The extract consists of a scene taken from the novel Oliver Twist by Charles Dickens which starts with the description of a cafeteria where boys are fed daily; their hunger gradually increased due to humble rations of food, so they aimed to send someone of them (Oliver himself after rolling the dices) to ask the master for more gruel. After his request “the assistants were paralyzed with wonder, the boys with fear”: the council stated for his estrangement from the parish at the moderate price of 5£ by the next morning to anyone who needed a versatile apprentice.

The narrator is an omniscient voice outside the novel, which filters reality from a point of view which brings to surface the main problems of the time like poverty, orphans banished in parishes and the gap between social classes which better witnessed how the Industrial Revolution didn’t bring wellness as well as it produced wealth.

The extract opens with a detailed description of the setting which highlights modesty and misery of life conditions at the time: the use of paratactic syntax emphasizes clearly and cruelly a thorough illustration of the background within the scene is set, while the use of units of measure (mass, height and time) allows the reader to make a precise idea of scarcity of rations in comparison with today’s ones and of the prolonged time lapse people could suffer hunger pangs.

In fact the intelligent reader can see how the way the space is portrayed is cold, monotone and repetitive.

A lot of rhetorical choices underline how food rations were limited, creating a contradiction  between quantity imagined and real quantity .

The narrative technique frequently adopted by Dickens is irony, thanks to which the exaggerated description of life conditions (grotesque) puts the reader in an intermediate position between a partial identification with the poor characters in exam (pathos) and a comic situation given by emphasized tones and polished rhetorical choices.

The characters in the sequence belong to two different and antithetical worlds: the orphans represent misery of lower classes while the gentlemen (Mr Bumble, Mr Limbkins and, in part, the assistants) stand for health and modest wellness. Their characterization is obviously different: children’s eyes are connoted as eager, hungry and wild with reference to refectory’s bowls and spoons, while the master and Limbkins are described as two healthy and fat men, thanks to a focus on their clothes, a cook’s uniform and a white waistcoat.

Finally the reader can notice a hierarchical order according to which one or more personalities were submitted  to others: at the bottom there were the children subdued to restrictive rules, then the “pauper assistants” under Mr Bumble, and at the top Mr Limbkins, whose “prophetic gentleman’s opinion” was undeniable.

Furthermore the activity of distributing food, carried out by some ladies, highlights the Victorian vision of the world, according to which the man was he who decided, ruled and supervised women at work.