- 著者
-
吉田 一穂
Kazuho Yoshida
- 雑誌
- 英米評論 = ENGLISH REVIEW (ISSN:09170200)
- 巻号頁・発行日
- no.17, pp.127-142, 2002-12-20
Many literatures, pictures, photographs of the Victorian age show that the contemporaries were interested in childhood, and the novels of Charles Dickens also show that he was interested in it. Dickens’s interest in childhood, was related to his experience in his own childhood ; John Dickens, Charles's father, was a cheerful person but he had no sense of economy. He was imprisoned in the Marshalsea prison, and Charles had to work at Warren’s Blacking warehouse, which gave him an agony and despair. Dickens's childhood experience in the Warren's Blacking warehouse made him feel that his own childhood had come to an abrupt end, and that he had been prematurely exposed to adult responsibilities and independence. Dickens had suffered from the trauma and expressed his view of childhood in his novels. Dickens represented the ill treatment of workhouse to children in Oliver Twist. The children suffered from the hunger. The poor relief and the New Poor Law of 1834 were the highly topical subjects when Dickens took them up in Oliver Twist, and his related sense of outrage at the misery of pauper children brought up in baby farms and adults living in workhouses remained strong right through to the end of his life. Oliver who says, “Please, sir, I want some more”, is treated like a criminal. Oliver barely escapes being apprenticed to a chimney sweeper. Dickens showed that the children of chimney sweeper were ill treated and connects such children to “the image of child coming home to heaven”, as William Blake (1757-1827) did in “The Chimney Sweeper”. Dickens expressed his feeling toward the children as victims of his age by ‘the image of children coming home to heaven’, relating Oliver's destiny to a workhouse, a chimney sweeper, an undertaker, and a criminal.