When the orphan Oliver Twist plaintively says, "Please, sir, I want some more," the workhouse guardians are so horrified at this rebellion that Oliver has to be sent away before the other orphans can start getting ideas. And yet what Oliver asks for is very modest: another bowl of gruel. Gruel is (or was) a type of thin porridge made from oatmeal boiled in milk, or, in Oliver's case, water. Dickens describes the workhouse diet as "three thin meals of gruel a day, with an onion twice a week, and half a roll on Sundays." There is a little comic exaggeration here, but not much. The workhouse diet was truly appalling; it was part of a deliberate attempt to discourage people from applying for assistance. In fact many people in Victorian England did starve to death rather than go there. The grim conditions were underlined when a series of riots broke out at the Andover workhouse in Hampshire; these were triggered when a little gruel got spilt on the ground. The sight was too much for the hungry inmates, who immediately began to fight over the scraps.
