What do you think?
Rate this book
Dickens and the Workhouse: Oliver Twist and the London Poor
The recent discovery that as a young man Charles Dickens lived only a few doors from a major London workhouse made headlines worldwide, and the campaign to save the workhouse from demolition caught the public imagination. Internationally, the media immediately grasped the idea that Oliver Twist's workhouse had been found, and made public the news that both the workhouse and Dickens's old home were still standing, near London's Telecom Tower. This book, by the historian who did the sleuthing behind these exciting new findings, presents the story for the first time, and shows that the two periods Dickens lived in that part of London - before and after his father's imprisonment in a debtors' prison - were profoundly important to his subsequent writing career.
370 pages, Hardcover
First published February 2, 2012
13 people are currently reading
136 people want to read
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 - 22 of 22 reviews
June 6, 2025
As a young man, Charles Dickens expected a lot from his early readers. First, as an unknown writer, he made his mark by giving them amusing sketches of London life. This was followed by some hilarious episodes with a Mr. Pickwick, intended to accompany some sketches by the well-known artist Robert Seymour, but quickly being enjoyed on their own merits. Readers of the time must have begun to look forward to their monthly entertainment from their beloved “Boz”.
Then came the shock: “The Parish Boy’s Progress” which soon became what we know as Oliver Twist. Forget the adaptations of cherubic singing moppets, or the many entertaining dramatisations of a poor boy who made good, with help from the “tart with a heart”. Although the latter is certainly the popular interpretation, and Dickens deliberately wrote a page-turning thrilling adventure, these are essentially distortions of Dickens’s hardhitting tale. Oliver Twist is often presented as a suitable story for children, but this is only because the retellings and films look through rose-tinted glasses at London’s underbelly in the early 19th century. Invariably it is presented as populated by remarkably clean, disease-free, healthy-looking and able folk of all ages. But Charles Dickens had experience of being a court reporter, and well knew the truth. And he was angry; very angry.
The Poor Law had just been rewritten in 1834, and social conditions were about to get a lot worse. Charles Dickens would write a serial which for the first time had a poor child at its heart; for the first time would describe the criminal classes, and for the first time would tell of young women who had fallen into prostitution, and the horrors of the workhouse. It would tell the truth. In fact only recently, archaeologists have excavated approximately 1047 articulated skeletons from the Cleveland Street site, which are likely to have been workhouse inmates.
The 1834 Act’s policy was: “to deter by unpleasantness the able-bodied poor”. Therefore cruel treatment was the norm; the inmates were now actually punished for being poor. Previously it had been the duty of the parishes to care for the poor through alms and taxes. They could either go to the parish workhouse or apply for “outdoor relief”, which enabled them to live at home and work at outside jobs. Most of these were run according to Christian principles, and the workers treated kindly. But the new Poor Law of 1834 grouped parishes together into unions. Each union had a workhouse, and the only help available to poor people from then on was to become inmates in the workhouse. Families were separated, and all were clothed in a calico uniform. Just as in Thomas Carlyle’s 1833 – 1834 serial “Sartor Resartus” (which Dickens admired), the baby Oliver’s destiny was assured because of his clothes.
Workhouse food was minimal, the work was incessant and hard, and beatings were common, meaning that early deaths were also common. The master of the workhouse had a lot of control, and was responsible for enforcing the 1834 Act’s policy. In Oliver Twist the Workhouse Board decided that the poor inmates would only drink water from now on, and “three meals of thin gruel a day, with an onion twice a week, and half a roll on Sundays”.
Additionally, the new Poor Law included a new “bastardy” clause, which made single mothers solely responsible for “illegitimate” children. There is no doubt that Oliver Twist was a critique of this new reform, and a condemnation of the attitudes of officials such as Mr. Bumble towards the poor as being degenerate, evil, and responsible for their own destitution. In Oliver Twist, Charles Dickens said with bitter sarcasm that the workhouse was little more than a prison for the poor. Civil liberties were denied, and all human dignity was destroyed. The inadequate diet instituted in the workhouse prompted his ironic comment that:
“all poor people should have the alternative … of being starved by a gradual process in the house, or by a quick one out of it.”
