PRISON REFORMER, SCOURGE OF CAPITALISTS... CHAMPION OF THE POOR
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AT WAR WITH THE WORKHOUSE
From the pages of novels such as Oliver Twist , Dickens savaged the injustices meted out to the impoverished – and at the top of his hit-list was the infamous New Poor Law
“Please, Sir, I want some more.” Charles Dickens’ portrayal of Oliver Twist approaching the master and asking him, timorously, for a second helping of gruel is surely one of the most famous scenes in all of 19th-century literature.
When Dickens wrote these words in the 1830s, huge celebrity and vast fortune still lay in the future. Instead the author was thinking of the here and now – in particular, the plight of the most impoverished Britons. Dickens was determined to savage the terrible injustices he saw unfolding around him, and did that so effectively that he soon secured a reputation as a spokesman for the poor.
Dickens’ writings on urban slum life exposed the rich to the poverty that existed in their midst
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Dickens’ righteous anger, voiced so elegantly in his second novel, didn’t spring from nowhere; it was brought bubbling to the surface by the New Poor Law. Passed in 1834, at a time
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