“Walrus and the Carpenter” and Child Labor

In Lewis Carroll’s “The Walrus and the Carpenter” it symbolically discusses child labor and talks about the young child works he symbolizes as “little Oysters”. In the poem the Walrus is meant to represent the factory owner who does not care about the lives of the “Oysters” but of the riches they make his stomach feel when he consumes them, the Carpenter is the man who leads the “Oysters” to this Walrus. The Carpenter is essentially the foreman and the man looking for these “little Oysters” to hire for his boss, the Walrus. During the Victorian Era, the issue of child labor was a very serious one in that children would simply work and not be able to receive a proper education. This would be slightly less of an issue if only the children did not have such poor conditions in these factories and such a large number of accidents which would leave them disfigured or simply dead.

https://baheyeldin.com/literature/symbolism-lewis-carroll-walrus-and-carpenter.html