Sometimes it is suggested - both then and now by the comfortably-off middle classes - that Dickens might have exaggerated the conditions in the workhouses for effect, as what we now term “persuasive literature”. The workhouse reality seems so unbelievable to the modern reader, that we almost automatically assume that Dickens must have wanted to heighten the drama in this way. He wrote page-turners after all, full of pathos, drama and humour in equal proportions.
A similar situation was to arise the next year, when he wrote the serial “Nicholas Nickleby” set in the disgraceful boarding schools in Yorkshire where unwanted children (often bastards of the wealthy) were dumped by those who could afford it, hopefully never to be seen again. Many died, but many others lived a life of horror under an almost unimaginably cruel regime. However, Dickens had learned from Oliver Twist, and seems to have anticipated possible charges of misrepresentation, and forestalled them by saying in one of his forewords where he got his information from.
Like many others I had wondered, and for many years had been trying to find out if there was any possibility that Dickens’s descriptions were complete inventions. My research led me to the records for at least one original school in “Nicholas Nickleby”. On February 2nd, 1838 Dickens had visited Bowes Academy, in Yorkshire. He was outraged by its disgraceful conditions, and used its headmaster William Shaw as the sadistic prototype for Wackford Squeers. The public outcry led to the school being investigated and closed down, along with several others in the area. Dickens himself had also briefly attended a school with a cruel headmaster.
So was there an actual workhouse which had inspired the one in Oliver Twist? I was delighted when this book by Ruth Richardson, Dickens and the Workhouse: Oliver Twist and the London Poor was published in 2012. Since then it had, I thought, long been overdue for me to read.
A perfect chance came to choose this as a group side read, during a long careful read of Oliver Twist. However, I should have been more cautious. It was a big let-down, and a couple of weeks before the start, I apologised to the group for my bad judgement. Ruth Richardson is an experienced author; an historian with an interest in the Victorian age, although not a Dickens expert. I’m sure her intentions were good, but she has created a book out of very little here. The facts merit a feature article at best, and should not have been artificially padded out in this way.
The trigger was that the “Cleveland Street Workhouse” was under threat of being demolished in 2013, and Ruth Richardson was prominent in the campaign to save the building, so possibly this book was written to keep it high profile. Part of the workhouse building continued to be maintained by the University College London Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust, and part of the site was also now occupied by Kier, the construction company responsible for demolishing the adjacent building. Some damage or loss of historical information had probably already occurred. Apart from the fact that it is always sad to see a part of London’s heritage and history lost for ever, Ruth Richardson claimed to have “discovered” that as a boy Dickens had lived within a mile of the Cleveland Street Workhouse. Her mind flew to Oliver Twist.
All well and good. Unravelling an exciting mystery might develop from this. It could read like a detective story, apart from one inconvenient fact. Ruth Richardson did not “discover” that Dickens had lived near a workhouse when he was born; it was already known. It was called the Strand Union Workhouse.
1930 postcard of Cleveland Street showing the workhouse, now the Middlesex Hospital Outpatient Department
She makes a big deal of how meticulous and time-consuming her research was, involving sitting on hard stools for hours in the British Library, poring over ancient street maps, to establish whether certain roads had changed names, and so on. She may have found the topography and historical layout of the streets in this area fascinating, but to a lay person it is not. Moreover, it has little to do with the subject in hand.
Apart from the fact that this is a suspiciously odd way to begin a book - authors may thank others for their time in the Acknowledgements, but they do not usually stress within the text how much tedious research it had taken them - it was mind-numbingly boring to read.
The author made much of the so-called fact that “most” biographies of Dickens either missed out the fact that he had lived in Norfolk/Cleveland Street, or only gave it a brief mention. Well, there is a reason for this … Dickens’s family had only lived in that house when he was nearly 3 to nearly 5 years old: between 1815 and 1816, and then briefly later. It was hardly going to play a big part in Dickens’s later observations about social conditions and London life.
Nevertheless there is an important book which concentrates on all the houses where he lived, for Charles Dickens completists. It was written by a Dickens scholar who was his contemporary late in life. After Dickens’s death, there was a surge of interest in everything to do with him. F.G. Kitton had already written books about Dickens, plus a series of general interest books on famous authors’ houses. So although he was quite old (and in fact was to die the next year), when he was asked, Kitton could not resist writing this last one as a tribute to Charles Dickens: an author he much admired, and as the final one in his series.
