rs. His moving, critical and sentimental stories are characterized by attacks on social injustices and hypocrisy, and offer an excellent insight into Victorian culture. Dickens achieved massive worldwide popularity in his lifetime and is regarded as one of the giants of English literature. Today his works are still widely read and regularly adapted for cinema and television. Over 75 feature films have been made based on his novels.1 He suffered a lot in his childhood, but become a great novelist at last. His main works are Oliver Twist, David Copperfield, A tale of two cities, Great Expectations and many other works.
1.3 The social background of Oliver Twist
“In the mid-nineteenth century, England was suffering from economic instability and widespread unemployment. In the 1830s, the middle class clamored for a share of political power with the landed gentry, bringing about a restructuring of the voting system. Parliament passed the Reform Act, which granted the right to vote to previously disenfranchise middle class citizens. The middle class was eager to gain social legitimacy. This desire gave rise to the Evangelical religious movement and inspired sweeping economic and political change.”2
In the extremely stratified English class structure, the highest social class belonged to the “gentleman” an aristocrat who did not have to work for his living. The middle class was stigmatized for having to work, and so, to alleviate the stigma attached to middle class wealth, the middle class promote work as a moral virtue. But the resulting moral value attached to work, along with the middle class’s insecurity about its own social legitimacy, led English society to subject the poor to hatred and cruelty. Many members of the middle class were anxious to be differentiated from the lower classes as lazy good for nothings. The middle class’s value system transformed earned wealth into a sign of moral virtue. Victorian society interpreted economic success as a sign that God favored the honest, moral virtue of the successful individual’s efforts, and, thus, interpreted the condition of poverty as a sign of the weakness of the poor individual.
The sentiment behind the Poor Law of 1834 reflected these beliefs. The law allowed the poor to receive public assistance only if they lived and worked in established workhouses. Begging carried the punishment of imprisonment. Debtors were sent to prison, often with their entire families, which virtually ensured that they could not repay their debts; workhouses were deliberately made to be as miserable as possible in order to deter the poor from relying on public assistance. The philosophy was that the miserable conditions would prevent able bodied paupers from being lazy and idle bums.
In the eyes of middle class English society, those who could not support themselves were considered immoral and evil. Therefore, such individuals should enjoy no comforts of luxuries in their reliance on public assistance. Because of the great stigma attached to workhouse relief, many poor people chose to die in the streets rather than seek public aid. The workhouse was supposed to demonstrate the virtue of gainful employment to the poor. In order to receive public assistance, they had to pay in suffering and misery. Victorian values stressed the moral virtue of suffering and privation, and the workhouse residents were made to experience these virtues many times over.
Rather than improving what the middle class saw as the questionable morals of the able bodied poor, the Poor Laws punished the most defenseless and helpless members of the lower class. The old, the sick, and the very young suffered more than the able bodied benefited from these laws. Dickens meant to demonstrate this incongruity through the figure of Oliver Twist, an orphan
