Child Abuse in the Victorian Era with reference to Charles Dickens Novels (Oliver Twist, David Copper Field, Great Expectation and Hard Times

Abstract

This study extensively displays the dramatic life conditions experienced by English Children in towns and cities as cheap workers or rather un-paid labour force threatened by three evils; illness, poverty and ignorance. The immediate outcome of which is hatred and deviation. This study deals with four of Dickens's social novels (Oliver Twist, David Copperfield, Hard Times and Great Expectations) that make public the disastrous living conditions of the English child a time of the countries prosperity and welfare which quite ironically. It is a common sense that political, social and economic reform is the direct task of Politicians Sociologists and Economists ' however, novelist may at times go far ahead to reform or even to revolution.