“The Dickens Country” was first published in 1903 and went to many editions. It is even available on Kindle! It is a workmanlike and comprehensive survey of all the houses Dickens had lived in, with accompanying monochrome whole-page photographs by T.W. Tyrell. These are fascinating in themselves, as only one of the many London houses Dickens lived in still stands; it is now the Dickens Museum in Doughty Street. And the third photograph is quite clearly captioned:
“Norfolk (now Cleveland) Street, Fitzroy Square. (p.7)
Dickens and his parents resided in Norfolk Street in 1816, after their removal from Hawke St., Portsea”
It seemed inconceivable that Ruth Richardson did not know of this book, but I fear such must be the case. So much for her claim that most biographers never mentioned Norfolk Street, and that she had new evidence. We know from “The Dickens Country” that the change of street name was known at least as far back as 1903.
It was after the young Charles Dickens had lived in Norfolk/Cleveland Street with his family, that his father, John Dickens, “a jovial opportunist with no money sense” (according to his son many years later), was then arrested for debt. The family was forced to live inside the Marshalsea Debtors’ Prison in Southwark. They returned to the same house in 1828 when Dickens was nearly seventeen, and stayed until 1831 when he was almost twenty. During that time, he was out at work as a young legal clerk, and was training himself to become a shorthand court reporter, and even inventing his own system of cryptic signs and symbols.
Although it may have provided the idea, the Cleveland Street Workhouse was not the only model for the one in Oliver Twist though. Dickens had also based it on the Kettering Workhouse, in Northamptonshire, and had himself said that this one had been his inspiration. The Kettering Workhouse’s bad reputation for ill-treatment was apparently widely known.
The evidence for Ruth Richardson’s claim is thus very fanciful. The plain truth is that an author of fiction often puts together ideas from several sources to create their work, as Charles Dickens evidently had with his depiction of a workhouse. He had originally said in the original serial text of the Parish boy episodes, that it was “in the town of Mudfog”, but changed this for the book edition to “a certain town, which for many reasons it will be prudent to refrain from mentioning”. To add to the conundrum, “Mudfog” is actually a thinly disguised portrayal of the town of Chatham, in Kent!
But this entire factual book is full of supposition and fancy. For an author who writes nonfiction, I was frankly amazed at the number of instances of “I like to think”, “perhaps”, “maybe”, “it is possible that” and so on. Ruth Richardson had researched and investigated the houses and shop premises which existed at the time (she told us), and sought to weave an entire story around them. Snippets of information about Charles Dickens’s childhood had been inserted into suppositions about visiting these shops in the area, with his nanny. An example of how ludicrous these suggestions were, is what critics call the famous “streaky bacon” passage.
The text forms the beginning of what is now chapter 17 of Oliver Twist, and is almost two pages of apologia for the “sudden shiftings of the scene, and rapid changes of time and place”. This bit of literary criticism - or metafiction - is completely separate from the action. In it Charles Dickens defends the scene changes as being like life, which he claims is similar to “layers of streaky bacon”.
In fact Charles Dickens was drawing the public’s attention to his own life at that point. The real reason was that there had been a break of two whole months when he sincerely believed Oliver Twist was behind him, and he would write other things; he had other ongoing projects. Dickens had had a big row with the paper’s owner Richard Bentley, in which he resigned his editorship and was not going to write any more episodes about Oliver. But when a truce was agreed, Dickens wrote this extraordinary passage about how life was like “streaky bacon”: in other words life is just one thing and then another. It’s obviously just a metaphor, but Ruth Richardson - incredibly - “likes to think” that it dates from living a few doors away from a butcher’s shop when Charles Dickens was a toddler!
Or how about this imaginative account of Dickens’s grueling job at the blacking factory when he was little more than a child. Apparently he did not make the most of this mind-numbing, humiliating, filthy and exhausting daily grind, with few hours left between waking and sleeping. He should not have despaired, or kept it a secret for so many years until he told John Forster about it, but instead realised that he:
“might otherwise never have learned so early in life: an appreciation of business practice, manual dexterity and speed, self-discipline, application; an understanding of the importance of the value of money and of hard work in getting it; managing on a meagre income (budgeting and paying one’s way); preserving one’s own inner dignity even in the midst of social mortification, learning to recognise and address the humanity of social ‘inferiors’; fitting in to other domestic establishments; recognising that working lives are often forced and irksome, that terms of employment can be demeaning, and that bare survival is uncongenial; understanding that the cowl doesn’t make the monk and the applicabilty of that insight to others as to himself; and being able to tranform the negativity of feeling demeaned and undervalued into an inner generating force for personal development.”
