Child Rights and Oliver Twist
Child
Rights and Oliver Twist
AR.Meenakshi,
M.Phil Scholar,
Department of English and Foreign
Languages, Alagappa University, Karaikudi.
A.AmrithBanu,M.Phil Scholar, Department of English
and Foreign Languages, Alagappa
University, Karaikudi.
Child
labour at the Victorian era was synonymous to slavery. Children were subjected
to inhuman torture, exploitation and even death. These child labourers were
forced to work in factories and workhouses at the insistence of their parents
and workhouse guardians. Child labour, in Victorian England, was part of a
gruesome system which snatched children of their childhood, health and even
their lives. Many children in Dickens times, worked 16 hour days under
atrocious conditions, as their elders did. Philanthropists, religious leaders,
doctors, journalists, and artists all campaigned to improve the lives of poor
children.
Poverty
however was found to be the root cause of child labour during this period. A
victim of child labour himself, Dickens criticizes the debilitating effect to
which he was subjected. With his father’s imprisonment for debt in 1824, at the
tender age of twelve he was sent to the „blacking‟ factory in Hungerford Market
London, a warehouse for manufacturing, packaging and distributing „blacking‟ or
„polish‟ for cleaning boots and shoes – in order to support his family.
The
rise of industrial capitalism created a huge demand for cheap labour, which
children certainly were. Forced to fend for themselves, many families endured
such extreme poverty that their children’s wages were indeed crucial to their
survival. In his novels, Dickens revealed an intense concern about the
vulnerability of these children. Dickens’s child characters are either orphaned
or their parentage is not clear. His novels are full of neglected, exploited,
or abused children: the orphaned Oliver Twist, the crippled Tiny Tim, the
stunted Smike, and doomed tykes like Paul Dombey and Little Nell. We find Pip
(Great Children in Dickens’s Novels International Journal on Studies in English
Language and Literature (IJSELL) Page | 3 Expectation), Esther (Bleak House),
Oliver (Oliver Twist),David (David Copperfield), Estella (Great Expectation)
and Sissy Jup (Hard Times). The children he depicted in his novels are
vulnerable and susceptible to exploitation. He also brings to the foreground
how children were deprived of education due to their social status. Jo, Pip and
Oliver are abandoned children who receive no education in the early stages of
their life.
Oliver
Twist is one of the most famous
novels Charles Dickens ever wrote (which is
impressive, given that he wrote fifteen super-popular novels during his life).
It’s a classic rags-to-riches
story about an orphan who
has to find his way through a city full of criminals, and avoid being
corrupted. People read Oliver
Twist in Dickens's day—and
are still reading it now—for the gritty realism with which Dickens portrays
working class people and the horrible living conditions of the London slums.
Throughout the book, Dickens gives observations on childcare and
parenting, both by society and by natural and substitute parents. He observes
and describes many categories of child abuse. The infant is turned over to a
baby farm and later the workhouse itself. The children here are neglected,
barely fed or clothed. Even food was not given to Oliver and other children.
“Please, sir I want some more”- these are the words often uttered by Oliver in
the novel. This shows how the children in the Victorian age were treated and
how they were abused and how they were ill-treated. Out of learning education
here in this novel children are asked to learn how to pick pocket the things
and money of others. Here the rights of the child were uprooted and they were ill-treated
through the character of Oliver. Dickens portrays the real life situation of
parentless children in England during Victorian era. Dickens pen pictured this
crucial situation of children in this novel so that the child abuse may come to
an end.
Works Cited
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