OLIVER WANTS SOME MORE:
Textual Analysis

Oliver Wants Some More is an extract from the second chapter of Oliver Twist, by Charles Dickens.
The scene is situated in a workhouse, in other ways a place where children with no possibilities were given a work and a poor diet.
The tradition in the workhouse is that every boy has only one bowl of soup a day and only on occasions of great public rejoincing they had two ounces and a piece of bread besides.
Dickens uses a rhethorical language, indeed he uses irhony to described the situation suggested. The language is exaggerated, and example is how the meal time is called: “festive composition”. It goes without saying that the truth is that the scene is very, very sad and socially criticable. The proof is the expression used by Dickens “The bowls never wanted washing”: children were so hungry and there was such a little food that they eat any drip of food. Dickens uses the verb “to polish”, which is normally used for something  shiny and glossy, as if the bowls after meal times were bright and clean. It goes without saying that Dickens is using a humorous strategie to create caricatures of the characters like the master and his helpers, who need to be even three to give out such a little portion to each one. Indeed the readership was mainly the middle class so he gives an alibi to them not to recognise with the bad character.
An unusual verb is “to perform” which belongs to the semantic field of theater and music. This makes the description even more incredible, creating a sense of strangeness in the reader, who frees himself of his bad conscience.
The scene described is all a big exaggeration, for example the operation “never took very long” and “the spoons being as large as the bowls”. Dickens's aim is to criticise the living condition of the children who were exploited, using a metaphoric language. In addition pathos provides an identification with the pathetic subject, in this case children. This is a consequence of the moral puritan obligation as the need to help peolple in difficulty as the consequence of industrialization.
In the second part the narrator provides the idea of a ritual exaggerating the tones of the narration.
The situation can be read as the struggle for democracy: the children decide to take action against the master who behaves as a dictator, indeed he is dispotic. The narrator uses a lot of commas and full stops. The narrator wants to suggest that there is a higher sense of democracy in children instead than in adults.
It is a contradiction the long pray they had to say before eating and the poor meal, it is interesting that children explotation was justified by religious reason. You can notice that religion becomes a pretext to cover the guilts. That shows the doubled face nature of the Victorian Age: the Victorian compromise.
Oliver represents a symbol: the change. Indeed he wants to turn upside down the tradition in workhouses. He is taller than the other boys: he is energetic and brave.
The expression “Please, sir, I want some” is the emblem of the whole extract, indeed he seems to be the rapresentation of small children. It can been considered as the miniature of contemporary society, where the struggle for democracy brings a delegate to fight for others.