ABSTRACT
Parish officials attempted to reclaim the money from the named father, although this was rarely successful. Under the New Poor Law, women were made entirely responsible for the welfare of their illegitimate children. Susan Zlotnick argues that despite Dickens’s ostensible criticism of the New Poor Law in the novel, his attitude towards the bastardy clauses was more complex because, while sympathetic to Oliver’s mother, who gives birth to the illegitimate boy in the workhouse, the novel’s treatment of women in general advances a critique of the single mother’s lack of self-control. If the New Poor Law was supposed to instil a sense of shame in mothers of illegitimate children, according to Herbert Smith, it had failed: the women were brazen, mixed freely with married mothers and returned to the workhouse time and again with more pregnancies. The new Workhouse was built at Ashurst in 1836 and Smith was appointed chaplain.