What an extraordinary imagination this author has, to think that someone in a soul-destroying repetitive job would gain “an appreciation of business practice”. This is not a few days of carefully controlled and gentle “work experience”! One wonders if such a world has ever come further than their distant horizon. Perhaps then we should abandon all our careful strategies to introduce modern teenagers to personal development and valuable citizenship, and instead put them on a factory line with no rights, an occasional clobber round the head if their speed was not up to scratch, nobody at home to help, but existing on one scant meal a day from a pie shop, and working slavishly 18 hours a day, six and a half days a week until they dropped from exhaustion, with no prospect of ever getting out save being kicked out on to the streets. Better still, let’s send them up the chimneys instead of bothering about any primary education at all.
The reality, though understated, comes in Ruth Richardson’s next grudging sentences:
“For Dickens the whole experience seems to have been thoroughly negative; he was still smarting from it almost a quarter of a century later. He believed he had been robbed of his childhood”.
There are many good biographies about Dickens’s life, which all use John Forster’s comprehensive 3 volume biography, plus Dickens’s personal letters as their source. Several of these are more reliable in their information about Dickens than this whimsical account.
There are 10 chapters overall, and chapter 8 titled “Workhouse” (finally!) is really quite good, with lots of facts and nary a “maybe” or “might have”. Ruth Richardson should have started her account there. The book is nicely bound, and comfortable to hold, with a fine, silk-finish dust cover. The print is small, and there are various small monochrome illustrations, although these consist in general of rather poorly copied photographs, diagrams and drawings.
I feel two stars to be a generous rating for this book, which irritated me from start to finish. I searched the index in vain for Dan Calinescu, a Dickens enthusiast from Toronto. He had been responsible for arranging and financing a blue plaque for the workhouse, but only gets a passing mention in the text.
There is some good information about Charles Dickens dotted around the text, for those who have not come across it before. But in my opinion, there are better ways of acquiring it.
Then came the shock: “The Parish Boy’s Progress” which soon became what we know as Oliver Twist. Forget the adaptations of cherubic singing moppets, or the many entertaining dramatisations of a poor boy who made good, with help from the “tart with a heart”. Although the latter is certainly the popular interpretation, and Dickens deliberately wrote a page-turning thrilling adventure, these are essentially distortions of Dickens’s hardhitting tale. Oliver Twist is often presented as a suitable story for children, but this is only because the retellings and films look through rose-tinted glasses at London’s underbelly in the early 19th century. Invariably it is presented as populated by remarkably clean, disease-free, healthy-looking and able folk of all ages. But Charles Dickens had experience of being a court reporter, and well knew the truth. And he was angry; very angry.
The Poor Law had just been rewritten in 1834, and social conditions were about to get a lot worse. Charles Dickens would write a serial which for the first time had a poor child at its heart; for the first time would describe the criminal classes, and for the first time would tell of young women who had fallen into prostitution, and the horrors of the workhouse. It would tell the truth. In fact only recently, archaeologists have excavated approximately 1047 articulated skeletons from the Cleveland Street site, which are likely to have been workhouse inmates.
The 1834 Act’s policy was: “to deter by unpleasantness the able-bodied poor”. Therefore cruel treatment was the norm; the inmates were now actually punished for being poor. Previously it had been the duty of the parishes to care for the poor through alms and taxes. They could either go to the parish workhouse or apply for “outdoor relief”, which enabled them to live at home and work at outside jobs. Most of these were run according to Christian principles, and the workers treated kindly. But the new Poor Law of 1834 grouped parishes together into unions. Each union had a workhouse, and the only help available to poor people from then on was to become inmates in the workhouse. Families were separated, and all were clothed in a calico uniform. Just as in Thomas Carlyle’s 1833 – 1834 serial “Sartor Resartus” (which Dickens admired), the baby Oliver’s destiny was assured because of his clothes.
