In Oliver Twist (1841), Charles Dickens chose as his subject matter Londons criminal underbelly, filling the novel with boy pick-pockets, girl prostitutes, murderers and house-breakers, thus horrifying many of his readers. In the preface to the book, Dickens wrote: It is, it seems, a very coarse and shocking circumstance, that some of the characters in these pages are chosen from the most criminal and degraded of London’s population It appeared to me to paint them in all their deformity, in all their wretchedness, in all the squalid poverty of their lives; to show them as they really are, for ever skulking uneasily through the dirtiest paths of life, with the great, black, ghastly gallows closing up their prospect, turn them where they may; it appeared to me that to do this, would be to attempt a something which was greatly needed, and which would be a service to society. And therefore I did it as I best could Required Reading: https://www.oldbaileyonline.org/forms/formStats.jsp, Susan Mumm, Not Worse than other Girls, Mahood “Give him a Doing,” Mahood and Littlewood, The Vicious Girl and the Street Corner Boy.
