TY - CHAP
T1 - Bull's-eye, Agency, and the Species Divide in 'Oliver Twist'
T2 - a Cur's-Eye View
A2 - McDonell, Jennifer
A2 - W Mazzeno, Laurence
A2 - D Morrison, Ronald
PY - 2017
Y1 - 2017
N2 - 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.
AB - 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.
KW - British and Irish Literature
UR - http://trove.nla.gov.au/version/243157876
U2 - 10.1057/978-1-137-60219-0_6
DO - 10.1057/978-1-137-60219-0_6
M3 - Chapter
SN - 9781137602190
SN - 9781137602183
T3 - Palgrave Studies in Animals and Literature
SP - 109
EP - 128
BT - Animals in Victorian Literature and Culture: Contexts for Criticism
PB - Palgrave Macmillan
CY - London, United Kingdom
ER -