The cold reality of the workshops depicted in Dickens's novel, Oliver TwistImagine being suddenly awakened by the harsh sounds of shouts and screams demanding to find yourself still shivering from the lack of a hole -filled sheets they call blankets. Tired from another night of sleeplessness and faintly from malnutrition, you look forward to your usual serving of porridge for breakfast. Extremely low due to the meager portion, the endless day begins as you are required to perform different tasks throughout the day. This is life in a workhouse. Workhouses “were places where poor homeless people worked and, in return, they were fed and housed. In 1834 the Poor Law Amendment Act was introduced, aimed at making workhouses more of a deterrent to idleness, as it was thought that people were poor because they were idle and should be punished. So people in the workhouses were deliberately treated harshly and the workhouses were more like prisons” (Internet Source – Charles Dickens 1812-1870). Charles Dickens realistically described the horrible conditions of 19th-century workshops in his novel Oliver Twist. Dickens attempted to improve the conditions of the workshops, and as a result his novel helped influence the development of the problem. Dickens' novel shows people how things really happened in the workshops in the 19th century. A child from the parish "had managed to live on the smallest possible portion of the weakest possible food; it perversely happened in eight and a half cases out of ten, either that he fell ill from lack and cold, or that he fell into the neglected fire, or was half suffocated by accident; in each of these cases the miserable little being was usually summoned to another world” (Twist p.5). Here Dickens shows how children were starved, neglected, poorly dressed and mistreated. His statement also claims that most of the time the children died due to the bad environment. The encyclopedia provides a more general explanation since it simply states that "conditions in the workshops were deliberately harsh and degrading" (The New Encyclopedia Britannica Vol.12 p.755). Another passage in the novel describes how one of the children in the parish was treated when she did not please him. A boy named Oliver received "a tap on the head [from the parish beadle's cane] to wake him: and another on the back to make him lively" (Twist p..