Industrial Revolution Played Its Negative Role In Society Of Oliver Twist

Name:  Pritiba B. Gohil

Roll No. :  21

Course No. 6: The Victorian Literature

Topic: Industrial revolution played its negative role in society of Oliver Twist

M.A. English Semester - 2

Batch: 2014 - 2016

Department of English

Maharaja Krishnakumarsinhji Bhavnagar University

Submitted  to:

Heenaba Zala

Department of English

Maharaja Krishnakumarsinhji Bhavnagar University

INTRODUCTION:-

Oliver Twist, subtitled The Parish Boy's Progress, is the second novel by English author Charles Dickens, published by Richard Bentley in 1838. The story is about an orphan, Oliver Twist, who endures a miserable existence in a workhouse and then is placed with an undertaker. He escapes and travels to London where he meets the Artful Dodger, leader of a gang of juvenile pickpockets. Naïvely unaware of their unlawful activities, Oliver is led to the lair of their elderly criminal trainer Fagin.

Oliver Twist is notable for Dickens's unromantic portrayal of criminals and their sordid lives. The book exposed the cruel treatment of the many orphans in London during the Dickensian era. The book's subtitle, The Parish Boy's Progress, alludes to Bunyan's The Pilgrim's Progress and also to a pair of popular 18th-century caricature series by William Hogarth, A Rake's Progress and A Harlot's Progress.

As we all know that when Dickens write this novel at the time of Industrial revolution and how it plays vital role or negative role in the society of Oliver Twist. Let’s discuss. First of all let’s take about Industrial revolution that what is Industrial revolution.

What is the Industrial Revolution?

The Industrial Revolution was the transition to new manufacturing processes in the period from about 1760 to sometime between 1820 and 1840. The Industrial Revolution was the transition to new manufacturing processes in the period from about 1760 to sometime between 1820 and 1840. This transition included going from hand production methods to machines, new chemical manufacturing and iron production processes, improved efficiency of water power, the increasing use of steam power, and the development of machine tools. It also included the change from wood and other bio-fuels to coal. Textiles were the dominant industry of the Industrial Revolution in terms of employment, value of output and capital invested; the textile industry was also the first to use modern production methods.

The Industrial Revolution marks a major turning point in history; almost every aspect of daily life was influenced in some way. In particular, average income and population began to exhibit unprecedented sustained growth. Some economists say that the major impact of the Industrial Revolution was that the standard of living for the general population began to increase consistently for the first time in history, although others have said that it did not begin to meaningfully improve until the late 19th and 20th centuries.

The Industrial Revolution began in Great Britain, and spread to Western Europe and the United States within a few decades. The precise start and end of the Industrial Revolution is still debated among historians, as is the pace of economic and social changes GDP per capita was broadly stable before the Industrial Revolution and the emergence of the modern capitalist economy, while the Industrial Revolution began an era of per-capita economic growth in capitalist economies. Economic historians are in agreement that the onset of the Industrial Revolution is the most important event in the history of humanity since the domestication of animals, plants and fire.

The First Industrial Revolution evolved into the Second Industrial Revolution in the transition years between 1840 and 1870, when technological and economic progress continued with the increasing adoption of steam transport (steam-powered railways, boats and ships), the large-scale manufacture of machine tools and the increasing use of machinery in steam powered factories.

Industrial Revolution plays its negative role in Oliver Twist

Now let’s take about that how Industrial Revolution plays its role in Oliver Twist. Oliver Twist & The Industrial Revolution Child labour played an important role in the Industrial Revolution. In 1860, perhaps only half a children in London who actually had any schooling. Many children worked 16-hour days under atrocious conditions, as did their parents. As more people commuted to town to work, the demand for clothes and food grew. There were more things needed as the cities grew. More and more machines were beings built in factories and with that, the companies needed cheap labour.

In Oliver Twist, Charles Dickens describes some issues that occurred during the Industrial Revolution: children of the poor were forced by economic conditions to work, some kids were used as commodities, and there was a great difference between the first, middle, and third classes. Some parents sent their kids to work because they did not have enough money to support the family. Kids were being paid 3s (shillings) a week. If there were no work available at the factory kids would just go back to the farm, or others would end up going on the streets and becoming prostitutes. Most prostitutes were between the ages of 15 and 22 years old during the Industrial Revolution. In Oliver Twist, the character Nancy is a prostitute. She had no education and the only means of getting money was if she was on the street. Dickens was showing the times of the Industrial Revolution, and through this, the story seems very real. During the Industrial Revolution, kids were used as possessions. In the beginning of the novel, Oliver is used to pick oakum. He lives in an orphanage where the kids are used as slaves. They were sold door to door to the right buyer. In chapter III, Oliver's future darkens when Mr. Gamfield, a chimney sweep, applies to take the boy. Mr. Gamfield cares so little about Oliver, that he does not care if the chimney catches on fire, as long as Oliver does his job.

With the rise of capitalism during the Industrial Revolution, individualism was very much in vogue as a philosophy. Victorian capitalists believed that society would run most smoothly if individuals looked out for their own interests. Ironically, the clearest pronunciation of this philosophy comes not from a legitimate businessman but from Fagin, who operates in the illicit businesses of theft and prostitution.