Workhouse food was minimal, the work was incessant and hard, and beatings were common, meaning that early deaths were also common. The master of the workhouse had a lot of control, and was responsible for enforcing the 1834 Act’s policy. In Oliver Twist the Workhouse Board decided that the poor inmates would only drink water from now on, and “three meals of thin gruel a day, with an onion twice a week, and half a roll on Sundays”.
Additionally, the new Poor Law included a new “bastardy” clause, which made single mothers solely responsible for “illegitimate” children. There is no doubt that Oliver Twist was a critique of this new reform, and a condemnation of the attitudes of officials such as Mr. Bumble towards the poor as being degenerate, evil, and responsible for their own destitution. In Oliver Twist, Charles Dickens said with bitter sarcasm that the workhouse was little more than a prison for the poor. Civil liberties were denied, and all human dignity was destroyed. The inadequate diet instituted in the workhouse prompted his ironic comment that:
“all poor people should have the alternative … of being starved by a gradual process in the house, or by a quick one out of it.”
Sometimes it is suggested - both then and now by the comfortably-off middle classes - that Dickens might have exaggerated the conditions in the workhouses for effect, as what we now term “persuasive literature”. The workhouse reality seems so unbelievable to the modern reader, that we almost automatically assume that Dickens must have wanted to heighten the drama in this way. He wrote page-turners after all, full of pathos, drama and humour in equal proportions.
A similar situation was to arise the next year, when he wrote the serial “Nicholas Nickleby” set in the disgraceful boarding schools in Yorkshire where unwanted children (often bastards of the wealthy) were dumped by those who could afford it, hopefully never to be seen again. Many died, but many others lived a life of horror under an almost unimaginably cruel regime. However, Dickens had learned from Oliver Twist, and seems to have anticipated possible charges of misrepresentation, and forestalled them by saying in one of his forewords where he got his information from.
Like many others I had wondered, and for many years had been trying to find out if there was any possibility that Dickens’s descriptions were complete inventions. My research led me to the records for at least one original school in “Nicholas Nickleby”. On February 2nd, 1838 Dickens had visited Bowes Academy, in Yorkshire. He was outraged by its disgraceful conditions, and used its headmaster William Shaw as the sadistic prototype for Wackford Squeers. The public outcry led to the school being investigated and closed down, along with several others in the area. Dickens himself had also briefly attended a school with a cruel headmaster.
So was there an actual workhouse which had inspired the one in Oliver Twist? I was delighted when this book by Ruth Richardson, Dickens and the Workhouse: Oliver Twist and the London Poor was published in 2012. Since then it had, I thought, long been overdue for me to read.
A perfect chance came to choose this as a group side read, during a long careful read of Oliver Twist. However, I should have been more cautious. It was a big let-down, and a couple of weeks before the start, I apologised to the group for my bad judgement. Ruth Richardson is an experienced author; an historian with an interest in the Victorian age, although not a Dickens expert. I’m sure her intentions were good, but she has created a book out of very little here. The facts merit a feature article at best, and should not have been artificially padded out in this way.
The trigger was that the “Cleveland Street Workhouse” was under threat of being demolished in 2013, and Ruth Richardson was prominent in the campaign to save the building, so possibly this book was written to keep it high profile. Part of the workhouse building continued to be maintained by the University College London Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust, and part of the site was also now occupied by Kier, the construction company responsible for demolishing the adjacent building. Some damage or loss of historical information had probably already occurred. Apart from the fact that it is always sad to see a part of London’s heritage and history lost for ever, Ruth Richardson claimed to have “discovered” that as a boy Dickens had lived within a mile of the Cleveland Street Workhouse. Her mind flew to Oliver Twist.
All well and good. Unravelling an exciting mystery might develop from this. It could read like a detective story, apart from one inconvenient fact. Ruth Richardson did not “discover” that Dickens had lived near a workhouse when he was born; it was already known. It was called the Strand Union Workhouse.
1930 postcard of Cleveland Street showing the workhouse, now the Middlesex Hospital Outpatient Department
She makes a big deal of how meticulous and time-consuming her research was, involving sitting on hard stools for hours in the British Library, poring over ancient street maps, to establish whether certain roads had changed names, and so on. She may have found the topography and historical layout of the streets in this area fascinating, but to a lay person it is not. Moreover, it has little to do with the subject in hand.
