Bull's-eye, Agency, and the Species Divide in 'Oliver Twist': a Cur's-Eye View

Abstract

In a bleak moment in 'Oliver Twist', the narrator reflects satirically on the competition for sustenance that preoccupied Thomas Malthus and his followers. Mrs Sowerberry, wife of the undertaker to whom Oliver is apprenticed, feeds Oliver with scraps that were set aside for her dog, Trip. Addressing the reader, Dickens asks the "well-fed" proponents of Britain's controversial 1834 Poor Law Amendment Act and the system of union workhouses it inaugurated, to witness the spectacle of Oliver tearing at Trip's leftovers like a dog "with all the ferocity of famine" ... The figurative logic of this passage depends on a conception of what Anat Pick (2011) has termed creatureliness, a condition shared by both human beings and dogs. Stray children and women, like dogs, are shown in the novel to be equally vulnerable to violation by others: they are subjected to various forms of imprisonment, bodily harm, and death without recourse to social justice, and have a particular interest in food.