How is the picture of childhood portrayed in Oliver Twist?

Authors Avatar

How is the picture of childhood portrayed in Oliver Twist?

Oliver Twist (or the Parish Boy’s Progress,) is an episodic story, published between 1837 and 1839 in the popular publication; ‘Bentley’s Miscellany’.  Through popular culture the character of Oliver Twist has become an iconic image of childhood and synonymous with the appalling conditions faced by Victorian children.

Oliver Twist is the novel’s protagonist, which is notable in itself, as Oliver Twist is the first novel in the English language to have a child at its centre throughout. It is interesting that the perception that children should be seen and not heard was challenged by Dickens here by his very placing of a child in the centre of his novel. Unlike Dickens’ other novels, however, this protagonist is not the narrator, as in Great Expectations and David Copperfield, instead a third person, adult narrator is used. By filtering Oliver’s vicissitudes through the perspective of an adult third-person narrator, Oliver’s plight is contextualised and Dickens compels the reader to read his tale as one that is emblematic of the fate of similar children in an unjust society. Oliver “was all alone in a strange place; and we all know how chilled and desolate the best of us will feel in such a situation”. The narrator is championing Oliver’s cause, compelling us to be outraged, acting as a moral signpost for the reader.  Indeed, the tone of the narrator’s voice is often aggressively emotive:

“I wish some well fed philosopher, whose meat and drink turned to gall within him’ whose blood is ice, whose heart is iron; could have seen Oliver Twist clutching at the dainty viands that the dog had neglected.  I wish he could have witnessed the horrible avidity with which Oliver tore the bits asunder with all the ferocity of famine.”  The word famine would have been particularly resonant to the Victorian reading public who had been besieged in the popular press by lurid tales of the Bengali famine which occurred for twenty five years from 1800, during which time a million people starved.

At other points in the novel the narrator adopts a satirical tone to underscore the abuse of children, waspishly describing the behaviour of the authorities as ”magnanimous and humane” and mocking the “tender mercies of Churchwardens and overseers.”

Another effect of Dickens adopting a third person omniscient narrator whose adult standard-English voice encloses and contains the direct speech of the children’s idiomatic expressions in the novel is to replicate the control of adults over children in Victorian society.  For example :

Join now!

“Toor rul lol loo, gammon and spinnage, the frog he wouldn’t, and high cockolorum,” said the Dodger: with a slight grin on his countenance”. The novel shows how children’s voices are silenced and that society punishes children who speak out and challenge. It’s significant that it is Oliver’s vocalising, his famous asking for more, that leads to punishment.  

Dickens’ portrayal of childhood is inextricably linked to his expose of Victorian society’s neglect of children and the callous institutions in place to deal with the problems of poverty. Dickens used his novels as a seditious vehicle for criticising Victorian society’s ...

This is a preview of the whole essay