Oliver Twist and a Walk in a Workhouse Comparison

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Compare Dickens’ account of the workhouse in Oliver Twist and his experience of visiting a workhouse in A Walk in a Workhouse. Both of the descriptions are very similar. In both the way that Dickens’ describes the bad and the good stuff about the workhouses. At the beginning of the extract of Oliver Twist, Dickens’ describes how the people that live in the workhouse that Oliver Twist is in actually enjoy it. He states ‘they found out at once, what ordinary folks would never have discovered – the poor people liked it!’ which shows that actually not all workhouses were as bad as they are now believed to have been. Oliver Twist also says ‘where it was all play and no work.’ He says how they get 4 good meals a day and free drinks and everyone enjoyed it, telling us that It was actually a huge benefit for the people which lived in this workhouse compared to how they would be if they lived and worked outside of the workhouse. This is also similar in the extract of A Walk in a Workhouse, where Dickens’ says that ‘to find the pauper children in this workhouse looking robust and wall, and apparently the objects of very great care’, this shows that not only that even real workhouses weren’t as terrible as everyone thought they were but that Dickens’ was very keen on making sure that his representation of workhouses and other aspects of his writing were very accurate to how they were in real life. Despite the fact both the workhouses sound pretty good during parts of the extracts, the rest of the writing is in fact very gloomy for both of the novels. Once the members of the board have visited the workhouse which Oliver Twist lives in and seen that everyone was in fact enjoying themselves, they changed everything – they wanted the poor to have as gloomy a life as possible. So they took away the good food and limited their water, split the families up and made everyone work
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