en he came
to the new laws they had a bad time. When Dickens found that after a
hundred economic arguments and granting a hundred economic
considerations, the fact remained that paupers in modern workhouses were
much too afraid of the beadle, just as vassals in ancient castles were
much too afraid of the Dedlocks, then he struck suddenly and at once.
This is what makes the opening chapters of _Oliver Twist_ so curious and
important. The very fact of Dickens's distance from, and independence
of, the elaborate financial arguments of his time, makes more definite
and dazzling his sudden assertion that he sees the old human tyranny in
front of him as plain as the sun at noon-day. Dickens attacks the modern
workhouse with a sort of inspired simplicity as of a boy in a fairy tale
who had wandered about, sword in hand, looking for ogres and who had
found an indisputable ogre. All the other people of his time are
attacking things because they are bad economics or because they are bad
politics, or because they are bad science; he alone is attacking things
because they are bad. All the others are Radicals with a large R; he
alone is radical with a small one. He encounters evil with that
beautiful surprise which, as it is the beginning of all real pleasure,
is also the beginning of all righteous indignation. He enters the
workhouse just as Oliver Twist enters it, as a little child.

This is the real power and pathos of that celebrated passage in the book
which has passed into a proverb; but which has not lost its terrible
humour even in being hackneyed. I mean, of course, the everlasting
quotation about Oliver Twist asking for more. The real poignancy that
there is in this idea is a very good study in that strong school of
social criticism which Dickens represented. A modern realist describing
the dreary workhouse would have made all the children utterly crushed,
not daring to speak at all, not expecting anything, not hoping anything,
past all possibility of affording even an ironical contrast or a protest
of despair. A modern, in short, would have made all the boys in the
workhouse pathetic by making them all pessimists. But Oliver Twist is
not pathetic because he is a pessimist. Oliver Twist is pathetic because
he is an optimist. The whole tragedy of that incident is in the fact
that he does expect the universe to be kind to him, that he does believe
that he is living in a just world. He comes before the Guardians as the
ragged