Oliver Twist: The Battle for Morality

In many novels, the society created by the author is surrounded by wealth and corruption. Numerous amount of times these settings are produced based on the life in which the author lives. Charles Dickens is no different. In the midst of most of his novels, Dickens exposes the deception of Victorian England and the strict society that holds everything together. In Dickens' novel Our Mutual Friend, a satire is created where the basis of the novel is the mockery against money and morals. Throughout this novel, multiple symbols and depictions of the characters display the corruption of the mind that surrounds social classes in Victorian England.

Charles Dickens uses a repeated theme of the power of clothing in Oliver Twist to colorize, emphasize, and ultimately satirize class distinctions in Victorian Britain. As shown through examples concerning the poor, the rich, and Oliver himself, Dickens is arguing through the device of clothing – and, one extends the metaphor, of body weight – that socially-constructed class identity is ridiculous, arbitrary, and harmful.

He is living proof of childhood corruption and portrays himself as his young, mischievous, and perplexed characters Oliver Twist and David Copperfield. He proves that he is a product of the Victorian era as he brings attention to the childhood cruelty, the less fortunate in an English society, and the unwealthy dysfunctional families of the early Victorian time period. Charles Dickens reflects these and other issues as he brings to life the realism of writing. While others were writing about the way things should be, rather than the way things were, Dickens was challenging these ideas, and argued that paupers and criminals were not evil at birth. This was an act of rebellion, for he in fact was showing the Victorian middle class generation

From the moment of his birth, Oliver Twist is besieged by pure evil, and while he grows up without knowledge of what being good is like, having never seen it, having never experienced it, he is able to maintain a level of morality that most of the adults around him cannot. His disposal into the workhouse, an institution original designed to help the poor but has been transformed into a house of punishment by the New Poor Law which callous

In this essay, I will argue that one of the underlying motives in Charles Dickens' novel A Tale of Two Cities (1859) is the reinforcement of Christian values in 18th century Victorian England. Dickens was very concerned with the accepted social norms of industrialized England, many of which he felt were very inhumane. Christian values were challenged, largely due to the recent publication of Darwin's Origins of a Species, and philosophy along with literature was greatly affected. In 1859, the industrial age was booming, making many entrepreneurs rich. However, the majority of the lower economic class remained impoverished, working in unsafe and horrific environments as underpaid

During the 1800s, Charles Dickens was one of the most acclaimed writers of his time. He did not just write books but he was a journalist, and play write. Many of his experiences and people in his life influenced his books. Because of this he was known as not just a writer but a writer for “the people”. He wrote about the workhouse, poverty, disabilities, social class, and so much more that effected his era.

In Charles Dickens books you can often find the rich and powerful to be portrayed as cruel and greedy. In his books described the rich to be heartless. He had a great compassion for the poor. His compassion came from when he was a kid, and his family went into debt. (Charles) He was sent to a workhouse to pay off his family’s debts. (Charles) He wrote thirty-three books in his life time. Charles Dickens died before he could finish his last book The Mystery of Edwin Drood. (Dickens) The world of Charles Dickens is best understood through his own life, industrialized London, and scriptures concerning the poor.

The novel’s opening words (Book 1, Chapter 1) “It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity. . .” Provided, Dickens conveys the relationship between poverty and aristocracy through the use of parallelism, paradox, and other poetic techniques. In addition to, Dickens's technique functions not only to draw opposites, but to reveal hidden parallels.

Oliver twist is one of the well known novel during the Victorian era. Charles Dickens, a nineteenth century writer mentions the the story of the young boy named Oliver twist in England and the advantures that happen to him.the novel theme up with many interrelated ideas.it is concentrated with the miseries of poverty and the spread of its degrading effects through society,Many evils are awaken in the society because of poverty for instance hunger, homelessness illiteracy etc.which was shown clearly in the novel.one of the worst consequences of poverty and being deprived of life’s essential is crime,with all of its corrosive effects on human nature.in the Victorian era,poverty experienced was extreme in case of the working classes.the

This is a very important passage because it establishes the theme of duality from the get-go. It was the most luxurious time for the upper class, and the worst of times for everyone else. It was the age of wise philosophy and learning, it was also the age of\ foolish policies and unnecessary suffering. This theme is further expressed in the first chapter when Dickens talks about the religious and justice systems in each country. England is fascinated by supernatural ghosts and other religious phenomenon. In France people pay attention to religion out of fear rather than actual interest. The author also compares France's harsh justice system to England's lax one. Criminals overrun England; And when the courts do serve justice they do so indiscriminately,

Dickens’ view of society having evil morals and ethics is conveyed with the use of hunger and an unjust law system. The bad morals of the wealthy aristocrats and the unfair treatment in prisons help portray why society would be angry. The people use these problems in society to fuel their revenge against the aristocracy so they can be treated equally. The people, starting an uprising against the aristocracy, will finally have the revenge they

Dickens develops inhumanity as something innately present in human beings, but that is only truly revealed when there is lack of consequence for revealing it. Society then shifts to accept man’s inhumanity and becomes a destructive force, brutally hurting everything in its path and breeding the inhumanity of revenge in the people it wrongs. This inhumanity developed by other inhumanities is why Madame Defarge so mercilessly hunts the Evrémonde family. It is why the peasants of the French Revolution are equally as inhumane to the aristocrats as the aristocrats had previously been to them. The brutally honest theme of man’s inhumanity toward his fellow man is part of what makes A Tale of Two Cities such a memorable book, as it serves as not only an entertaining piece of literature, but also a warning to generations to come.

Dickens criticizes this injustice in Great Expectations buy mocking a society that values wealth and appearance. In the novel typically the poorest characters are the most honest and moral and the wealthiest are the most immoral and corrupt. Pips moral stalwart is Joe, his much older brother in law. Joe is a poor blacksmith who is ridiculed for his humble means by his wife and also by a wealthy Pip for his humility and ignorance of wealth and high society.

It was a topic best swept under the rug during this time and the upper classes really had no clue as to the horrible state of living these people had to go through to survive. Oliver Twist was an alarming call for the upper class. He creates an amalgamation of grim realism with merciless satires He describes the issues like the failure of the charity, purity of corrupt city, the countryside idealized , disguised or mistaken identities etc . The society and class concept which is made by the upper class of the society that gave birth to class consciousness; similarly poverty to criminals. There was so much development that people hired poor kids to work. The building of criminals cannot be totally blamed to them it was the circumstance who made them chose this path. Poverty is a prominent theme in this novel. Although the text, he describes the theme, describing slums so decrepit that whole row of houses are on the point of ruin. The use of symbolism is widely seen. Also, the ending of the characters are differentiated, the people who were good and suffered had happy ending and apparently the other people who were bad had sad

Charles Dickens came from a working class background and was taken away from his family to work in a dirty, filthy warehouse. Some of his brothers and sisters died when they were young. He did not have a good childhood. All his work, his novels were based on the main characters being poor, working class, uneducated with some sort of disability.