"Please sir, I want some more."

Oliver Twist was the first novel that made me cry. I sat curled up in a soft chair thinking about what I had just read. Tears streamed down my burning cheeks and splashed onto the yellowed pages of the book I held in my hands. My eyes skimmed over the last part of the chapter and I knew then that Dickens was the greatest master of the English language. Bill Sikes had just murdered the prostitute Nancy as she cried out piteously for mercy. In a few sparse sentences, Dickens conveyed passion, mercilessness, tender-heartedness, and forgiveness unlike any writer I had ever read. The day that Charles Dickens died was the day that the world lost its greatest English writer. No one has equaled him since.
Not only did Dickens write good novels, he wrote them for a purpose. He saw the appalling conditions of the workhouses, prisons, and streets of Victorian London and made those scenes the stage for his novels. He showed the rich people of London the squalor and filth that the poor were living in at the time in the hopes that workhouses might be closed. A Christmas Carol, Bleak House, Oliver Twist, and many others of his novels are built around Dickens’ desire to create social awareness of what was really going on in the gutters and side streets of London. Having worked as child in a boot blacking factory, Dickens felt that child labor was unethical. In his book Oliver Twist, he writes against using children labor to further wealth—such as Fagin uses the street boys to gain money as pickpockets. Children were given very little to eat in workhouses and street life was not much better. Dickens knew how to get a public reaction to these appalling facts when he wrote Oliver Twist’s plaintive cry, “please sir, I want some more.”
Charles Dickens is a great English author, not only because he could write well or develop interesting characters, but because he knew how to arouse the public’s awareness onto horrible conditions in London’s workhouses and streets, and child labor in the Industrial Revolution. True greatness lies not in how many books an author can write, but on how many reader’s hearts he or she can change.