Oliver Twist Analysis

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Merchants ' wives for instance often managed the shops and kept accounts. Doctors ' and Lawyers ' wives acted as receptionists and clerks. Farmers ' wives took charge of the dairy and smaller animals. These customs were undermined with the rising of living standards and the increase in specialization of work. Servants gradually began to take over household work. Clerks and assistants began to take over the business chores. Social emulation on the other hand demanded that wives and daughters should wear fine clothes, practice needle work, drawing, music and that they should have the time to enjoy them. The result was of course the rise of the completely leisured, helpless, dependent middle class wife or daughter with no function besides inspiring…show more content…
Mrs. Mann, one of those experimental philosophers, runs a house in which children are treated in hideous ways. For instance: -------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- 52As quoted in Walter E. Houghton , The Victorian Frame of Mind , (Yale University Press, New Haven and London , 1957 ) p. 270 . at the very moment when a child had contrived to exist upon the smallest possible portion of the weakest possible food, it did perversely happen in eight and a half cases out of ten, either that it sickened from want and cold, or fell into the fire from neglect, or got half smothered by accident; in any one of which cases, the miserable little being was usually summoned into another world, and there gathered to the fathers it had never known in this. (P.8) Mrs. Mann embezzles the stipend of the children, a matter which affects the children's life style in the workhouse she runs. As a result of her mistreatment, children die out of hunger and sickness: It cannot be expected that this system of farming would produce any very extraordinary or luxuriant crop. Oliver Twist's ninth birthday found…show more content…
p.14 56"Child Labour and The Industrial Revolution"(URL:http://www.nettlesworth.durham.sch.uk/time/victorian/vindust.html), retrieved May 2005. The Poor Law (Amendment) Act of 1834, otherwise known as the 'New' Poor Law, was about the establishment of the workhouse system. Instead of providing shelter, food or clothing for the poor, workhouses were to become a sort of prison system. The Poor Law was harsh and injustice. It subjects the poor to the dehumanization . Although it may have seemed as if the poor were sufficiently accommodated at the workhouses, they were actually oppressed while those who were not living in the workhouses were forced to work and they could no longer be provided with any help . They were poor because of lack of employment and if they did find any work at all, it was always low paying petty work like sweeping or repairing roads. Even though the Poor Laws were enacted to assist the poor, they did nothing to change their plight or improve their situation. The poor were further exploited through physical and emotional abuse. This amendment shows that the poor could receive assistance only if they took up residence in official workhouses. In Dickens’s opinion, charity based on this way did far more harm than good to the poor. Dickens in his novel adopts a harsh satire tone to reveal this point. Oliver Twist criticizes the nineteenth-century English Poor Laws as a false attempt to
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