Mrs. Sowerberry

Mrs. Sowerberry is introduced as a short, thin, squeezed-up woman with a vixenish countenance, emerging from a little room behind the shop when her husband calls her to see the new parish boy. Her first reaction to Oliver is to complain that he is very small, and she immediately predicts that he will cost more to keep than he is worth, grumbling that parish children always do. She pushes Oliver down a steep flight of stairs into a damp, dark stone cell that serves as the kitchen, and orders the slatternly servant Charlotte to give him the cold bits that were put by for the dog, Trip, who has not come home. When Oliver devours the neglected scraps with ferocious hunger, Mrs. Sowerberry watches in silent horror, fearful auguries of his future appetite already forming in her mind. She then leads him upstairs to his bed, which is under the counter in the shop, and tells him bluntly that he must sleep among the coffins because there is nowhere else.

Role in Oliver's Apprenticeship and Daily Life

Mrs. Sowerberry is Oliver's decided enemy from the start, largely because her husband is disposed to be his friend. She treats Oliver with consistent ill-usage, and Charlotte treats him ill because Noah does, while Mrs. Sowerberry's hostility provides the foundation for the household's cruelty. When Oliver, goaded beyond endurance by Noah Claypole's taunts about his dead mother, attacks the charity-boy, Mrs. Sowerberry rushes into the kitchen and assists Charlotte in holding Oliver while she scratches his face with one hand. After they drag Oliver into the dust-cellar and lock him up, she sinks into a chair and bursts into tears, lamenting what a mercy it is that they have not all been murdered in their beds. She sends Noah to fetch Mr. Bumble, and when the beadle arrives, she insists that Oliver must be mad to speak so boldly. When Mr. Bumble blames her for over-feeding Oliver and raising an artificial soul and spirit unbecoming his condition, she piously exclaims that this comes of being liberal—though her liberality has consisted only of giving him the dirty odds and ends nobody else would eat.

Conflict with Oliver and Her Husband

Mrs. Sowerberry's malice is most naked when she directly attacks Oliver's mother. After the fight, when Oliver protests that Noah called his mother names, she retorts that she deserved what he said and worse. When Oliver cries out that it is a lie, she bursts into a flood of tears, which leaves Mr. Sowerberry no alternative but to punish Oliver most severely. The flood of tears, the narrator notes, leaves him no resource, and he gives Oliver a drubbing that satisfies even Mrs. Sowerberry herself. That night, she makes various remarks outside the door by no means complimentary to the memory of his mother, and orders him upstairs to his dismal bed amidst the jeers and pointings of Noah and Charlotte. Her cruelty is thus both personal and instrumental: she uses her tears to manipulate her husband into beating the boy, and she ensures that Oliver's degradation is complete and public within the household.

Narrative Significance

Mrs. Sowerberry functions as a domestic tyrant whose petty cruelty mirrors the institutional brutality of the workhouse system. Where Mr. Bumble and the board operate through official neglect and punishment, Mrs. Sowerberry enforces a personal, intimate hostility that makes Oliver's life at the undertaker's a continuous ordeal. Her character also illustrates the novel's theme of the corruption of domestic life by economic self-interest: she sees Oliver only as an expense and a burden, never as a child in need of care. Her final appearance in the narrative is when Mr. Bumble, after his engagement to Mrs. Corney, stops at the shop and finds Noah and Charlotte feasting on oysters; Mrs. Sowerberry is absent, but her legacy of mistreatment has already driven Oliver to run away to London, setting the entire subsequent plot in motion.