Apart from the fact that this is a suspiciously odd way to begin a book - authors may thank others for their time in the Acknowledgements, but they do not usually stress within the text how much tedious research it had taken them - it was mind-numbingly boring to read.
The author made much of the so-called fact that “most” biographies of Dickens either missed out the fact that he had lived in Norfolk/Cleveland Street, or only gave it a brief mention. Well, there is a reason for this … Dickens’s family had only lived in that house when he was nearly 3 to nearly 5 years old: between 1815 and 1816, and then briefly later. It was hardly going to play a big part in Dickens’s later observations about social conditions and London life.
Nevertheless there is an important book which concentrates on all the houses where he lived, for Charles Dickens completists. It was written by a Dickens scholar who was his contemporary late in life. After Dickens’s death, there was a surge of interest in everything to do with him. F.G. Kitton had already written books about Dickens, plus a series of general interest books on famous authors’ houses. So although he was quite old (and in fact was to die the next year), when he was asked, Kitton could not resist writing this last one as a tribute to Charles Dickens: an author he much admired, and as the final one in his series.
“The Dickens Country” was first published in 1903 and went to many editions. It is even available on Kindle! It is a workmanlike and comprehensive survey of all the houses Dickens had lived in, with accompanying monochrome whole-page photographs by T.W. Tyrell. These are fascinating in themselves, as only one of the many London houses Dickens lived in still stands; it is now the Dickens Museum in Doughty Street. And the third photograph is quite clearly captioned:
“Norfolk (now Cleveland) Street, Fitzroy Square. (p.7)
Dickens and his parents resided in Norfolk Street in 1816, after their removal from Hawke St., Portsea”
It seemed inconceivable that Ruth Richardson did not know of this book, but I fear such must be the case. So much for her claim that most biographers never mentioned Norfolk Street, and that she had new evidence. We know from “The Dickens Country” that the change of street name was known at least as far back as 1903.
It was after the young Charles Dickens had lived in Norfolk/Cleveland Street with his family, that his father, John Dickens, “a jovial opportunist with no money sense” (according to his son many years later), was then arrested for debt. The family was forced to live inside the Marshalsea Debtors’ Prison in Southwark. They returned to the same house in 1828 when Dickens was nearly seventeen, and stayed until 1831 when he was almost twenty. During that time, he was out at work as a young legal clerk, and was training himself to become a shorthand court reporter, and even inventing his own system of cryptic signs and symbols.
Although it may have provided the idea, the Cleveland Street Workhouse was not the only model for the one in Oliver Twist though. Dickens had also based it on the Kettering Workhouse, in Northamptonshire, and had himself said that this one had been his inspiration. The Kettering Workhouse’s bad reputation for ill-treatment was apparently widely known.
The evidence for Ruth Richardson’s claim is thus very fanciful. The plain truth is that an author of fiction often puts together ideas from several sources to create their work, as Charles Dickens evidently had with his depiction of a workhouse. He had originally said in the original serial text of the Parish boy episodes, that it was “in the town of Mudfog”, but changed this for the book edition to “a certain town, which for many reasons it will be prudent to refrain from mentioning”. To add to the conundrum, “Mudfog” is actually a thinly disguised portrayal of the town of Chatham, in Kent!
But this entire factual book is full of supposition and fancy. For an author who writes nonfiction, I was frankly amazed at the number of instances of “I like to think”, “perhaps”, “maybe”, “it is possible that” and so on. Ruth Richardson had researched and investigated the houses and shop premises which existed at the time (she told us), and sought to weave an entire story around them. Snippets of information about Charles Dickens’s childhood had been inserted into suppositions about visiting these shops in the area, with his nanny. An example of how ludicrous these suggestions were, is what critics call the famous “streaky bacon” passage.
The text forms the beginning of what is now chapter 17 of Oliver Twist, and is almost two pages of apologia for the “sudden shiftings of the scene, and rapid changes of time and place”. This bit of literary criticism - or metafiction - is completely separate from the action. In it Charles Dickens defends the scene changes as being like life, which he claims is similar to “layers of streaky bacon”.
