The Importance Of The Workhouse In Oliver Twist

Dickens in Oliver Twist reveals the horrors in these workhouses . He tries to show the mistreatment of the children under the parish authority. He reveals that the workhouse is unpleasant place to look after people and portrays the corruption that existed in such places often by those people who should have been offering some protection to the children. In the first part of the book, he openly satirizes The New Poor Law, and greed and hypocrisy of the officials connected with the law. He criticizes the bureaucrats who preached the Christian moralities, yet in fact were indifferent to the paupers. Dickens shows how the England society treated the poor.

the parish authorities magnanimouslyand humanelyresolved, that Oliver

There is no saying how many applicants for relief,under these last two heads, might have started upin all classes of society, if it had not been coupledwith the workhouse; but the board werelong-headed men, and had provided for this difficulty. The relief was inseparable the workhouse and the gruel; and that frightened people . (p.18)

In his writings he tries to give the real picture of the Victorian workhouse which was run according to a regime of prolonged hunger, physical punishment, humiliation and hypocrisy. This law is one of the aspects of materialism and social injustice. This nullify man and make of him either a brute or a victim . In 1850, Dickens writes his article A Walk in the Workhouse and published in the magazine Household Words. He describes the conditions in the Marylebone workhouse and its rough system : In a room opening from a squalid yard, where a number of listless women were lounging to and fro, trying to get warm in the ineffectual sunshine of the tardy May morning – in the “Itch Ward,” not to compromise the truth – a woman such as HOGARTH has often drawn, was hurriedly