Notes of the 7th/05/2012

• About the Workhouses

The workhouses were social institutions for poor people. Their life there was very difficult. In the 17^th century Queen Elisabeth enacted the Poor Law for the relief of the poor people. The responsibility of the relief was given to the parish, who distributed payments to the able-bodied poor and offered a place to stay, the workhouses, for the sick, elderly or orphaned. During Victorian age there were a lot of elderlies because the mortality rate was quite high in the working-class. In the 1834 a new Poor Law was issued.

Dickens’s novels had the function of the contemporary medias. Welfare state gave slowly a solution for those social problems. Today’s immigrants can be compared to poor people who lived in the workhouses during Victorian age.  

• About Oliver Twist by C. Dickens. “Oliver wants some more”.

The novel is set in a workhouse. Oliver is the protagonist of the novel, a nine years old child. The narrator used by Dickens is an omniscient narrator (this literary device represents a category). From the description given on the second chapter the intelligent reader understands Oliver is an unhealthy and a hungry boy. Dickens describes the boy with an indirect description. Oliver has a very strong will, he’s stubborn. On the 4^th line the narrator uses irony: he employs language to suggest the hunger of the boy. The technique of mixing pathos and grotesque is typical of Dickens’s poetry. Ironically the narrator is telling to the reader that Oliver risks to die.

“Coal” is a key word of the Victorian Age. The narrator tells us that these poor people were without food and were often hit.  The expression “festive composition” has also an ironical attribute that strengths the idea of suffering. He uses very rhetorical language, that implies that at that time the writer couldn’t write whatever they wanted.