Poverty and Criminality in Charles Dickens’ “Oliver Twist”

Abstract

Literature is the mirror of society that pictures real events reflecting the social, political, or historical phenomena that societies suffer from. This extended essay aims at analyzing Charles Dickens’ “Oliver Twist” novel shedding the light on the English society during the Industrial Revolution in the late 19th century based on the Marxist literary criticism’s theory. The major problem in this analytical research is to reveal that poverty, in addition to the obligation of life’s circumstances, is a symptom of criminality. In order to complete this study and reach significant results, we tackled the historical background of the author's society during the Victorian era showing the impact of the Industrial Revolution that boosted both of poverty and criminality’s rates. Through the former, the focus is on the setting and the characters as we attempt to investigate the different crimes committed by different people for different reasons. Furthermore, this investigation exposes the crucial role played by Dickens in rising the public’s awareness to the seriousness of the dilemma of poverty through his social reforms. We will also try to document some hypotheses linking poverty and criminality trying to find the true causes of adults’ inclusion in the world of crime in general. To get to the last step of our research that tackles how and why it was easy for children to be trapped in the criminal underworld after a deep scrutiny of Oliver's personality and his experience in both worlds