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.

In Dickens' conception, private munificence saves children like Oliver from harm. Those children...

But that thing that truly saves Oliver is opportunity and new options, as well as hope, as exemplified in the memory of his mother, even early on in the novel. Only by giving children hope and hot meals together can the solution of hunger and the social problems like crime that it causes be solved.
Works Cited

Banerjee, Jacqueline. "Ideas of Childhood in Victorian Children's Fiction: Orphans, Outcasts and Rebels." The Victorian Web. 22 Aug 2007. 14 Apr 2008. http://www.victorianweb.org/genre/childlit/childhood4.html

Lankford, William T. "The Parish Boy's Progress": The Evolving Form of Oliver Twist

PMLA. 93. 1. Jan., 1978. pp. 20-32. URL:

http://www.jstor.org/stable/46181714Apr 2008.

Vernon, James. "The Ethics of Hunger." American Historical Review. Jun 2005. http://www.historycooperative.org/journals/ahr/110.3/vernon.html#FOOT1