Vagabonds

Abstract

This chapter reads Oliver Twist (1837–9) as a tale of two Parliamentary Papers: the Poor Law Commission Report of 1834 and the Prisons Report of 1836. In so doing, it traces the convergence of domestic and colonial reform in Parliament in the period between the abolition of slavery in 1833 and emancipation in 1838—the period when British colonial slaves were controversially retained by their masters as “apprentices.” It begins with Stockdale v. Hansard, a case of libel arising from the Prisons Report, which was only resolved by the Parliamentary Papers Act of 1840. This trial coincided with the first installments of Oliver Twist in February 1837. To draw out connections between the blue books summarized in The Mirror of Parliament and Dickens’s emerging fiction, the chapter examines Oliver Twist in light of the parliamentary reports, with an eye for “vagabonds”: those who escaped their bonds as workers, prisoners, or slaves. It considers how Dickens’s disenfranchised characters are constructed from the tissues of parliamentary publications and brought to life by the novelist’s response to them. Finally, it stresses the transatlantic dimensions of Dickens’s early fiction—including the reference to cotton “twist” in Oliver’s name.