ABSTRACT
This chapter argues that Oliver Twist raises questions about slavery and race by focusing on the abolitionist agitation of 1837–38 to repeal the transitional period post-abolition of so-called apprenticeship for the formerly enslaved. Tracing the underlying connections between the ideas organizing the administration of the New Poor Law and apprenticeship, it argues that the novel’s focus on violence against dependents suggests an ambivalence if not outright antagonism to the formerly enslaved. Such feelings were also present in the late 1830s between the so-called “white slaves” of the English working class and the newly freed slaves in the West Indies. As a result, the novel racializes its villains in order to reverse the violence of coerced and dominated labor. The novel’s use of the words “violent” and “violence” provide the affect of a dominator’s use of force when attempts to coerce work fail. Although Oliver Twist is not a formally coherent work like late Dickens, it offers a form for feeling the problems of a conjuncture in its stylistic multiplicity.