In fact Charles Dickens was drawing the public’s attention to his own life at that point. The real reason was that there had been a break of two whole months when he sincerely believed Oliver Twist was behind him, and he would write other things; he had other ongoing projects. Dickens had had a big row with the paper’s owner Richard Bentley, in which he resigned his editorship and was not going to write any more episodes about Oliver. But when a truce was agreed, Dickens wrote this extraordinary passage about how life was like “streaky bacon”: in other words life is just one thing and then another. It’s obviously just a metaphor, but Ruth Richardson - incredibly - “likes to think” that it dates from living a few doors away from a butcher’s shop when Charles Dickens was a toddler!
Or how about this imaginative account of Dickens’s grueling job at the blacking factory when he was little more than a child. Apparently he did not make the most of this mind-numbing, humiliating, filthy and exhausting daily grind, with few hours left between waking and sleeping. He should not have despaired, or kept it a secret for so many years until he told John Forster about it, but instead realised that he:
“might otherwise never have learned so early in life: an appreciation of business practice, manual dexterity and speed, self-discipline, application; an understanding of the importance of the value of money and of hard work in getting it; managing on a meagre income (budgeting and paying one’s way); preserving one’s own inner dignity even in the midst of social mortification, learning to recognise and address the humanity of social ‘inferiors’; fitting in to other domestic establishments; recognising that working lives are often forced and irksome, that terms of employment can be demeaning, and that bare survival is uncongenial; understanding that the cowl doesn’t make the monk and the applicabilty of that insight to others as to himself; and being able to tranform the negativity of feeling demeaned and undervalued into an inner generating force for personal development.”
What an extraordinary imagination this author has, to think that someone in a soul-destroying repetitive job would gain “an appreciation of business practice”. This is not a few days of carefully controlled and gentle “work experience”! One wonders if such a world has ever come further than their distant horizon. Perhaps then we should abandon all our careful strategies to introduce modern teenagers to personal development and valuable citizenship, and instead put them on a factory line with no rights, an occasional clobber round the head if their speed was not up to scratch, nobody at home to help, but existing on one scant meal a day from a pie shop, and working slavishly 18 hours a day, six and a half days a week until they dropped from exhaustion, with no prospect of ever getting out save being kicked out on to the streets. Better still, let’s send them up the chimneys instead of bothering about any primary education at all.
The reality, though understated, comes in Ruth Richardson’s next grudging sentences:
“For Dickens the whole experience seems to have been thoroughly negative; he was still smarting from it almost a quarter of a century later. He believed he had been robbed of his childhood”.
There are many good biographies about Dickens’s life, which all use John Forster’s comprehensive 3 volume biography, plus Dickens’s personal letters as their source. Several of these are more reliable in their information about Dickens than this whimsical account.
There are 10 chapters overall, and chapter 8 titled “Workhouse” (finally!) is really quite good, with lots of facts and nary a “maybe” or “might have”. Ruth Richardson should have started her account there. The book is nicely bound, and comfortable to hold, with a fine, silk-finish dust cover. The print is small, and there are various small monochrome illustrations, although these consist in general of rather poorly copied photographs, diagrams and drawings.
I feel two stars to be a generous rating for this book, which irritated me from start to finish. I searched the index in vain for Dan Calinescu, a Dickens enthusiast from Toronto. He had been responsible for arranging and financing a blue plaque for the workhouse, but only gets a passing mention in the text.
There is some good information about Charles Dickens dotted around the text, for those who have not come across it before. But in my opinion, there are better ways of acquiring it.
oh-well-i-tried
June 9, 2023Currently travelling, I’ve found this book a hard slog and soon got bored with all the “It’s not easy to know…”, “Dickens might have been able…”, “Young Dickens could have…” and plenty of other variations. Decided to give up after 5 chapters.
January 28, 2019
This book draws important attention to the Cleveland Street Workhouse in London. The building was in danger of being demolished until concerned citizens, including the author, made the important connection that Charles Dickens lived only a few doors away at two points during his childhood. Amazingly, both his home and the workhouse still stand.
I found the early chapters a little disjointed and disorganized. There were too many street names and the accompanying maps weren't big enough or clear enough - a picture is worth a thousand words, but not if it's impossible to make out! The later chapters, once Dickens is a teenager, were much more engaging, and the evidence more solid (that his early business card survives is amazing!). There's definitely a strong case here, but there's also a lot of personal conjecture, especially when it comes to Dickens as a toddler ("is it possible that Dickens saw/visited/read [a thing] that influenced [this scene in his books]?") that I felt weakened the plausibility of some of the more concrete arguments. I mean, it's possible that aliens built the pyramids, too... ;-)
But I'm glad I read it and I'm glad the workhouse building was saved from demolition. I learned a lot about Dickens's early life and the role his family's experiences and political context undoubtedly influenced his choice of subject matter and personal political stance. I'll re-read Oliver Twist with a better understanding of its context and importance.
