Oliver Twist

A workhouse orphan asks for more food, is sold on, runs to London and falls in with a gang of child thieves. Dickens wrote it directly against the Poor Law Amendment Act of 1834 — the workhouse chapters are polemic, and were read as such — which makes it one of the clearest cases in English fiction of a novel written to change a policy.

One element is genuinely contested and was in his own lifetime: Fagin is repeatedly identified simply as “the Jew,” and after Eliza Davis wrote to Dickens in 1863 objecting to the portrayal he cut many of those usages from later editions and wrote a sympathetic Jewish character into Our Mutual Friend. The early text is the one usually reprinted.

Context: Charles Dickens (1812-1870) published Oliver Twist in monthly instalments in Bentley’s Miscellany while The Pickwick Papers was still running. It was his second novel.

Connections

• Charles Dickens — the author.
• Poverty — the workhouse system the book was written against.
• Literature