ENL 133: The Search for Love: The Poor Victorian Citizen’s Struggle as Represented by Oliver Twist

Jolene Patricia Brown

Dr. K. Frederickson

ENL 133

5 May 2010

The Search for Love: The Poor Victorian Citizen’s

Struggle as Represented by Oliver Twist

The novel Oliver Twist by Charles Dickens is an exploration of roots and family that takes place in a culture that values those things to the highest degree. The tragedy of Oliver is not that he is without a family, for indeed many children in the novel are without a family, but instead that he is a child deserving of a family who must find a family deserving of him. Oliver’s travels from the moment he loses his mother to the time he is adopted by Mr. Brownlow is a search for a family, and the reader is sympathizing with Oliver because he manages always to fall into the wrong circumstances, namely the wrong kind of families. The combination of his naïve innocence, his constant illnesses in times of stress, his aversion to crime, and his appreciation of positive attention render Oliver a sympathetic character to the reader; we want him to find a home and a family to care for him and nurture his innate good qualities. The idea of a family becomes a metaphor for the state of Victorian government and its lack of sympathy for poor citizens. As children were turning to crime in order to survive—and thus punished by the state—the root of their corruption was not poor upbringing, or a flaw in the poorer classes. The state was driving the criminals to a choice between punishment (by toiling in the workhouses) and crime (which ends in punishment). What the poor of England are looking for is the love of their state: sympathy from the government instead of constant punishment. With a little help from their rulers, then, in the words of Nancy to the kind Rose: “If there was more like you, there would be fewer like me, —there would—there would!” (Dickens 333).

A child without a family, raised in an environment depriving him of not only physical care but also emotional care, would be hard-pressed to care for himself. In being taken to the workhouse Oliver experiences loneliness for the first time (11), despite the terrible treatment of where he was raised. It is only a short time later, when he is in the juvenile workhouse, that Oliver finds himself in a scenario that signifies his search for familial love:

Child as he was, he was desperate with hunger and reckless with misery. He rose from the table, and advancing, basin and spoon in hand, to the master, said, somewhat alarmed at his own temerity –

‘Please, sir, I want some more.’

…The assistants were paralysed with wonder, and the boys with fear…

‘Please, sir,’ replied Oliver, ‘I want some more.’ (15)

Even though it is food that Oliver is requesting, the metaphor is clear: what he longs for and what he desires is really the love of a family. It is no coincidence that Oliver is taken from the one family he knows, as “Wretched as were the little companions in misery he was leaving behind” (11), then speaks up for more food when he reaches the uncaring environment at the workhouse. Being forced to leave what little love he has with his friends, and brought to a place for children considered “offenders” of the law of poverty (6) is a jarring change. Instead of finding a place of camaraderie among the boys of the workhouse, he finds a place of misery and competition that is devoid of any nurturing that his nature requires.

In the article by Larry Wolff, he cites sources that compare the camaraderie of juvenile criminals a kind of sibling relation:

…in an older tradition of writing about juvenile crime, for already in the 1750’s the magistrate John Fielding…proposed a sibling relation between the two criminal cases: “These deserted Boys were Thieves from Necessity, their Sisters are Whores from the same cause.” (231)

The environment that Oliver finds among the thieves is a welcome one precisely because it offers a kind of comfort and protection that he desires and has not found in his short life. He sees Fagin as a “merry old gentleman” why plays games with a group of young boys: the game brings Oliver to tears with laughter; probably one of the first moments of joy in Oliver’s life (Dickens 70). The game is performed in such a “funny and natural manner” (71) on the part of Fagin that Oliver sees it as a ritual of belonging, and on the very next page participates in the game himself. Through this game Oliver is brought into a family structure of criminals, and though he does not realize they are criminals he is nonetheless impressed with the brotherhood enough to want to join it. It is not until he realizes the nature of their family that he decides he does not want to belong: it is not the criminality that attracts him; it is the opportunity to belong to a family.

It is through intervention by Rose that Oliver is first allowed the luxury of a family. Rose shares with Oliver the status of being an orphan, so she understands what it is that he seeks. She comes to his rescue when he is most vulnerable, and cannot defend himself because he is near-mortally injured, and in their care:

‘…think that he may never have known a mother’s love, or even the comfort of a home, and that…may have driven him to herd with the men who have forced him to guilt…I have never felt the want of parents in [Mrs. Maylie’s] goodness and affection, but that I might have done so, and might have been equally helpless and unprotected with this poor child, have pity upon him before it is too late’ (239)

Rose recognizes Oliver’s search for love and familial companionship as one she would have had to do if it were not for the care and love of the Maylie family. Indeed, she was also rescued from a family who “began to sicken…of their fine humanity,” (437) by Mrs. Maylie, who treated her as her own daughter. Rose realizes how fortunate she was to find a family who would treat her as a daughter, a friend, and—in the case of Henry Maylie—future wife, and because she has not forgotten her luck, wishes to show that same pity to Oliver. Oliver only too happily accepts, and though he is not immediately reunited with Mr. Brownlow, he has found a family who cares about him and, more importantly, has faith in him enough to believe that there are evil men out to do him harm, and this family protects him.

The Victorian audience would appreciate Oliver’s longing for familial love, and recognize their own struggle within the country, especially those people of the lower and middle classes. Much of this novel is a protestation against the over-punishment of crime in England. Even the smallest crimes run the risk of death by the state. The struggle is between the choices made to commit a crime—a child is forced to a criminal lifestyle when there are no other options for survival, but the punishment for a child in that struggle outweighs the crime itself. The argument is then one of pity: it is wrong for the state to punish a child for maintaining their survival; Oliver struggles for survival and does not need to turn to crime to do so because he finds a family. The state must take in those poor criminals who struggle to survive and help them, like Oliver’s new family helps him; otherwise the criminal continues to wander and run the risk of getting into—or causing—more trouble.

Poverty was a crime at the time of publication, yet the wealth remained in the hands of a select few, while the vast majority of the population struggled with everyday living. What Oliver wanted more than anything was the love of a family to nurture his natural inclination to do what is right for himself and for society. The poor-houses of England were full of people who wanted nothing more than to survive, but had no way to do support themselves. Wolff cites this behavior as well in the story of a boy and a gentleman, as first related by another author Henry Mayhew in London Labour and the London Poor:

“…[the boy] went up to an old gentleman, walking slowly in Hyde-park, and said to him, ‘Sir, I’ve lived three weeks by begging, and I’m hungering now; give me a sixpence, or I’ll go and steal.’ The gentleman stopped and looked at the boy…in whose face was no doubt starvation, for without uttering a word he gave the young applicant a shilling” (241)

Instead of turning to crime, the good poor citizens turned to the state: the government-run work houses. Instead of a gentleman to give them more than they asked, like the young man in the passage above, they found themselves punished unjustly and disproportionately for their “crime” of poverty. The metaphor runs deep between the love of a family and the love of the state; the illusion is one is born with both a family and a country to care for them, but in reality neither love is a guarantee.

Works Cited

Dickens, Charles. Oliver Twist. London: Penguin Publishing, 2002. Print.

Wolff, Larry. “The Boys are Pickpockets and the Girl is a Prostitute: Gender and Juvenile Criminality in Oliver Twist.” New Literary History 27.2 (1996) 227-249.