Edmond Perrier's Victorian Museum

This drawing is taken from the original book Oliver Twist, written by Charles Dickens.

At dinner in the workhouse, children had a bowl of soup, the minimum to live. This drawing represents the first days of Oliver when he asked for more. The others are shocked and the cook is furious. Children were not allowed to do that and had to content themselves with what they had, but Oliver did not know that and was punished.

It shows the bad conditions in the workhouses: hard work, undernourishment, tiredness...During his childhood, Charles Dickens had to go to a workhouse to help his family. It was a traumatic experience and he expressed it in a book, He crusaded for children’s rights. Child labour, obsession of hunger and poverty, nostalgia of his happy childhood, the death penalty were themes which mattered to him and he denounced them in books or with demonstrations.