Feeding Dickens’s Dysfunctional Families: Advocating Social Surrogacy in The Adventures of Oliver Twist and Great Expectations

Almost every novel by Charles Dickens could be said to expose the ideological blinders we willingly wear to live within certain ideological state apparatuses, such as the court of law in Bleak House or a debtor’s prison in Little Dorrit. But his primary and most consistent focus is on the most powerful of these structural apparatuses surrounding children, the family. Fully peopled by some of the most iconic child characters in Anglophone literature, the work of Charles Dickens also depicts diverse scenarios for recognising dysfunctional private families and alternative social solutions to childcare. In Oliver Twist and Great Expectations, Dickens cloaks the childcare question in the language of food—emotional, prosocial, substantial, and, most of all, not biologically but culturally created. Dickens seems to present a view of family that can be cobbled from community. Those characters who depend upon such “family” find themselves fed “by hand” in a social, not bio-kinship context, and by doing so, they might help us to question the biological essentialism that dominates familialist thought, oppresses women who mother, and abandons children to the uncertain supports of the private, domestic, family.