The hardships of the Victorian workhouse led to Oliver Twist utter the famous phrase Please Sir, I want

some more. Here Ruth Richardson explores Dickenss own experiences of poverty and the social and political
context in which he was writing.

Most people nowadays know about the Poor Law and its workhouses from Oliver Twist - whether from
the book, film or the musical. The image of the skinny neglected little boy asking for more has become a
classic. For Charles Dickens, writing a novel about the Poor Law was a thoughtful intervention in a
contemporary national debate. You can hear in his tone of voice - occasionally heavy with satire or irony - that
he regarded the Poor Law as profoundly un-Christian.

Dickens intended Oliver Twist, first published in monthly instalments between February 1837 and April
1839, to show the system's treatment of an innocent child born and raised in the workhouse system, where no
'fault' could be ascribed to the child. He shows the boys neglected, ill-treated, and experiencing hunger so bad
that one child threatens to eat one of the others if he isn't better fed. Oliver has the temerity to ask for more food
only because the hungry boys had cast lots to decide who would have to do it - and he had drawn the short
straw. In the famous illustration by George Cruikshank, the poor orphan Oliver stands utterly alone - with the
fearful threat of cannibalism right behind him, and facing him, the bully of a workhouse master preparing to
unleash his powers of retribution. The pauper woman helper in the background recognises the danger of what
Oliver has done, throwing up her hands in horror.

The description of Oliver's punishments for his request - a natural entreaty from a growing boy -
occupies quite a chunk of the following chapter. The sheer brutality of the system is exposed. Oliver is
maligned, threatened with being hanged, drawn and quartered; he is starved, caned, and flogged before an
audience of paupers, solitarily confined in the dark for days, kicked and cursed, hauled up before a magistrate
and sent to work in an undertaker's, fed on animal scraps, taunted, and forced to sleep with coffins.

The New Poor Law

Dickens was disgusted by Parliament. Before becoming a successful novelist, he had worked as
parliamentary reporter. He had watched politicians at very close quarters, rapidly taking down their speeches
word for word in shorthand notes, and then transcribing them for daily newspaper reports. He had listened
carefully to many debates, and he was sickened by the attitudes MPs expressed towards their fellow human-
beings. When Dickens planned and penned Oliver Twist, new legislation was just beginning to be implemented
across the country.

The Poor Law (Amendment) Act of 1834, otherwise known as the 'New' Poor Law, established the
workhouse system. Instead of providing a refuge for the elderly, sick and poor, and instead of providing food or
clothing in exchange for work in times of high unemployment, workhouses were to become a sort of prison
system. The government's intention was to slash expenditure on poverty by setting up a cruelly deterrent
regime. The old parish poorhouses and almshouses were to be completely changed, no cash support whatever
would henceforth be given out - whatever the hardship or the season - and the old gifts in kind (food, shoes,
blankets) which could help a family survive together, were now disallowed. The only option would be hard
work, forced labour, and only inside the workhouse (which meant entering there to live, full time) in exchange
for a thin subsistence. Homes were broken up, belongings sold, families separated.

Groups of parishes - called Poor Law Unions - were formed under the new system, and a network of
workhouses was established across the country. They were run by 'Guardians' who were usually local business
people. The regime inside these places was deliberately intended to deter everyone but the most desperate.
Children were separated and sent away, heads were shaved, clothes boiled, uniforms issued. Although centrally-
controlled through the Poor Law Board, each workhouse was administered locally. Dickens shows that the
administration was run by self-satisfied and heartless men: the 'man in the white waistcoat' personifies the smug
viciousness of the guardians in Oliver Twist's workhouse (ch. 2).[1] This is likely to have been something
Dickens knew about: he had probably reported on such matters in London, and many accurate details in Oliver
Twist show that Dickens did a lot of research before he wrote the story. It is true that the workhouse system was
patchy: in some places - especially in parts of the North of England - more charitable notions among the
'guardians' of the poor meant that management could be kinder. In general, though, the system was harsh and
austere. The poor - even if sick, old or dying - were treated punitively, as if their predicament was entirely of
their own making, and they were deserving of punishment. This was at a time when there was no National
Health Service to help the sick get well, no pension scheme to help the elderly remain at home, no
unemployment pay for people with no work, no social services at all for those in need.

The workhouse system was hated, and people did everything they could to avoid becoming subject to it,
so those who ended up there were either the most vulnerable, or the most hardened and brazen. Sadly, these
groups were often housed in the same wards. Charitable hospitals generally refused access to those suffering
from chronic (incurable) conditions, dying patients, and paupers. So workhouse inmates were often people
whose medical conditions were regarded as hopeless at the time, and whose social status debarred them from
other kinds of help. The Victorian Poor Law system effectively warehoused people the Nazis would have liked
to liquidate: the sick, elderly and infirm, people who were chronically ill or incurable, physically deformed,
diseased, maimed, lunatic, demented or mentally handicapped.

Dickenss personal experience

Dickens was only 25 when he started writing Oliver Twist in the winter of 1836-37. Because of his own
life-experience he understood that accidents of birth or circumstance could make ordinary individuals
vulnerable to desperation, hunger, cruelty and crime. His secret (which was only revealed after his death) was
that when he was a child, his own family had been imprisoned in a debtors' prison. However terrible that
experience was for him - and it marked him for life - he knew it was actually preferable to being incarcerated in
a workhouse. In a debtors' prison, the family was at least allowed to remain together.

The Dickens family had also twice lived only doors from a major London workhouse (the Cleveland
Street Workhouse), so they had most likely seen and heard of many sorrowful things. The family's lodgings
were above a food shop, and it is quite possible that young Dickens felt deeply sensitive about the suffering he
knew was going on inside the institution close by. As an adult, Dickens knew that he himself had been fortunate
to avoid a fate like Oliver Twist's.

Dickenss inspiration

Further material has also come to light which suggests that Dickens used details from the locality of the
Cleveland Street Workhouse in his writings, most especially in Oliver Twist. For example, Oliver's cap is
described as being of brown cloth - the same as the boys' uniform in the Cleveland Street Workhouse, and the
novel's plot pivots on the possibility that the workhouse matron could be observed from the women's wing of a
workhouse, going to visit a pawnbroker's. In Dickens's day, a well-established pawnbroker's shop stood at the
top end of Norfolk Street, diagonally between the Workhouse and the corner house in which the Dickens family
were lodgers. It was clearly visible from the windows of both places. If you stand on the same corner today,
where the pawnbroker's shop used to be, you can still see both Dickens's old home (which now has a blue
plaque) and the upstairs windows of the Workhouse's women's wards, from where the elderly female inmates
could have secretly scrutinised the matron's errand.

But perhaps the most convincing evidence that Dickens used Cleveland Street in Oliver Twist is that
right opposite the Workhouse, was a tallow-chandler's shop selling candles and cheap rushlights made of animal
fat (tallow). The signboard outside is likely to have been painted with the proprietor's business and his name.
Who was he? A man named Bill Sykes, just the same as the murderer in Oliver Twist.