Academic literature on the topic 'Workhouses – Fiction'

This study reads Charles Dickens' Oliver Twist and Great Expectations as crime novels by applying Sutherland's theory of "differential association" which postulates that criminal behavior is learned rather than inherited, and it is learned through interaction with other people within intimate personal groups in which one learns techniques and acquires motives for committing crimes. In Oliver Twist, Oliver is portrayed as a victim of the corrupted social environment as well as Monks' conspiracy with Fagin to drag him down to the underworld.; he is raised as an orphan in a workhouse and subjected to mistreatment. Thus, he unknowingly indulges in Fagin's gang and learns the crime of pickpocketing, as all the members of the gang come from a poor background and are taught how to commit crimes within the gang, their intimate social group. Nancy's poverty also compels her to join the gang, which ultimately leads to her death, as criminality is not innate in her personality. Criminality in Oliver's character is not innate either, so he ends up leading a decent life in a healthier environment. Like Fagin, Compeyson in Great Expectations favors the violation of law and has others indulge in the criminal world, thereby exploiting Magwitch and Orlick who turn into criminals. By presenting criminal characters with various motives and from harsh backgrounds, Dickens' fiction suggests that crime behavior has nothing to do with heredity. Rather, criminal characters are implicated in crimes as a result of the corrupted social environment forced on them, along with gangs and corrupt people they have to encounter.

Neo-Victorianism is described as a genre in critical and fictional writing which alters our perspective of past and present by bringing two different centuries into focus. From a new genre which is rooted in the past and strongly attached to the present, arise analytical comparisons and alternative-creative works. Victorian England is a vantage point for the Industrial Revolution; when contemporary readers and critics trace effects and results of major social, economic and intellectual changes in the twenty-first century back to their source, Victorian England appears as a model for the industrial shift in Europe. This situation justifies the choice of setting for a great number of Victorian and Neo-Victorian novels: among numerous nineteenth-century settlements, Victorian London becomes prominent. London is a designed spot in time and space which is laden with success in industrial production to become a role model, but at the same time with its characteristics such as the heavy burden of urbanisation, showing itself in over-populated places, filthy and inhumane living and working conditions; it exhibits the downside of the industrialisation period. Social and institutional vices of industrialism are portrayed in historical documents as well as literary works in settlements and places of the nineteenth-century: factories, workhouses, slums, hospitals, asylums, and colonies. Period-specific developments are measured through recorded personal and social stories, coming from every class of society, belonging to every age, gender and ethnicity, in the motherland as well as colonies. Moving from the philosophies influencing mainly the first half of the twentieth century, it is argued that contemporary theories show a growing interest on perception, representation and production of space. This article aims to emphasize the set of relations between the concepts of belonging, identity and otherness in the light of the theories on heterotopias and third spaces in Peter Carey’s Jack Maggs, which is a Neo-Victorian rewriting of Charles Dickens’ Great Expectations.

This chapter analyses the critical representation of changing baby care methods in Charlotte Yonge’s fiction to parse the growing awareness of competitive parenting advice in Victorian culture. As a religious novelist dedicated to producing realist accounts of family life, Yonge creates unidealized infant protagonists who exhibit realistically described, age-appropriate behaviour. While they demonstrate the effects of different childrearing methods, Yonge avoids producing model children or parents. Instead, she depicts baby care as demanding domestic work that is rendered more difficult by the growing onslaught of contrasting opinions. Whereas her early marriage novel Heartsease (1854) describes maternal involvement in the day-to-day care of the young heroine’s first-born with unprecedented detail, both The Daisy Chain (1856) and Nuttie’s Father (1885) highlight the difficulties of a ‘mother-sister.’ In asserting the superiority of domestic realism over sensationalism, moreover, Yonge rewrites popular infant impostor plots while drawing on child abduction cases in the press and, in her late novel That Stick (1892), critically tackles the notorious vilification of workhouse nurseries. This still seldom discussed domestic writer thus negotiates shifting attitudes to and representations of babies and baby care. Her comments on changing practices alert us to the competitive parenting prevalent in Victorian Britain, how such a sense of competition was fostered by divergent childrearing advice, how damaging this could be, and how it already began to attract critical remarks at the time.

This chapter begins with the exploration of how the Dickensian city novel works toward forging alternative modes of sociality out of the human surplus. It studies the political stakes of Charles Dickens's refusal to solve the problem his narratives so spectacularly create: the incapacity of all existing institutions — the state, the factory, the workhouse, the prison, and above all the family — to sustain the quantity of life they produce. Such sprawling serial novels as Bleak House, Little Dorrit, and Our Mutual Friend can consequently be read as intentionally failed experiments in population management. The chapter resists the new historicist tendency to equate Dickens's narrative techniques with surveillance and preventive policing, emphasizing instead how his fiction reveals power operating primarily through neglect rather than active intervention or the omnipresent gaze of the law. Ultimately, the chapter details how Dickens extends Bleak House's scope beyond the parameters set by British society. Rather than try to represent the unrepresented or count the uncounted, Bleak House reconstitutes its social world as a total always in excess of itself.