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Charles dickens works of influence
Charles dickens works of influence
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Oliver Twist by Charles Dickens is a fictional story based in London during the 1800’s. Oliver Twist, an orphaned child, is forced to live in a workhouse where he is abused, starved, and given away as an apprentice. Eventually Oliver turns to a life on the streets, living with a gang of orphaned children. Charles Dickens depiction of the workhouse conditions is considered very accurate according to historians. The conditions were horrible and unfit for humans. Poor people were not valued and were considered a blight on society. It was morally acceptable to treat them as less than human and to abuse and starve them.
Charles Dickens was born in Portsmouth in 1812. His father was imprisoned as a debtor when Dickens was only 12 years old. According to the laws of the time, his brother and mother were forced into the workhouse with his father. While they were imprisoned, Charles started his first job at a factory. He would not speak of the time he worked at the factory to many people, only his wife and closest friend were told of the horrors he faced during that dark period in his life. He witnessed the devastating effects of poverty first hand and he saw the social idiocracy. As an adult, Charles became a newspaper reporter and a book author. During this time in society you were not allowed to openly object to the government regulations so Charles would express his displeasure and opinions through his writing.
Social norms were considerably different in the 1800’s. The English considered the poor to be unworthy of help and passed laws preventing anybody from assisting them. “In 1834, the Commission’s report resulted in the Poor Law Amendment Act, which was intended to end all out-relief for the able-bodied. The care and training...
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...ed with little humility, and the elderly and sick were of even less concern. The less fortunate in the 1800’s faced abuse, segregation, starvation, and harsh labor (Perdue).
Works Cited
Barrow, Mandy. "The Victorians ."woodlands-Junior.2010, 2010.Accessed on 16 Mar 2011. .
Barbury, Lorna."Oliver twists workhouse discovered ."The Telegraph. copyright at telegraph media group , 20 1 2011. Accessed on 10 Mar 2011. .
Dickens, Charles."The complete works of Charles Dickens ."Dickens. dickens-literature.com, 2008.Accessed on 12 Mar 2011.
Perdue, David .www.charlesdickenspage.com.Dickens' London.David A. Purdue ,2010. Accessed on 16 Mar 2011.
"Work house children."Sparticus School net. Accessed on 9 Mar 2011. .
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The warehouse work at age 12, the humiliating shadow of prison and family debt, questions of money and social rank, and topical issues of law and reform preoccupied him in early life - but they rankled and haunted him through his later years as well, and are present in various forms in all of his writings. In all of these fictional imaginings, drawn from the turmoil of his own life, the reader senses Dickens' compassion for the less fortunate and his desire to find real meaning and substance behind an individual's worth favoured by society, wealth, class, power, and education. Charles Dickens was born in 1812, in Portsmouth, England. He spent his formative years in London, and began his schooling at age nine. In 1824, his father, John, suffered financial difficulties and was stripped of his house by creditors.
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Dickens' Criticism of the 1834 Poor Law in Oliver Twist Dickens criticised the 1834 poor law in many different ways within the first five chapters. He does this firstly by cleverly portraying the Victorians attitudes towards the poor. He does this in chapter 1 by referring to Oliver as 'the item of mortality' suggesting how lowly his position in society is. Also the difficulty of Oliver's birth and the fact his mother dies, gives us some idea of the dangers of child birth in Victorian society and the amount of negligence his mother receives from the surgeon.
Oliver Twist is born in a workhouse with the help of a drunken nurse and the parish surgeon. His mother, who they had found on the streets that night, has no wedding ring and after kissing her child on the forehead, dies.
For the first nine years of Dickens’s life, he was living in the coastal regions of Kent, however when Dickens was twelve his family moved to London. He lived with his mother, father and his seven brothers and sisters. His father, John Dickens was a pleasant man, but was very incompetent with money, and had enormous debt throughout his life. As a consequence of this, John Dickens was arrested and sent to debtors’ prison.
can be seen in Oliver Twist, a novel about an orphan, brought up in a workhouse and poverty to demonstrate the hypocrisy of the upper class people. Oliver Twist shows Dickens' perspective of society in a realistic, original manner, which hope to change society's views by "combining a survey of the actual social scene with a metaphoric fiction designed to reveal the nature of such a society when exposed to a moral overview" (Gold 26). Dickens uses satire, humorous and biting, through pathos, and stock characters in Oliver Twist to pr...
Oliver Twist is a novel about the adventures and the life of Oliver yet, his character is not as developed as some of the others. He is not the protagonist, which leads one to ask, what purpose does he serve? Oliver has the most important role in the novel, he links everyone together. He is the anchor, not the hero. He develops the characters. The characters whom he becomes the closest with are the characters that the reader comes to know and love. He might be deemed a symbol rather than a character. A symbol of innocence. Innocence reveals so much about a person because it is so pure. Does the character want to destroy his innocence or does he want to make it grow? The way that each character interacts with Oliver tells the reader about their nature. This is Dickens method for character development.
Dickens had several real life experiences of poverty and abandonment in his life that influenced his work, Oliver Twist. The times of poverty and abandonment in Charles Dickens’ life instilled a political belief in Dickens’ mind against the new poor laws of Great Britain. Dickens’ felt the new poor laws victimized the poor, failed to give the poor a voice, and were in need of change. These points are shown in Oliver Twist through the characters, scenes, and narration Dickens’ uses throughout the book.