“Meat, ma’am, meat,” replied Bumble, with stern emphasis. “You’ve overfed him, ma’am. You’ve raised a artificial soul and spirit in him, ma’am, unbecoming a person of his condition; as the board, Mrs. Sowerberry, who are practical philosophers, will tell you. What have paupers to do with soul or spirit? It’s quite enough that we let ’em have live bodies. If you had kept the boy on gruel, ma’am, this would never have happened.”
“Dear, dear!” ejaculated Mrs. Sowerberry, piously raising her eyes to the kitchen ceiling; “this comes of being liberal!”
The liberality of Mrs. Sowerberry to Oliver had consisted in a profuse bestowal upon him of all the dirty odds and ends which nobody else would eat.
By this conversation Dickens meant to teach that a well-fed child is a different type from one who is not properly nourished; that food has an influence on the spirit, as well as on the body. He did not disapprove of Oliver’s spirit, but he heartily commended him for resenting the way he was treated. This lesson was needed too, as children were expected to submit uncomplainingly to those who were their legal guardians, whether strangers or parents. Now, largely through Dickens, children are not only encouraged to defend themselves against cruel and tyrannical guardians or parents, and to run away from them, but the state itself will take them away, if cruelty is proved against those who should be their protectors.
Dickens also revealed by this incident the meanness of adults not only in institutions but in homes, in giving to the children the “odds and ends,” the scraps, the parts of the fowl or the meat that older people do not care for. He brought the matter up again in Great Expectations. At the Christmas dinner Pip “was regaled with the scaly tips of the drumsticks of the fowls, and with those obscure corners of pork of which the pig, when living, had least reason to be vain.”
One of the reasons given by Snawley to Squeers to induce him to take his stepsons at a lower rate was that “they were not great eaters.”
The selfishness of adulthood toward childhood, and the stupidity of the general idea, that children do not require good food because they are young and do not have to work hard, were held up to deserved ridicule, in Squeers’s manner of breakfasting in London, and the food he provided for the five hungry little boys to strengthen them for their long ride to Yorkshire in cold weather.
He found that learned gentleman sitting at breakfast, with the three little boys before noticed, and two others who had turned up by some lucky chance since the interview of the previous day, ranged in a row on the opposite seat. Mr. Squeers had before him a small measure of coffee, a plate of hot toast, and a cold round of beef; but he was at that moment intent on preparing breakfast for the little boys.
“This is two penn’orth of milk, is it, waiter?” said Mr. Squeers, looking down into a large blue mug, and slanting it gently, so as to get an accurate view of the quantity of liquid contained in it.
“That’s two penn’orth, sir,” replied the waiter.