Oliver Asks for More | Oliver Twist

Examine the social inequities that existed between the wealthy and the poor through Dickens’s use of irony, in this excerpt from Oliver Twist | MASTERPIECE. Like the title character, poor and orphaned children who ended up in workhouses during nineteenth-century England were at the mercy of parish officials. These officials, who assumed moral superiority and blamed the impoverished for their problems, provided the needy with inadequate food, shelter, and care.