I very much enjoyed reading Storr and Rudolf’s review of literary perspectives on childhood.¹ Appropriately enough, Charles Dickens loomed large. Oliver Twist is the first novel in the English language that takes a child as its central character. The book is also polemical and the early chapters are very much an attack on the working of the New Poor Law, a series of measures introduced to cut down the cost of the poor by precluding the able-bodied pauper from relief and by making the life of the workhouse as unappealing a prospect as …