PRISON REFORMER, SCOURGE OF CAPITALISTS... CHAMPION OF THE POOR
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
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
