ABSTRACT
Perhaps it’s Oliver’s good fortune that, discounting Fagin’s anti school for pickpockets, he never attends any school. Throughout Dickens’s novels, schools are places of tyranny and miseducation. Noah Claypole has been to a charity school, which seems to have taught him nothing but cruelty and low cunning; though appar ently better educated than Oliver, Noah, alias “Morris Bolter,” joins the criminals. But maybe Dickens says nothing about Oliver’s schooling because he takes it for granted. In fact there were schools for pauper children in the late 1830s. Even under the Old Poor Law a pauper schoolmaster might teach in a parish workhouse-a kindly old man fills that role in the first o f the Sketches by Boz. But it was more often the case, as one historian of “schools for the people” wrote in 1871, that “the only sort of information which the [workhouse] young had to interest them, was a rehearsal o f the exciting deeds o f the poacher and the smuggler, or the . . . adventures of abandoned females.” 1 On the other hand, the Benthamite drafters o f the New Poor Law o f 1834 stressed education as the key to eliminating pauperism .2 Yet well into the 1840s little progress was made toward providing
adequate workhouse schools. Qualified teachers were nonexist ent, salaries rock-bottom, and classroom conditions wretched.