 He tells Noah Claypole that “a regard for number one holds us all together, and must do so, unless we would all go to pieces in company.” In other words, the group’s interests are best maintained if every individual looks out for “number one,” or himself. The folly of this philosophy is demonstrated at the end of the novel, when Nancy turns against Monks, Charley Bates turns against Sikes, and Monks turns against Mrs. Corney. Fagin’s unstable family, held together only by the self-interest of its members, is juxtaposed to the little society formed by Oliver, Brownlow, Rose Maylie, and their many friends. This second group is bound together not by concerns of self-interest but by “strong affection and humanity of heart,” the selfless devotion to each other that Dickens sees as the prerequisite for “perfect happiness”.

“So they established the rule that all poor people should have the alternative (for they would compel nobody, not they) of being starved by a gradual process in the house, or by a quick one out of it. With this view, they contracted with the waterworks to lay on an unlimited supply of water, and with a corn-factor to supply periodically small quantities of oatmeal, and issued three meals of thin gruel a day, with an onion twice a week and half a roll on Sundays. They made a great many other wise and humane regulations . . . kindly undertook to divorce poor married people . . . instead of compelling a man to support his family, as they had theretofore done, took his family away from him, and made him a bachelor! There is no saying how many applicants for relief, under these last two heads, might have started up in all classes of society, if it had not been coupled with the workhouse; but the board were long-headed men, and had provided for this difficulty. The relief was inseparable from the workhouse and the gruel, and that frightened people.”

This passage, from Chapter 2, describes the conditions in the workhouse to which the orphan Oliver has just been sent. The function of this description is twofold: first, to provoke our sympathies for young Oliver and his fellow unfortunates, and second, to register Dickens’s protest against the welfare policy and practice of charity in the England of his time. Three years before the publication of Oliver Twist, the British Parliament passed a controversial amendment to the nation’s “poor-laws.” This amendment stipulated that the poor could receive public assistance only if they took up residence in official workhouses and abided by their regulations. In these workhouses, husbands were separated from wives, and living conditions were often abysmal. Lurking behind the establishment of workhouses were the assumptions that moral virtue lay in work, that work led necessarily to success, that economic failure was the result of laziness, and that, therefore, poverty was a sign of moral degeneracy. In Dickens’s opinion, charity based on this kind of premise did far more harm than good to the material and moral situations of its recipients. In this passage, and throughout the early chapters of the novel, he adopts a sarcastic, harshly satirical tone to make this point. Dickens, in fact, says the exact opposite of what he really means and does no more than state the truth. All of the conditions he describes did actually exist. Rather than exaggerating to make his point, Dickens relies on the inherent absurdity of the way English society treated the poor to manifest itself through his description.

Cold Reality of Workhouses Depicted in Oliver Twist :-

Imagine abruptly woken to the harsh sounds of demanding yelling and screaming only to find yourself still shivering from the lack of hole-filled sheets that they call blankets.  Feeling fatigued from another sleepless night and faintly from the malnutrition, you eagerly await your habitual serving of gruel for breakfast.  Extremely weak from the meagre portion, the never-ending day begins as you are led to do various different chores throughout the day.  This is the life in a workhouse.

Workhouses “were places where poor homeless people worked and in return they were fed and housed.  In 1834 The Poor Law Amendment Act was introduced which wanted to make the workhouse more of a deterrent to idleness as it was believed that people were poor because they were idle and needed to be punished.  So people in workhouses were deliberately treated harshly and the workhouses were more like prisons”. 

 Charles Dickens realistically portrayed the horrible conditions of the 19th century workhouses in his novel Oliver Twist.  Dickens attempted to improve the workhouse conditions and as a result, his novel helped influence changes in the problem.

Who can describe the pleasure and delight, the peace of mind and soft tranquility, the sickly boy felt in the balmy air and among the green hills and rich woods of an inland village! Who can tell how scenes of peace and quietude sink into the minds of pain-worn dwellers in close and noisy places, and carry their own freshness deep into their jaded hearts! Men who have lived in crowded, pent-up streets, through lives of toil, and who have never wished for change—men to whom custom has indeed been second nature, and who have come almost to love each brick and stone that formed the narrow boundaries of their daily walks—even they, with the hand of death upon them, have been known to yearn at last for one short glimpse of Nature’s face, and, carried far from the scenes of their old pains and pleasures, have seemed to pass at once into a new state of being.

In Dickens’s time, England was rapidly becoming an industrial, urban society. Dickens’s works are overwhelmingly concerned with the social and psychological conditions that city life fostered, and he is known as one of the first great urban European authors. Yet, in this passage from Chapter 32, describing Oliver’s sojourn to the countryside with Mrs. Maylie and Rose, the author reveals his profound scepticism about the influence of urban life on the human character. This passage praises the purity and health of the rural environment and claims outright that even a lifelong city-dweller has in his blood a faint longing for the “new state of being” to which nature can elevate him. Dickens goes on to note that, in the country, even “the poor people” are “neat and clean.” The squalor and starvation that characterize urban poverty are not present in rural England. Given the eagerness of England’s rural poor to migrate to the city, it seems unlikely that this assessment is realistic. In many ways, Dickens’s idealized vision marks him all the more clearly as an urban writer, since his gritty portraits of city life are based on real experience, while his blissful portrait of rural life seems more the product of wistful fantasy.

