Charles Dickens Research Paper
Charles Dickens was born on February 7, 1812. Dickens was born at the height of the Industrial Revolution, a time which brought great change to Victorian society. Population in urban areas (London's, in particular) soared. The overpopulation led to a lack of employment; soon poverty and crime increased. In response, the Poor Laws were put into effect. The Poor Laws established baby farms and workhouses to provide aid for those in poverty, and those who could not find work. Rather than provide money or pay in a form of welfare, they provided food and housing. As a child, Dickens experienced the hardships of poverty and neglect of aid that he would write about in his works later in his life. Charles Dickens strongly disagreed with the
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"Inmates' only possessions were their uniform and the bed they had in the large dormitory. Beds were simply constructed with a wooden or iron-frame, and could be as little as two feet across. Bedding in the 1830's and 1840's at least, was generally a mattress and cover, both filled with straw." (1834 Poor Law) Rooms of only about twenty square feet could accommodate upwards on thirty people. Charles Dickens, after reporting (his writings A Walk in A Workhouse, and A Paupers Palace) on a visit to a workhouse, felt that workhouses were legalized cruelty of the poor. "Innocent children are shut up with tramps and prostitutes." (1834 Poor Law) The ill, insane, and able-bodied were all kept in the same quarters. Some workhouses had no separate sick ward for children, despite that "it did perversely happen in eight and a half cases out of ten, either that it [a child in the workhouse] 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, and there gathered to the fathers it had never known in this." (Dickens, Oliver Twist, 6) Dickens's Christian values disagreed with the quality of workhouses to separate husbands and wives, brothers and sisters, and men and women of all ages to discourage breeding and the poor people's "natural" urge for incest. (1834 Poor Law) "They made a great many other wise and humane regulations, having reference to the ladies, which it is not necessary to repeat; kindly undertook to divorce poor married people, in
"Inmates' only possessions were their uniform and the bed they had in the large dormitory. Beds were simply constructed with a wooden or iron-frame, and could be as little as two feet across. Bedding in the 1830's and 1840's at least, was generally a mattress and cover, both filled with straw." (1834 Poor Law) Rooms of only about twenty square feet could accommodate upwards on thirty people. Charles Dickens, after reporting (his writings A Walk in A Workhouse, and A Paupers Palace) on a visit to a workhouse, felt that workhouses were legalized cruelty of the poor. "Innocent children are shut up with tramps and prostitutes." (1834 Poor Law) The ill, insane, and able-bodied were all kept in the same quarters. Some workhouses had no separate sick ward for children, despite that "it did perversely happen in eight and a half cases out of ten, either that it [a child in the workhouse] 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, and there gathered to the fathers it had never known in this." (Dickens, Oliver Twist, 6) Dickens's Christian values disagreed with the quality of workhouses to separate husbands and wives, brothers and sisters, and men and women of all ages to discourage breeding and the poor people's "natural" urge for incest. (1834 Poor Law) "They made a great many other wise and humane regulations, having reference to the ladies, which it is not necessary to repeat; kindly undertook to divorce poor married people, in