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Oliver Twist contains scathing and memorable portraits of hypocritical and self-important officialdom. Much of the novel’s harshest irony is directed at the parish beadle, Mr. Bumble, who proudly wears his “porochial seal” of “the Good Samaritan healing the sick and bruised man” (chap. IV) while allowing the indigent to die in the streets. Bumble boasts that his “great principle of out-of-door relief is, to give the paupers exactly what they don’t want; and then they get tired of coming” (chap. XXIII). Dickens makes use of mordant satire to animate melancholy statistics. The infant Oliver is farmed out to a branch workhouse in which “twenty or thirty ... juvenile offenders against the poor-laws, rolled about the floor all day, without the inconvenience of too much food or too much clothing,” and where it seemed to “perversely happen” that in “eight and a half cases out of ten” children “sickened from want and cold, or fell into the fire from neglect, or got half-smothered by accident” (chap. II). Yet for all its poignant scenes and memorable characters, Oliver Twist has serious limitations as social criticism. The novel arouses our indignation against the general treatment of the poor but does not argue for any specific reforms. Indeed it is not entirely clear whether Dickens is attacking the Poor Law Amendment Act itself, or the failure of the new commissioners to stamp out abuses that had become entrenched under the old system. The main targets of his satire, Bumble, Mrs. Corney, and Mrs. Mann, are all relics of the old system of poor relief. In Oliver Twist, and throughout his writings, Dickens fails to present cogent arguments for reform at a systemic or institutional level because he harbors a deep mistrust of all systems and institutions. As Steven Marcus points out, Oliver Twist’s “determined, aggressive satire” cannot “in any convincing sense be assigned to partisan allegiance.” Dickens can conceive of reform only on a personal level.

In the world of Oliver Twist, public officials are at worst negligent and corrupt like Bumble or Mrs. Mann, at best merely inept and comic like the Bow Street Runners Blathers and Duff, who fail to solve the Maylies’ burglary. Oliver’s rescue is accomplished through the compassionate actions of individuals in the private sphere. Dickens nowhere offends his middle-class readership by suggesting that Brownlow, Grimwig, or the Maylies, as members of bourgeois society, can be blamed for condoning or collaborating in institutionalized oppression of the poor. He further assuages bourgeois sensibilities by providing his readers with a middle-class hero in disguise. In reality, Noah Claypole, and even Charley Bates and the Artful Dodger, present far more convincing models of the likely fate of a penniless nineteenth-century orphan.

Successful or not, social criticism ceases to be Dickens’s chief concern once his orphan hero arrives in London. In his portrayals of the workhouse officials, Dickens gives evil a comic face: Polemic is never far from pantomime. In their marital squabbles, Mr. Bumble and Mrs. Corney are like Punch and Judy, the sparring couple in a traditional English slapstick puppet show. When Oliver falls among thieves, the characters he encounters are recovered from a much darker and more primitive layer of the author’s imagination. From now on, Dickens can rarely muster enough detachment to write satire. He has entered Oliver’s orphanhood and is once again the abandoned and fearful boy in the blacking factory. As many readers have noticed, the denizens of Dickens’s underworld are curiously sexless: Nancy, the prostitute, is a slatternly Madonna, and there is never a hint of pederasty in Fagin’s relationship with the boys. Rather than, as is commonly supposed, distorting his characters to please a prudish Victorian audience, I believe Dickens created them this way because this was how they presented themselves to him: exaggerated, larger-than-life, erotic but sexless, grotesque, and mysteriously powerful,