The livery of misery

I'm reading Oliver Twist now, and though I really want to finish it, if only to prove to myself (and, oh yes, the world) that I can, I'm not sure I will.

I wasn't prepared for such a dark world. The book is so unrelentingly and also so transparently miserable, I can barely stand the thought of 300 more pages. Of course Oliver is not going to return to Mr. Brownlow's house when he offers to take the books back to the bookseller's stall!

Who read this story when it first appeared? I've been trying to imagine the women and the men who took up the magazine, shook it out, folded it over, read, licked their forefinger to turn the page... what did they think? Were they shocked, and satisified to have been? Did they dread the next installment, or look forward to it? Did they have any hope for a happy ending?

I'm not the sort of person to read happy books, especially. So I'm having trouble figuring out what bothers me so much about this. I think, really, this book is far more explicit in its portrayal of evil wrought on children than anything being written today. And yet at the same time, it's so overbaked by today's standards of writing that one can hardly help feeling a bit of mockery towards it. So I have two conflicting emotions every time I read.

Here's a passage about Dick that really ate me up:

The child was pale and think; his cheeks were sunken; and his eyes large and bright. The scanty parish dress, the livery of his misery, hung loosely on his feeble body; and his young limbs were wasted away, like those of an old man. ...
"I should like," faltered the child, "if somebody that can write, would put a few words down for me on a piece of paper, and fold it up and seal it, and keep it for me, after I am laid in the ground. ...
"I should like," said the child, "to leave my dear love to poor Oliver Twist; and to let him know how often I have sat by myself and cried to think of his wandering about in the dark nights with nobody to help him. And I should like to tell him," said the child, pressing his small hands together, and speaking with great fervour, "that I was glad to die whan I was very young; for, perhaps, if I had lived to be a man, and had grown old, my little sister who is in Heaven, might forget me, or be unlike me; and it would be so much happier if we were both children there together."