Article Text
Letter
Once upon a time ...
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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 …