                    Dickens’ novel shows people how things really were in the workhouses during the 19th century.  A child of the parish 

“ had contrived to exist upon the smallest possible portion of the weakest possible food, it did perversely happen in eight and a half cases out of ten, either that it sickened from want and cold, or fell into the fire from neglect, or got half-smothered by accident; in any one of which cases, the miserable little being was usually summoned into another world” (Twist p.5). 

 Here Dickens shows how children were starved, neglected, inappropriately dressed, and mistreated.  His statement also claims that many of the times, the children died in a result to the poor environment.  The encyclopaedia provides a more general explanation as it simply states that the

“conditions in the workhouses were deliberately harsh and degrading” (The New Encyclopaedia Britannica Vol.12 p.755). 

Effects of Social Class in Oliver Twist :-

The Novel Oliver Twist is one of Charles Dickens most well known and loved works. The central character, Oliver, has been seen for generations as a symbol of innocence in a corrupt world. It is important to note that many of the themes that Dickens explored are pertinent not only to his time but to our modern world as well. The themes of Oliver Twist, such as innocence versus evil, are reflected in the main character and the other characters that he encounters. The themes of this book also include the effects of social class and the way that the society of the time was unjust and cruel in many respects. In the book Oliver is an orphan whose mother died in childbirth. He spends the first few years of his life on a baby farm but is sent to work in a workhouse at the age of nine, run by Mr. Bumble, the parish beadle.

Oliver and the other children in the workhouse are poorly treated and continually hungry. When Oliver is persuaded to ask for more food, there is a terrible outcry from the authorities. Oliver’s simple request

"Please, sir, I want some more."

receives a furious and uncalled for response from the master. The master aimed a blow at Oliver's head with the ladle; pinioned him in his arms; and shrieked aloud for the beadle. Oliver Twist an innocent and hungry child should be refused such as simple request underscores the unjustness and cruelty that Dickens reveals in the society of the time. As a result of his audacious request and his ungratefulness, Oliver is sold to anyone who will take him and he is involved in a number of experiences in the often unfeeling society.

A brutal chimney sweep nearly claims Oliver but luckily he is taken in care by the kindly Mr. Sowerberry, an undertaker.

Throughout the book we encounter the contrast between good and evil and kindness and cruelty. While Mr. Sowerberry is kind to Oliver, his wife and others are not.

Another passage in the novel describes how one of the children of the parish was treated when not to their liking.  A boy named Oliver received

“a tap on the head [from the cane of the parish beadle] to wake him up: and another on the back to make him lively” (Twist p.10). 

The boy then received another tap in the back that terrified him more and brought him tears.  Later in the novel, it is discovered that the same boy is sent into the cold weather to

“perform his ablutions, every morning under the pump, in a stone yard, in the presence of Mr. Bumble [the parish beadle], who prevented his catching cold, and caused a tingling sensation to pervade his frame, by repeated applications of the cane” (Twist p.15). 

These cruel acts show no sympathy to the workhouse children.  Frank Crompton, the author of the book Workhouse Children, writes

“life was monotonous and inmates, including children, were given menial and degrading tasks to perform, thus impressing on them their lowly conditions” (p.37). 

The people in the workhouses had no choice. 

 “There was no welfare state, so those who were deprived of land and left unemployed found themselves forced to work in prison-like conditions in the workhouses”.

It is obvious that workhouses were an attempt to solve the poverty problem.

           Dickens novel shows the social injustice of the 19th century.  He is an author who wanted a change in society, and helped influence the reformation. 

In an essay written by Gareth Jenkins on Oliver Twist, he writes that through the novel,

“there is hope that by exposing the horrors of the workhouse, on the brutality and deficiency of education, that decent men and women will take steps to reform society”

In the novel, Dickens shows through the character of a young boy how the poor in the workhouses were beaten by a cane, and nearly starved given

“three issued meals of thin gruel a day, with an onion twice a week, and a half roll on Sundays” (Twist p.11). 

 Dickens used his writings :-

 “to tell about the bad conditions that the working classes and poor people had to live under.  He hoped that by doing this that things would change for the good”.  

There is no positive way to find out if Dickens was solely responsible for the dissolution of the workhouses.  However, it is fair to say that he helped influence the change in society as “Dickens and other important people that thought like him gradually got conditions in the workhouses improved”.

CONCLUSION:-

So, as we discussed about Industrial revolution and how it played its negative role in society of Oliver Twist. After discuss so many things we may say that through the novel Oliver Twist, Charles Dickens shows people the reality of the 19th century workhouses. 

Along with many firm believers, Dickens attack on the unjust social system helped influence society, as

“conditions in the workhouses improved later in the 19th century, and social-welfare services and the social-security system supplanted workhouses altogether in the first half of the 20th century”.

( Words :- 3,187 )