In her 2001 piece for Archives of Disease in Childhood, Patricia Brennan begins:

“Oliver Twist, as everybody knows, is Dickens’ novel about an orphaned boy who starts life in a workhouse and after trials on the streets of London in Fagin’s “gang”, is eventually adopted by a middle class gentleman who has liberal and gentle ideas of parenthood.”

She goes on to say that:

“Clearly, what might have been acceptable in Victorian England was not acceptable to Dickens, who expresses his disapproval of much that he described. In terms of standards in Britain in the year 2001, many of the childcare practices described in Oliver Twist constitute child abuse.”

Patricia Brennan concludes her article by writing:

“Child abuse and neglect were recognised when Kempe wrote his articles about baby battering in the 1960s and 1970s. However, it has obviously been an issue for centuries and Dickens certainly described all the categories of abuse, together with many predisposing features and many sequelae.”

https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC1719007/pdf/v085p00504.pdf