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Charles Dickens "Oliver Twist"

In: English and Literature

Submitted By nearp
Words 396
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Throughout Charles Dickens’ book “Oliver Twist” the author elaborates on one main theme, the failure of charity. The first part of Oliver Twist takes into account the charity organizations run by the church and the government. The system Dickens describes in his book, explains that the poor could only receive government help if they moved and worked in government workhouses. Residents of those workhouses were compared to inmates whose rights were taken away for the price of food and shelter. Labor was required, and rations of food and clothing were slim. The workhouses operated on the principle that poverty was the equivalent to laziness and that the awful conditions in the workhouse would inspire the poor to better their own lives. The economic situation of the Industrial Revolution made it impossible for many to do so, and the workhouses did not provide to help with the social and economical adjustment upward. As Dickens points out, the government agencies who ran the workhouses violated the values they spoke of to the poor. Dickens describes with a sarcastic tone that of the greed, laziness, and arrogance of charitable workers like Mr. Bumble and Mrs. Mann. Charitable institutions only played on the awful conditions in which the poor would live anyway. Making orphan children like Oliver Twist start work at a very young age. Never giving him a chance to move up in the world.

The book first opens with a look on how the poor must live and the conditions of the work houses. “There is no saying how many applicants for relief, under these last two heads, might have started up in all classes of society, if it had not been coupled with the workhouse; but the board were long-headed men, and had provided for this difficulty. The relief was inseparable from the workhouse and the gruel, and that frightened people.” This quote, from Chapter 2 page 8, describes the

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