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Oliver Twist

How does Charles Dickens portray and make us feel sympathetic towards the poor in Oliver Twist.

Charles Dickens was born near Portsmouth: his father was a clerk in the Navy Pay Office. His father didn’t make much money here and the family wasn’t coping well. The happiest period of Dickens's troubled childhood was spent in Chatham, although the family moved around a great deal. By early 1824, the family was in financial trouble and the 12-year old Dickens was sent to work for a few months at a shoe-polish warehouse on the banks of the Thames. A few days later, his father was arrested for debt. When his father was released, the family finally had some luck as they were left an inheritance courtesy of a late relative.

In 1827, Dickens worked as a junior clerk for a firm of solicitors in Holborn, but he hated the law, and was drawn instead to journalism. He learnt shorthand and began reporting at the Doctors' Commons Courts, and in 1831-1832 he was making shorthand reports of Parliamentary debates for the London papers. At this time, Dickens was toying with the idea of an acting career, and he remained fascinated by the theatre throughout his life, often directing and acting in shows to raise money for charitable causes and friends in distress. However, when the Monthly Magazine accepted his story, “A Dinner at Poplar Walk” (1833), Dickens was diverted into his subsequent literary career. He published a series of sketches of daily life in London in the Evening Chronicle, using the pseudonym “Boz”, his younger brother's childhood nickname. Through this work, he met his wife, Catherine Hogarth, the daughter of the Evening Chronicle's co-editor; they married in 1836. Throughout his life Dickens disliked the law. Since he had experienced both sides of life being rich and poor through different periods of his childhood Dickens was completely against the poor law.

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Dickens uses the story of Oliver Twist to attack the cruelties of the 1834 reforms to the Poor Law, and to counter the glamorous and falsely attractive depiction of London’s criminal underworld. The novel follows the progress of Oliver, an orphan born in a workhouse, and maltreated by its hypocritical master, Bumble.

When Oliver is born after a while he begins to sneeze as if to announce that he is well and healthy but here Dickens uses humour to notify us of the feelings of the rest of the parish.

“Oliver breathed, sneezed and proceeded to advertise to the ...

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