The Complexity of Poverty. Dickens’s Response to the Poor Law from Oliver Twist to Bleak House

Pochi autori hanno saputo rappresentare la povert\ue0 con la compassione e la sensibilit\ue0 di Dickens, sorprende dunque che rari siano gli studi pubblicati sul rapporto tra Dickens e i poveri del suo tempo. Il presente articolo indaga l\u2019evoluzione del concetto di povert\ue0 nelle opere di Dickens dal giovanile Oliver Twist al pi\uf9 maturo Bleak House. In un momento in cui la riflessione sulla povert\ue0 era dominata dall\u2019agenda della Poor Law Commission, il pensiero che emerge dagli scritti dickensiani vede un\u2019evoluzione da una spontanea empatia di matrice religiosa a una visione pi\uf9 sofisticata della povert\ue0. La stessa poetica dei romanzi dickensiani consente col tempo di penetrare sempre pi\uf9 profondamente la complessit\ue0 della condizione del povero, in aperto contrasto con la semplicistica nozione vittoriana secondo cui i problemi che conducono all\u2019indigenza possono essere ricondotti a due o tre categorie e risolti di conseguenza.Few authors have been able to represent poverty with the intelligence and compassion shown by Dickens. And yet little scholarship has been devoted to the relationship between the Victorian novelist and the paupers of his times. This paper investigates the evolution of the idea of poverty in some of Dickens\u2019s work, from his early novel Oliver Twist to his more mature Bleak House. At a time when the understanding of poverty was dominated by the agenda of the Poor Law Commission, Dickens seems to move from a spontaneous and religious empathy with the poor, to a more sophisticated view of poverty, which he tackles in all its social and human complexity. Indeed Dickens\u2019s poetics allows him to offer a glimpse into the complexity of the poor\u2019s predicament, gainsaying the Victorian notion that indigent people could be sorted into two or three categories and managed accordingly