"...[T]he parish authorities magnanimously and humanely resolved that Oliver should be 'farmed'..." (Dickens 25).
At the beginning of his life, Oliver is sent to a nineteenth-century "baby farm." Due to the social stigma against babies out of wedlock, Victorian women often had to give their babies away to these baby farms. If anything happened to these babies, the mothers would often hide this from the police out of shame, leading to a huge number of infant murders ("'Baby'"). The farms and social conditions enabled women like Amelia Dyer, who is said to have murdered hundreds of infants (Lee).
Works Cited
"'Baby Farming': A Tragedy of Victorian Times." Capital Punishment U.K., http://www.capitalpunishmentuk.org/babyfarm.html.
Lee, Sarah. "Amelia Dyer: The Victorian Nurse Who Strangled Babies." BBC, 3 June 2017, https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-england-berkshire-39330793.
Wells Asylum. "Amelia Dyer." Wikimedia Commons, https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Amelia_dyer1893.jpg.
