>Were people really so horrible back then?

Short answer: yes. Children were historically fairly disposable. Without vaccines and proper healthcare, every family rich or poor dealt with child mortality. Generally disease and living conditions were a primary cause of death for everyone in the big cities at the time.

Between a lack of birth control and a penchant for literally producing spare children, a lot of families ended up with a surplus of kids.

Combine that with the industrial revolution making work scarce and labour cheap and kids turn into quite a burden. Money, food and living space is tight but you still have a gaggle of kids that you need to keep alive.

So when parents die, as they will working dangerous jobs and living in shitty conditions, you end up with a whole lot of orphans.

Kids in general were put to work simply to contribute to their survival. But orphans in particular were essentially just disposable. Chimney sweepers, for example, would buy orphans because they fit through narrow chimneys. It was expected that most of them would die on the job long before they'd grow too big to do it. You'd just buy more orphans.

It wasn't slavery perse. They would just pay the orphanage a fee for getting them the most useful kids. And the kids were welcome to leave and starve or get killed thieving or prostituting themselves instead if they thought that was an easier life. Most didn't think so.

And yeah, those same kids ended up in organised crime as thieves, pickpockets, prostitutes and so on. The alternative was the workhouses where they were just put to work on whatever people were willing to hire a gang of children for. Workhouses generally meant abuse, hunger, beatings and other mistreatment as the adults basically just monetised the kids any way they could.

It was a time where the standard of living was pretty terrible in general. If you asked the adults of the time, they weren't being horrible to children. They were providing children with a way to survive.

People tend to be as kind and generous as conditions allow. And Victorian England was not an easy time for much of the population.

I'm fairly certain Dickens wrote to actively expose people to the horrors of child labor, which was perfectly legal at the time. As with most things, take it with a grain of salt. While I've no doubt people were that terrible, you have to remember that you're only seeing where the camera is pointing. While maybe not every situation was that bad, some were.

Dickens was a journalist at heart. He wrote about the living conditions of the lower classes he observed.

People are horrible even today.

Exposing Oliver's plight was the main point of the book.

Lord Ashley's report on child labor in the coal mining industry is available online and is from around the same time as Oliver Twist's publication.

There were no child labor laws during during the Victorian Era. Even today. When 1st world countries say they have safeguarded children against labor, it's more to mean they shafted some 3rd world country to do it. The practice of tying a rope to a child and lowering them into a narrow mine shaft with nothing but a candle down to check for gasses, ore and gold veins is still a thing in some parts of the world.

The Industrial Revolution was hard. And there were a lot of people living way below the poverty line in Victorian England. Children were a source of cheap labor and were "readily available". With families unable to provide for their brood. Workhouses provided room and board to keep adults and children off the streets. And those workhouses are very much how Charles Dickens portrayed them to be. If not worse. Between the abuse, the non-existent health care system, the many ways they were poisoning each other - it was a miracle to reach your 30s.

I mean, I wouldn't say the average person was horrible, it was more the standards of life were so much worse that horrible things were deemed by overall society as "ok"

Re cruelty, I think he is muckraking. Like Black Beauty, or Uncle Tom's Cabin or the Jungle, he is portraying social evils he sees to elicit a response of sympathy or outrage. However, even in 'good' families, the common forms of punishment for children then would be unacceptable today. Also criminal justice for adults at the time was severe and cruel.

To be honest, if you went back to the 60's or 70's, let alone the early 19thC, you would consider child treatment cruel by current standards. This is not any reference to abuse scandals, but actually what was considered normal and decent then. Parents smacking their children and teachers carrying out corporal punishment was acceptable and considered even necessary. Take a child out for a burger or pizza would be considered spoiling them.

It's only logical that the further we go back in time, the more standards seem more shocking.

I think the early industrial revolution period perhaps imposed unique pressures, not least that exploitation of the weaker was considered morally good. Even so, we don't care for children out of a sense of morality, but because we have an in-built biological programming to do so. I think what the moral standards of the early 19thC did, ironically with so much Christian virtue, was to dehumanise the weak and vulernable.

For those on the bottom rung of the socioeconomic ladder, London can be a grim place even today. It was seriously tough in the Victorian age. Exposing this hardship to the privileged literate class was one of Dickens’ motivations.

This was the grim reality for most of the world's population until not too long ago. We like to romanticize these bygone days as being "simpler times" the "good old days", but the truth was that there was massive suffering on a daily basis. People, especially children, were disposable. Regulatory bodies for safety and well being did not exsist as we know them today. Add that with the lack of modern medicine and the general lack of knowledge on harmful substances and you end up with a world that would be downright terrifying to anyone from a developed nation today.

I love history and consider myself to be a fairly rational person, but I still find myself fantasizing about being a long hunter like Daniel Boone...until I think about all the times I would have died simply because I couldn't run to cvs and pick up some amoxicillin.

Good stories require bad things to happen. Deal with it

Yes. Poor children were especially hard hit because "they were a burden" on the community. Being an orphan meant you had no relatives to take care of you, which probably meant your parents had been "bad persons" (they still believed in "bad blood" back then, and if your father or mother was a thief or a liar, you would be, too, not because of example, but because "it ran in your blood").

I just finished that book. Definitely worth the time and effort. Having worked with damaged kids for over 25 years, the story isn’t too far-fetched, especially for those in the system, like Oliver.

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I started it many years ago and never managed to finish it because of those exact same reasons. Also I found it very antisemitic but I was young and put may things into the wrong context. Just out of interest - did you get this impression also?

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Yes.

Children basically were considered “chattel” who had no rights that adults were bound to respect.

Familial love (if they were lucky enough to have it!) was the only thing protecting children from being enslaved, beaten, submitted to sex work, and murdered in the street.

And children still don’t have many rights, to this day.

Look at the fact that only in the last 40 years has child abuse and neglect become an actual crime people can be charged with.

Look at the fact that in many cultures, it’s still considered perfectly acceptable for parents to beat their children as a form of discipline.

And look at the fact that in many cultures, it’s still considered perfectly normal to mutilate children, as part of “religious observances.”

While the sort of thing that happens in Oliver Twist is based to some degree on fact, Dickens has always tended towards writing caricatures, which was in fact common with a lot of Victorian literature at the time. In a Dickens book, if a guy was bad, he was cartoonishly, vindictively, bad. If someone was good, they were saintly good.

Not every adult in those days was as evil as they seem in Oliver Twist (I mean the fact that Dickens, an adult, was writing about how horrible these conditions were suggests he was not alone in his opinion). But for the story he is telling, he had to make them extra horrible to get his message across.

So many stupid people writing stupid things!