Charles Dickens; Reforming from Experience

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 Poor Laws, and expressed negative imagery of its institutions and those who ran them. Charles Dickens’s personal experiences with the underprivileged and government neglect of these people in English society led to his book Oliver Twist. This book became an invitation for British society to take action and aid the poor and working classes with methods other than workhouses.

Charles Dickens’s experiences with poverty as a child, and his first-hand accounts of workhouses and other effects of the Poor Law Amendment Act he witnessed later in his travels