Oliver Twist

Oliver Twist

Please sir, can I have some more:" the symbolism of hunger in Charles Dickens' Oliver Twist

In Charles Dickens' Oliver Twist, the physical, economic oppression of the poor is tied directly to the enforced experience of hunger. This is seen most explicitly in the incident where the corrupt Mr. Bumble later says to Mrs. Sowerberry that poor, starving Oliver has an "artificial soul and spirit' because he has been given meat to eat (Lankford 21). In other words, hunger is not merely tied to poverty because the poor lack money to eat, rather hunger is used as an explicit and conscious tool to keep the hierarchical system of oppression in Victorian society intact (Lankford 21). However, in the novel, Oliver's latent spirit is of course not roused by meat, but because the memory of his dead mother has been attacked by another boy. Significantly, the reader learns much later on, Oliver's mother is a member of the privileged classes, and this gains the boy access back into a world of respectability when his true identity is revealed.

The fact that Oliver's anger is assumed to have an alimentary concern, liked to hunger, according to William Lankford, is Dickens' metaphorical depiction of how the poor are oppressed "emotionally' as well as "economically; the incidents when Oliver asks for more food at the workhouse and when have become touchstones, but Dickens' protest is directed more fundamentally at Oliver's desperate need for love than at his physical hunger. Throughout the early chapters the urgent question is whether Oliver can survive, physically and spiritually, when he is repeatedly starved, beaten, and isolated -- 'in a fair way of being reduced, for life, to a state of brutal stupidity and sullenness by the ill-usage he had received'" (Lankford 21).

However, hunger was hardly a mere metaphor for the many abandoned children in Oliver's Britain. The real-life Coram's Foundling Hospital in London turned away five out of every six children that petitioned for placement within its confines, the workhouses like the one that Oliver is subjected to in the novel sheltered 13,265 orphans in the year 1861 (Banerjee 2007). Eventually, the idea that hunger and poverty was a morally uplifting state began to be undercut by the rise in abandoned and destitute children crowding the streets. Private charities, such as the philanthropists who begged Mr. Scrooge for donations in one of Dickens' other novels, a Christmas Carol, could, quite simply, not keep up with the demand for charity.

The more effective solution Victorian England found to the problem of child hunger was linked with education -- namely that of the school lunch. In the 1870s, local philanthropic school meals services began to emerge in Britain. "By promising a scientific mechanism for identifying hungry children and calculating the minimum quantities of food required to satiate them, social and nutritional scientists provided ways of translating and depoliticizing the new social ethics of hunger into practical administrative techniques for the provision of school meals by the state"(Vernon 3). The institution of the school lunch effectively linked social betterment with good nutrition, acknowledging that a hungry child was more likely to commit crimes, while a better-fed child was less likely to lash out in anger and deprivation.