During the Victorian era many children of the lower social class where forced to live very miserable lives. Charles Dickens who grew up in this era was placed to work at the age of twelve in a Blacking factory in order to survive. The jobs that Dickens and other children of his age and even younger were forced to work were jobs that required very intense labor and resulted in extremely low wages. Thinking about his past, Dickens wanted to see a change in society. In an approach to draw society’s attention to the hardships of orphaned children, Dickens decided to write the novel Oliver Twist.
How Charles Dickens Creates Sympathy for his Characters in Great Expectations Charles Dickens, an author in Victorian England, suffered a harrowing and hard life. He was born in 1812 and having to work at a boot-blacking factory from the age of 12, had a lasting effect on him. The hurt and pain he went through as a young boy, influenced the characters, settings and overall plots of many of his books. He showed resentment towards his father because Dickens was sent to work to pay of his fathers debts. His experiences in the factory are displayed, in one of his more famous novels.
He did not have much especially when his father was always in jail. He had to go to work at Warren’s Blacking Factory at the age of twelve due to the circumstance that his whole family was imprisoned (Cody 1). Charles Dickens was born into a middle class family in Chatham, England being the eldest of all the children. He was always blissful when he was a child, but as he got elder more things started happening. The problems his family had altered the way he looked at certain situations.
After his father went to prison, at the age of twelve, Charles had to go to work for a few months as a warehouse employee, blackening shoes and putting labels on boxes. During this period in his life, (while his father was in jail) was painful for him and is later influenced in some of his writings such as the novel David Copperfield. His father was the inspiration of one of the characters, Mr. Micawber. Charles Dickens never had much of the opportunity to be a child. Many of his novels such as Oliver Twist and Philip Pirrip express the struggles he faced growing up.
To some extent, the life of young Oliver can be seen as a reflection of Dickens’ own childhood. Charles Dickens was born on 1812 in a mid-class family at Landport in Portsea Island. His father John Dickens was a clerk in the Navy Pay Office with a comfortable income. But his squandering quickly destroys the family by the accumulation of the debts which he could not pay and went to jail in the end. Dickens was also forced to leave school and work ten-hour days at Warren's Blacking Warehouse, where he earned six shillings per week for pasting labels on pots of boot blacking.
The novel exposes a lot of Victorian attitudes which Dickens experienced as he was in poverty himself. Oliver Twist suffered for nine years in the baby farm treated like an animal. Eventually Oliver is taken by Mr Bumble to work in the workhouse where he asks for more food which makes the master angry and Mr Sowerberry’s offers to take Oliver, but Oliver is unhappy and runs away to London walking for seven days. Oliver is a poor orphan who is cruelty mistreated in his childhood. His situation reflects the 19th century society Dickens was writing about because Dickens wrote ‘Oliver Twist’ for two purposes the first one was to show everyone how poor people and orphans were treated according to the Poor Law of 1824, Dickens second aim was to show how the unlawful and wrong the world really was.
Charles was put to work at Warren's Blacking Factory, where conditions were terrible. When his father was released he was twelve and already scarred psychologically by the experience of the blacking factory. His father, however, rescued him from that fate and in 1824 to 1827 he attended school in London. His brief stay at the blacking factory haunted him all his life, but the dark secret became a source of both creative energy and of the preoccupation with alienation and struggle which emerge throughout his work. Pip's desire to become a respectable gentleman stems from Dickens' own experience, having come from humble beginnings.
Web. 1 Apr. 2014. Dickens, Charles. Oliver Twist.
As in 1824 his father was imprisoned. Dickens got sent to work in a blacking warehouse. Memories of his childhood especially of this event haunted him for the rest of his life. His parents failed to educate him. But Dickens worked hard, building his way up to writing novels.