Poverty Quotes - Oliver Twist | Oliver Twist - Summary, Themes & Characters - Novels PDF Download

[…] the parish authorities magnanimously and humanely resolved, that Oliver should be ‘farmed,’ or, in other words, that he should be despatched to a branch-workhouse some three miles off, where twenty or thirty other juvenile offenders against the poor-laws rolled about the floor all day, without the inconvenience of too much food, or too much clothing, under the parental superintendence of an elderly female who received the culprits at and for the consideration of sevenpence-halfpenny per small head per week. (2.1)

Oooh, Dickens, don’t cut yourself on that irony – it’s pretty sharp. The description of the system of "baby-farms" is actually accurate: orphan babies would get sent out of the workhouse to be brought up by someone who was paid by the parish. Some baby farms like Oliver’s had a mortality rate as high as 90%. So, in the worst ones, only 1 baby in 10 would survive infanthood. And the "poor-laws" Dickens refers to were designed to care for poor people, yet at the same time to make the workhouses unpleasant enough to deter people who could work and support themselves from living at the expense of the parish. Not that anyone would want to, of course – and babies obviously had no choice in the matter, anyway. So calling these orphaned babies "juvenile offenders against the poor-laws" and as "culprits" who are without the "inconvenience" of adequate nutrition or clothing is some of the sharpest irony you’ll find anywhere in this book. It’s pretty damning of the whole system, because obviously the orphans haven’t done anything wrong.

So they established the rule, that all poor people should have the alternative (for they would compel nobody, not they,) of being starved by a gradual process in the house, or by a quick one out of it. (2.59)

Again with the irony. Again with a system designed to care for poor people, that actually just draws out their misery. And the sarcastic parenthetical comment here is particularly telling: it highlights the complacency of the parish authorities. They’re so arrogant and self-satisfied that they think that their system is both just and humane, and that they should be thanked for their generosity.

They made a great many other wise and humane regulations having reference to the ladies, which it is not necessary to repeat. (2.59)

One of the ways the parish authorities wanted to control the poor was to keep poor people from reproducing and creating more little poor people, so they had strict rules to keep men and women (even if they were married) in separate quarters in the workhouses. The "wise and humane" part is obviously ironic – the rule is neither wise nor humane. But the "it is not necessary to repeat" bit is important, too – it’s part of the self-censoring that’s all over Victorian fiction. The reason for keeping men and women separated was, of course, to keep them from having sex, and heaven forbid we mention anything about sex anywhere in print.

The houses on either side were high and large, but very old; and tenanted by people of the poorest class. [...] A great many of the tenements […] which had become insecure from age and decay, were prevented from falling into the street by huge beams of wood which were reared against the tottering walls, and firmly planted in the road; but even these crazy dens seemed to have been selected as the nightly haunts of some houseless wretches, for many of the rough boards which supplied the place of door and window, were wrenched from their positions to afford an aperture wide enough for the passage of a human body. The kennel was stagnant and filthy; the very rats that here and there lay putrefying in its rottenness, were hideous with famine. (5.60)

This passage is a good example of Dickens’s realism – he describes the poorest part of the town without pulling any punches. Some contemporary readers were offended by this kind of realistic detail, but that was probably Dickens’s point – he wanted to shock readers by showing them how the poor really lived. In this passage, Dickens makes the houses seem almost like people who are "tottering" and "crazy", supporting themselves on canes. And the people he describes are dehumanized – they "skulk like shadows" earlier in the paragraph, and they’re reduced to "human bodies" here – they’re not even "people" – just nameless bodies.

The man’s face was thin and very pale; his hair and beard were grizzly, and his eyes were bloodshot. The old woman’s face was wrinkled, her two remaining teeth protruded over her under lip, and her eyes were bright and piercing. Oliver was afraid to look at either her or the man, – they seemed so like the rats he had seen outside. (5.64)

These people are desperately poor, and Dickens seems to want the reader to sympathize with them (like in the next quotation). But in this initial description, they hardly seem human, and Oliver finds that he can’t sympathize with them because they’re more like animals than people.

"I never knew how bad she was, till the fever came upon her, and then her bones were starting through the skin. There was neither fire nor candle; she died in the dark – in the dark. She couldn’t even see her children’s faces, though we heard her gasping out their names. I begged for her in the streets, and they sent me to prison. When I came back, she was dying; and all the blood in my heart has dried up, for they starved her to death. I swear it before the God that saw it,– they starved her!" (5.69)

This is the poor man, Mr. Bayton, ranting to Mr. Sowerberry and Oliver over the body of his dead wife. Two questions about this passage: why does he repeat "in the dark"? Obviously, she was literally in the dark when she died (no fire or candle), but repeating it makes us wonder if, even through his half-crazy rant, Mr. Bayton is suggesting that she died in the dark in a more figurative sense, as well. The whole system leaves people in the dark. Which brings us to the second question: who’s this "they" that Mr. Bayton is accusing of starving her to death? Again, that’s something he repeats: "they starved her." Does he mean the parish authorities? The neighbors in the poor neighborhood around him? The rich people who turn a blind eye to the suffering of others? All of society? If it’s all of society, does that mean that the reader, too, shares some of the guilt of starving her?

The sun was rising in all his splendid beauty, but the light only seemed to show the boy his own lonesomeness and desolation as he sat with bleeding feet and covered with dust upon a cold door-step. (8.9)

There’s an old saying about how the sun shines on everyone – rich and poor. But here, the sun might be shining on Oliver, but it isn’t warming at all – the door-step Oliver is sitting on is still "cold," and the light only shows him how alone he is.

"Out-of-door relief, properly managed,-- properly managed, ma’am,-- is the porochial safe-guard. The great principle of out-of-door relief is to give the paupers exactly what they don’t want, and then they get tired of coming." (23.21)

Mr. Bumble’s revealing trade secrets here. "Out-of-door relief" is the practice of giving people help when they come to ask for it, rather than waiting until they have no choice but to be admitted to the workhouse. Mr. Bumble’s "porochial safe-guard" method is just another way to save the parish money – but do the paupers stop coming because they’re tired of it, or because they’ve starved to death on their own? And Dickens isn’t just making this up – the 1834 New Poor Law (so, just a few years before Oliver Twist was written) does away with "out-of-door" relief in favor of the kind of institutionalized, centralized system that Dickens is critiquing here.

[…] there came a rumour that two men and a boy were in the cage at Kingston, who had been apprehended overnight under suspicious circumstances […]. The suspicious circumstances, however, resolving themselves, on investigation, into the fact that they had been discovered sleeping under a haystack, which, although a great crime, is only punishable by imprisonment. (31.84)

It’s considered bad form to sleep outdoors – so much so, that you can be thrown in jail for it. This is because of the vagrancy laws in England at this point: it’s like the law that had Mr. Bayton, the poor man from Chapter Five, thrown into prison for begging in the streets when his wife was sick. Basically, those laws were designed to keep poor people behind the walls of the workhouse, where they could be easily controlled. So sleeping under a haystack, or begging in the street (looking for "out-of-door relief") was a big no-no.

[…] every repulsive lineament of poverty, every loathsome indication of filth, rot, and garbage;-- all these ornament the banks of Folly Ditch. (50.4)

In Folly Ditch, poverty is "loathsome" and "repulsive." Is that a reflection of what Dickens thinks of poor people, or of the conditions the broken social system forces them to live in?