How Does Dickens Portray The Criminal Underwor

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How does Dickens portray the criminal underworld in “Oliver Twist”? Dickens was a social critic, he wrote to expose the faults of his society, in this case; the criminal underworld. In his novel the criminal underworld he exposes the environment of children in theft and prostitution in 19th century London. In the novel Oliver Twist Dickens describes a criminal underworld that contrasts to the poorer places of Victorian England. Poorer places in England were resorting to crime in a struggle to stay alive with hardly any money. The environment has a very negative effect on the people that live there, almost inhuman. The novel portrays the criminal underworld to be a place shrouded in dishonesty, with mortifying living conditions, and the threat of unforeseen violence. Slime and filth seem unavoidable. The novel has a main focus on poverty and crime. The people that live in the underworld in the novel represent the outcasts of society who lurk inside crumbling ruins, striving to survive. In Dickens's descriptions, the words "neglect" and "decay" insistently reoccur throughout the novel. And it has been the need to survive that has fostered the decay that is so often reflected in the loathsome surroundings. Generally the images described to us about the criminal underworld were all portrayed as very deprived and foul. Dickens showed the conditions of the local environment in many different ways in his novel. A way in which Dickens showed his epic dislike of London was to describe their local environment using superlatives, Dickens uses phrases such as ‘blackest’ and ‘filthiest’; they are extremes. Dickens uses an excess amount of superlatives; they refer to objects as not being able to be any worse or better. Dickens uses these to emphasise that this is not just dirty, but the “dirtiest” nor just strange but the “strangest” place that he could ever imagine.

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