The character who says “Please, sir, I want some more” in Oliver Twist is Oliver Twist.
Oliver makes the famous request while living in a parish workhouse. The boys receive painfully small portions of gruel, and after enduring prolonged hunger they decide that one child must ask for a second helping. Oliver draws the lot and approaches the master with his empty bowl. His polite request shocks the officials, who treat it as an outrageous act of rebellion.
Instead of investigating the children’s starvation, the workhouse authorities punish Oliver and try to pass him off as a troublesome boy. The scene exposes Dickens’s criticism of the harsh English Poor Law system and the institutional treatment of impoverished children.
The quote is often shortened or altered in popular adaptations, but it belongs to Oliver in Dickens’s novel. It occurs before Oliver is apprenticed to Mr. Sowerberry and later escapes to London, where he encounters the Artful Dodger and Fagin.