How is the relationship between poverty and crime discussed in Oliver Twist?

The Philosophical Anatomy of the Relationship Between Poverty and Crime in Oliver Twist: An Existential Conflict

Charles Dickens’s Oliver Twist treats the relationship between poverty and crime not as a purely sociological phenomenon, but as an ontological issue that reveals the fundamental contradictions of human existence. While the novel presents the socio-economic structure of Victorian England as an “existential matrix” that determines the moral essence of man, it positions the phenomenon of crime in the dialectical tension of both social determinism and individual freedom.

1. The Ontological Violence of Poverty: The Systematic Denial of Humanity
   The poverty that Dickens depicts is not a simple state of economic deprivation, but a form of “ontological violence” in which the basic existential rights of man are systematically usurped. While orphanages and workhouses function as a “disciplinary society” apparatus in the Foucauldian sense, they turn into a “biopolitical control” mechanism that condemns individuals to crime.

Oliver’s hunger strike: The demand “I want more soup” is not just an expression of a physical need, but of the fundamental ontological necessity of being human. In this scene, poverty appears as a threat to the essence of man.

2. The Phenomenology of Crime: Crime as the Necessary Denial of Freedom
   In a manner that inverts Sartre’s thesis that “man is condemned to freedom,” Dickens’s characters can only realize their freedom by committing crime. For the boys in Fagin’s gang, theft is a form of “being-in-the-world” (In-der-Welt-sein) in the Heideggerian sense.

The Artful Dodger’s performance of theft: Crime becomes not only a means of subsistence for these characters, but also a “praxis” that makes their existence meaningful. In a manner that inverts Marx’s concept of the “alienation of labor,” crime here appears as a form of alienated self-determination.

3. On the Boundaries of Morality: A Levinasian Confrontation
   The character of Nancy embodies Levinas’s concept of the “face of the Other.” The compassion she shows Oliver is a moral light seeping through the ethical collapse imposed by poverty. Here, crime and virtue, rather than being absolute opposites, become categories that are constantly negotiated within existential conditions.
4. Hegelian Dialectics and Class Consciousness
   The character of Monks anticipates Marx’s concept of the “lumpenproletariat.” The guilt created by poverty is here intertwined with the effort to move up the class ladder. The discovery of Oliver’s noble origins can be read as a literary manifestation of Hegel’s “master-slave dialectic.”
5. An Existential Way Out: The Search for Meaning in the Absurd
   Parallel to Camus’s “Sisyphus myth,” Oliver’s effort to preserve his innocence is a struggle to create meaning in an absurd world. While the happy ending of the novel offers a naive optimism that the existential impasse created by poverty can be overcome, Dickens’ realistic depictions constantly question this optimism.

On the Metaphysics of Crime
Oliver Twist presents the relationship between poverty and crime as a manifestation of the fundamental philosophical tension between the essence of man and his existence. The novel reinterprets Hobbes’s thesis that “man is a wolf to man” in the context of the structural violence of capitalist society. However, Oliver’s unchanging goodness seems to defend the existence of Kant’s “moral law” as a human ideal independent of social conditions.

Dickens’s work offers a rich laboratory of thought for us to examine the fine line between structural violence and individual responsibility with philosophical depth, even while discussing the relationship between poverty and crime today.