats, who treat a small
child cruelly while voicing their belief in the Christian virtue
of giving charity to the less fortunate.
Dickens was a lifelong champion of the poor. He himself
suffered the harsh abuse visited upon the poor by the English legal
system. In England in the 1830s, the poor
truly had no voice, political or economic. In Oliver Twist, Dickens
presents the everyday existence of the lowest members of English
society. He goes far beyond the experiences of the workhouse, extending
his depiction of poverty to London’s squalid streets, dark alehouses,
and thieves’ dens. He gives voice to those who had no voice, establishing
a link between politics and literature with his social commentary.
