Oliver Twist Page 0,1

goad to the conscience of his readers. Victimized children, by-products of the Industrial Revolution, also occur with frequency in Dickens’ fiction. The protagonist of Little Dorrit, his great novel of 1857, is born in debtors’ prison; foreshadowing her, Oliver is born in the prisonlike conditions of the workhouse, not a place of work but a place for the destitute purposely made more harsh than comforting. Regulations were cruel and the food provided was sparse; the paupers seeking shelter were to be made uncomfortable so that they would be discouraged from entering the local parish workhouse and would, instead, seek employment. The assumption was that the poor evaded work, and little distinction was made between paupers who could work (whether they could find employment or not) and those who surely could not (small children, say, or the aged or ill). The sense of accusation in poorhouse regulations was part of the Poor Law Amendment Act of 1834, and Oliver Twist is an attack on the mentality that made such a cruel attitude into the law of the land. There is considerable pleasure taken by Dickens, and by the reader, as Bumble the Beadle, that bully, hypocrite, and unmistakable expression of the Poor Law’s inhumanity, and his wife, Mrs. Corney, no less shallow or cruel, end up abject in the workhouse. Their erotic relationship begins as a commercial transaction—we watch Bumble paw and appraise her belongings—and it ends in fiscal disaster: they are financially, as well as spiritually, bankrupt. It is worth noting how Dickens plots this pleasure for us: he knows at the start, in chapter XXIII, that the circle of this couple’s story will be closed (in chapter LIII) “in that very same workhouse in which they had once lorded it over others.” The author needed to know, at least roughly, very early in the serial what elements would need management for the later episodes. The parish boy’s “progress” is not merely linear, a straight line of events from his birth as an “item of mortality” to his happy days with Rose Maylie and Mr. Brownlow; there is more design than that to the novel, and we might want to trace it from chapter II.

If you are mortal, or are said to partake of mortality, you are defined as someone who can die. Oliver’s birth, then, is an event all- about death: his mother dies as he is born, and he is aimed by his author toward the possibility of early death. Virtually all of the novel is about dying or not dying. Everything else—whether concerning the treatment of the poor, the cruelty of public officers, the public attitude toward poverty, the organization of the underworld, expressions of bigotry—is secondary to the primary concern of the novel: death.

Oliver and the other orphaned paupers in the workhouse are told by a large, nasty boy possessed of “a wild, hungry, eye” that he might well eat the small child sleeping beside him. The boys draw straws to see who must act to forestall this cannibalism. The point for us is that they believe that their lives are this contingent—that someone can decide to feast on them and do so if he will. It is no less perverse an idea than the twisted social Darwinism that enables public officials to permit the weak and helpless to starve because the poor are guilty of being poor. These children believe that they, too, are guilty; they are hounded and harried because they have committed the crime, in society’s eyes, of poverty: why, in punishment, should someone not be allowed to feed himself on their sparse flesh? So Oliver asks for more gruel not because he is brave, and not because he feels entitled to it, and not because of appetite. He begs because he must. He has drawn the short straw, and he is required to save one of his mates, and perhaps himself, from being a meal. The response to this reduction of children to food—remember Jonathan Swift’s satire, “A Modest Proposal,” in which mass starvation in Ireland in 1729 is to be relieved by the cooking and eating of the young—is of course neither mercy nor forbearance. Instead, Oliver is found guilty of wanting more than the Parliamentary act permits him. His destiny is obvious to Mr. Limbkins, who is Bumble’s supervisor: “ ‘That boy will be hung,’ said the gentleman in the white waistcoat. ‘I know that boy will be hung.’ ” The assertion by the poor of their needs is, to