Oliver Twist- Background Info

About the author

Charles Dickens was born in 1812 in Portsmouth,
England, the second of eight children. His family then moved to Chatham, to the east of London. His childhood was not a very happy one. His father, a government clerk, was imprisoned for debt and the twelve year old Dickens was sent to work in a factory. The experience had a profound effect on him, and throughout his life Dickens had a fear of the lack of money and this drove him to undertake huge workloads. Despite little formal
education, he worked hard, first as a solicitor’s clerk and then as a parliamentary reporter. His first book, The Pickwick Papers (1836–7), essentially a comedy, was a publishing phenomenon with the characters in it becoming household names. Dickens followed this with Oliver Twist and later such classics as David Copperfield and Great Expectations. Towards the end of his life his novels became increasingly more sombre, full of biting social criticism and savage comedy. Dickens was married to Catherine Hogarth, but separated from her in 1858. They had ten children. Dickens died in 1870, and despite his insistence that he wanted a normal, quiet family funeral, was buried in Poet’s Corner in Westminster Abbey
in London.


Background and themes

Poverty and the lower classes: Before Dickens, no writer had written about the poor except to portray them as chronic criminals or characters to be laughed at. Dickens, however, was on the side of the poor. He loved them and he wrote for them. Of course, there are criminals in the book, but they are portrayed as three dimensional people with reasons for their actions and not just as caricatures.
Dickens describes the utter squalor these people had to live in and the wretchedness of their lives and contrasts this sharply with the comfort and stability of others. By doing this he shows us that he believed that people were made bad by circumstance and not born bad.

The treatment of children: The majority of poor children in Victorian London had dreadful lives. They were confined to workhouses, beaten in deplorable boarding schools, forced to work in terrible conditions, or reduced to petty theft on the streets. Dickens was one of the first people to bring this to public attention, and this prompted
the government to act.