Oliver wants some more is an extract taken from the II chapter of the novel Oliver Twist written by Charles Dickens. It is set in a workhouse, an institution were children, poor people, unhealthy people, or who have a lot of debts, went to survive. After the second Poor Law in 1834, in these places the conditions worsened. The workhouses operated on the principle that poverty was the consequence of laziness and that the dreadful conditions in the workhouse would inspire the poor to better their own circumstances.

Oliver Twist is the novel’s protagonist. Oliver is an orphan born in a workhouse, and Dickens uses his situation to criticize public policy toward the poor in 1830s England. Oliver is between nine and twelve years old when the main action of the novel occurs. Though treated with cruelty and surrounded by coarseness for most of his life, he is a innocent child, and his charms draw the attention of several wealthy benefactors.

In the novel the names of characters represent personal qualities. Oliver Twist himself is the most obvious example. The name “Twist,” though given by accident, alludes to the outrageous reversals of fortune that he will experience.

The introduction describes the condition of Oliver and his friends, obliged to suffer a slow starvation. The description can be divided into two parts. The former is the description of the room where the boys staid, “a large stone hall, with a copper at one end”, so a very poor and cold room. The latter is about boys and their condition: Dickens makes a very detailed description of the hunger children, obliged to a “slow starvation for three months”, or the voracity of a boy that threatened “to eat the first boy who slept next him”! With this description he wants to show to the reader the terrible condition of life in the workhouses, and he wants to arouse pity in the reader.

The story tells about the daunting task that falls to Oliver during dinner: ask for more food.

Dickens describes the moment of the dinner, each character and his role, and then describes the Oliver’s felling. “Child as he was, he was desperate with hunger, and reckless with misery”.

Then there is the last part, the reaction. This request has shocked the master, paralysed the assistants with wonder and the boys with fear. To judge this great form of “rebellion” was organised a board in solemn conclave and everyone believed that he would be hang or something like that. At the end the director of the workhouse, Mr. Limbkins, decided to offer a reward of five pounds to “anybody who would take Oliver Twist off the hands of parish.”

Dickens uses the external and omniscient narrator, in accord to the role of commenting the story events. The novelist had to be external to the story to have the possibility to judge each happening and decide if it is “wrong” or “good”. So the narrator, in his description is pity for the children, and he stresses and mocks the adults’ reaction: for a simple request of a hungry child, it had been assembled a “solemn conclave” and Oliver had been offered to anybody who wants to take him.