by 
DocAmira
ANSWERS: 2
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I'm sure it's an amalgamation of the true stories of many people around that time. Dickens was keenly familiar with the poorhouses himself. But was there really an urchin named "Oliver Twist?" Probably not.
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Maybe, maybe not not. The important thing is how the UK threatened the poor in the first half of the 19th century. Beggars were sent to the poorhouse/workhouse where families and sexes where split up (so they couldn't give birth to more children) and people were abused to scare away people from seeking aid from the UK state. OK, I know those poorhouses/workhouses were said to be voluntary and that conditions became much better during the second half of the 19th century, but they were originally no shit better than the concentration camps in Germany 100 years later, or labor camps in the USSR. Germany is always, still today, blamed for the nazi Holocaust, the USSR for it's labor camps and the USA for killing the native Americans, and slavery. Allmost everybody is blamed for something in history. But I would like to see the UK state signing a document about how bad and in-human they thretened the poor (I know poorhouses existed on other places two in the 18th/19th century, but not an entire system of "prisons for the poor" as they were called by the people (the people hated it), to torture the poor like this).
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