Charles Dickens’ classic story of Oliver Twist gains its power came from the author’s own childhood experience with poverty and factory work.
Workhouses of England were Staffed by Children
It was Victorian England and the workhouses put poor people to work in exchange for housing and food. The workhouses allowed for survival but little else. The workhouses were really just harsh prisons for people whose crime was poverty. The middle class society of the time claimed that poverty came from laziness, immorality, and weakness of character. They did not give the children any leniency in this regard either. Factory owners were always on the look out for cheap labor and the children of the workhouses could be apprenticed as young as eight and worked for 16 hours a day for little more than room and board.
OliverTwist was Born of Dickens' own Brush with Poverty.
The author of Oliver Twist was Charles Dickens and he had his own brush with poverty that forever changed his perspective. When Dickens was 12 years old his father could not afford to pay his families debts and was sent to prison. Charles was forced to leave school to support his family and took a job working long hours in a boot-blacking factory. He was saved from his life of drudgery when his father came into an inheritance that would free him from debtor’s prison and allow Charles to return to school. He never forgot and made it his life’s mission to protect oppressed children. Oliver Twist attacked the exploitation of children in the workhouses.
Oliver Twist's Cruel Life
In Oliver Twist, the title character’s mother dies in childbirth and he becomes a workhouse orphan. The children are starved and when Twist politely asks for more food he is branded as a menace and treated even more cruelly. When he is sent to work for an undertaker who beats him he flies to London. He becomes involve in a life of crime. Oliver’s innate goodness and an inheritance save him in the end.
Oliver Twist Changes the World
The novel was so popular that nearly anyone who could read English read of Oliver’s woes and from him the plight of the workhouse children. The law force reformations in the government that gradually led to laws protecting children from harsh working conditions. Before the publication of the novel, the Poor Law of 1834 which called poverty a crime had instituted the workhouses but afterwards the plight of the hungry, working children could no longer be ignored and though it would be decades before the workhouses would disappear completely it would change the way society would view poverty.
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