Workhouses text analysis (chapters 1-4), Dickens

1) Oliver Twist is an extreme criticism of Victorian society’s treatment of the poor. The
workhouses that figure prominently in the first few chapters of the novel were institutions
that the Victorian middle class established to raise poor children. Since it was believed that
certain vices were inherent to the poor and that poor families fostered rather than
discouraged such vices, poor husbands and wives were separated in order to prevent them
from having children and expanding the lower class. Poor children were taken away from
their parents in order to allow the state and the church to raise them in the manner they
believed most appropriate.

In the narrative, the workhouse functions as a sign of the moral hypocrisy of the working
class. Mrs. Mann steals from the children in her care, feeding and clothing them
inadequately. The Victorian middle class saw cleanliness as a moral virtue, and the
workhouse was supposed to rescue the poor from the immoral condition of filth. However,
the workhouse in Dickens’s novel is a filthy place—Mrs. Mann never ensures that the
children practice good hygiene except during an inspection. Workhouses were established
to save the poor from starvation, disease, and filth, but in fact they end up visiting precisely
those hardships on the poor. Furthermore, Mr. Bumble’s actions underscore middle-class
hypocrisy, especially when he criticizes Oliver for not gratefully accepting his dire
conditions. Bumble himself, however, is fat and well-dressed, and the entire workhouse
board is full of fat gentlemen who preach the value of a meager diet for workhouse
residents.

The assumption on the part of the middle-class characters that the lower classes are
naturally base, criminal, and filthy serves to support their vision of themselves as a clean
and morally upright social group. The gentlemen on the workhouse board call Oliver a
“savage” who is destined for the gallows. After Oliver’s outrageous request for more food,
the board schemes to apprentice him to a brutal master, hoping that he will soon die. Even
when the upper classes claim to be alleviating the lower-class predicament, they only end
up aggravating it. In order to save Oliver from what they believe to be his certain fate as a
criminal, the board essentially ensures his early death by apprenticing him to a brutal
employer.

The workhouse reproduces the vices it is supposed to erase. One workhouse boy, with a
“wild, hungry” look, threatens in jest to eat another boy. The suggestion is that workhouses
force their residents to become cannibals. The workhouse also mimics the institution of
slavery: the residents are fed and clothed as little as possible and required to work at tasks
assigned by the board, and they are required to put on a face of cheery, grateful
acceptance of the miserable conditions that have been forced on them. When Oliver does
not, he is sold rather than sent away freely.

Dickens achieves his biting criticism of social conditions through deep satire and hyperbolic
statements. Throughout the novel, absurd characters and situations are presented as
normal, and Dickens often says the opposite of what he really means. For example, in
 describing the men of the parish board, Dickens writes that “they were very sage, deep,
philosophical men” who discover about the workhouse that “the poor people liked it! It
was a regular place of public entertainment for the poorer classes; a tavern where there
was nothing to pay. . . .” Of course, we know that Oliver’s experience with the workhouse is
anything but entertaining and that the men of the parish board are anything but “sage,
deep,” or “philosophical.” But by making statements such as these, Dickens highlights the
comical extent to which the upper classes are willfully ignorant of the plight of the lower
classes. Since paupers like Oliver stand no chance of defeating their tormenters, Dickens
takes it upon himself to defeat them with sly humor that reveals their faults more sharply
than a serious tone might have. Though Oliver himself will never have much of a sense of
humor, we will eventually meet other boys in his situation who will join Dickens in using
humor as a weapon in their woefully unequal struggle with the society that oppresses
them.

2) “Oliver wants some more” is an extract from the chapter two of the novel "Oliver Twist" by
Charles Dickens. In his novel he underlines the social situation during the Victorian age, in
particularly in this extract he tells about the critical situation of children at the time.
Childhood in the Victorian age was a bloody experience as many children had to go to work
hard and without compensation due to poverty.

In my opinion, the extract can be divided into two parts: the first describing the critical
situation of hunger for children and the power of the master, the second describing the
extreme act of the child to ask for another soup and the reaction of the master.

The narrator in the novel is third-person and omniscient; everything he tells us is filtered
through his point of view. Only at the end of the extract the narrator uses the direct speech
to tell the story from the point of view of the characters, such as Oliver Twist and the
master.

The setting is a workhouse where the protagonist and the other children are forced to live
because of the poverty of those years.

The main theme treated by Dickens is the critique of social problems during the Victorian
age. In particular in this extract the narrator underlines the inferiority of the children and
the women towards the man (the master).

In this extract the narrator tells the story of a child, Oliver Twist, who asks the master of the
extra soup after being drawn by the other children. The master's reaction characterizes and
explains the purpose of the narrator, that is, criticizing the behavior of the master in front
of the children and therefore criticizing the difference of the social classes during the
Victorian age.

Immediately (in the first part of the extract) the narrator begins by presenting the setting,
in particular through the detailed description of the room and the master on which all that
will happen depends. The narrator uses the cold adjective both to indicate the climatic
conditions and to indicate the coldness of the situation. The narrator then uses the
sinnedoche form to catapult the reader into the situation immediately. In particular he
already uses the passive form in the description of women from the beginning to
emphasize their inferiority.The description of the children is immediately ironic: the
narrator points out that the cups do not need to be washed as the children lick the soup to
the end (uses the verb "splasher"), uses to describe the children's hunger verbs "to deveal",
"polish", verbs usually used for animals and objects. The narrator in this first sequence
underlines the hunger of children using irony that makes the reader smile and reflect of the
critical situation. The use of the word "master" immediately underlines the importance of
man describing it as if he were doing some important action.

The narrator in the novel is third-person and omniscient; everything he tells us is filtered
through his point of view. Only at the end of the extract the narrator uses the direct speech
to tell the story from the point of view of the characters, such as Oliver Twist and the
master. The setting is a workhouse where the protagonist and the other children are forced
to live because of the poverty of those years. The main theme treated by Dickens is the
critique of social problems during the Victorian age. In the second part of the extract the
narrator underlines the reaction of the master in front of the simple request of the child.
The narrator again uses irony making the master ridiculous for his exaggerated reaction.

In particular, the narrator focuses on Oliver Twist when he has to go and ask for another
soup. He is called "rebel" and this once again underlines the inferiority of the child, ironic
by the narrator, of the use of this word. The narrator uses the "to rose" and "to alarm"
verbs used to describe a war or a strong danger. The whole situation is emphasized and
exaggerated and this makes it all ridiculous.

Charles Dickens chooses to use fiction as accessible to everyone and because it is the best
way to express your idea about a specific topic. With this novel he gets to describe the
criticality of the social situation and the deep divisions within it during the Victorian age. In
particular, describing the act of asking for another soup as a war, he is like talking about a
war between poverty and power, present in those years. As often underlined previously, he
uses an ironic language and above all uses thick rhetorical figures to emphasize the
situation, to amuse the reader but at the same time to highlight the critical situation that
makes this, in fact, ridiculous.