Oliver Twist, as everybody knows, is Dickens' novel about an orphaned boy who starts life in a workhouse and after trials on the streets of London in Fagin's “gang”, is eventually adopted by a middle class gentleman who has liberal and gentle ideas of parenthood. Roy Meadow, in the ABC of Child Abuse, defines child abuse as “treatment which is unacceptable in a given culture at a given time”.1 Clearly, what might have been acceptable in Victorian England was not acceptable to Dickens, who expresses his disapproval of much that he described. In terms of standards in Britain in the year 2001, many of the childcare practices described inOliver Twist constitute child abuse.

Throughout the book, Dickens gives observations on childcare and parenting, both by society and by natural and substitute parents. He observes and describes many categories of child abuse, together with risk factors which modern research has identified in abusing parents.

Institutional abuse is the first scene, as Oliver's mother dies in childbirth. She is attended by a drunken “midwife” and an uncaring doctor. The infant is turned over to a baby farm and later the workhouse itself. The children here are neglected, barely fed or clothed. Oliver Twist's ninth birthday found him “a pale thin child, somewhat diminutive in stature, and decidedly small in circumference” (chapter …