I found the early chapters a little disjointed and disorganized. There were too many street names and the accompanying maps weren't big enough or clear enough - a picture is worth a thousand words, but not if it's impossible to make out! The later chapters, once Dickens is a teenager, were much more engaging, and the evidence more solid (that his early business card survives is amazing!). There's definitely a strong case here, but there's also a lot of personal conjecture, especially when it comes to Dickens as a toddler ("is it possible that Dickens saw/visited/read [a thing] that influenced [this scene in his books]?") that I felt weakened the plausibility of some of the more concrete arguments. I mean, it's possible that aliens built the pyramids, too... ;-)
But I'm glad I read it and I'm glad the workhouse building was saved from demolition. I learned a lot about Dickens's early life and the role his family's experiences and political context undoubtedly influenced his choice of subject matter and personal political stance. I'll re-read Oliver Twist with a better understanding of its context and importance.
November 25, 2016
The early part of this book is part detective story and part history as Richardson builds a case for the identification of a still-standing house in London as the childhood home of Charles Dickens. There's a lot of geographical detail here that is a bit much for a non-Londoner to follow, but the book develops into a very nice study of Dickens and how he came to resent the horrid treatment of the poor in London. It is an eye-opening account of the horrors of the workhouse and the poor laws that continued up into the last century in what was supposedly a civilized nation. The implications ring true for today's climate in the United States as well.
Dickens was personally and deeply concerned for the fate of the poor. There is no such champion with his level of visibility today and we are all the poorer for it.
Some further thoughts may be found on my blog: Sects and Violence in the Ancient World.
Dickens was personally and deeply concerned for the fate of the poor. There is no such champion with his level of visibility today and we are all the poorer for it.
Some further thoughts may be found on my blog: Sects and Violence in the Ancient World.
Read
February 2, 2020 This book is such an eye-opener. It was the authors' personal research (and tireless efforts by herself and others) which led to the preservation of the Strand Union Workhouse which was the inspiration for Oliver Twist. The Author discovers quite by chance, that Dickens home (now a heritage site) when he was very young, and again as a young man was a mere nine doors away from the Strand Union Workhouse; none of the previous works on Dickens had mentioned this fact as Dickens chose in his lifetime to obscure his residence at this address and the entire period of his family's brush with poverty.
February 29, 2012
I bought this book because I enjoyed the author's book, Death, Disection and the destitute. Having also enjoyed the Dickens exhibiton at the Museum of London I thought this would be an interesting book looking at workhouses and the poor of the Victorian era. Unfortunately it is more biography than history and I found myself a bit bored. Rather than taking things directly relevant to Dickens and then widening them out into generalisations about life for that period, Richardson did the reverse. She took generalisations about shops and streets and then tried to apply them to the very specific Dickens related houses, shops and streets that she focused in on. This led to rather a lot of supposition, "perhaps in this instance it was like this" "perhaps Dickens when he was here was aware or did this".
It provides but a scant portrait of life in early 19th century London. It is definitely more of a biography of Dickens' early years than it is a history of the period. Unfortunately, because the information directly about Dickens is so scare the whole book comes across as just a little vague. Unlike the exhibition at the Museum of London this is definitely for fans of Dickens and not just for people interested in the period and things that he wrote about.
It provides but a scant portrait of life in early 19th century London. It is definitely more of a biography of Dickens' early years than it is a history of the period. Unfortunately, because the information directly about Dickens is so scare the whole book comes across as just a little vague. Unlike the exhibition at the Museum of London this is definitely for fans of Dickens and not just for people interested in the period and things that he wrote about.
December 17, 2015
This book was written by Ruth Richardson after doing eshaustive research to save a workhouse that is near one of Dickens' childhood homes. While Richardson uses conjecture to show us the significance of the workhouse and neighborhood and its people in Dickens' writing, it is not too far-fetched to imagine this is how it was for the author. I love the photos and other illustrations in the book as it gives the reader a sense of place and a frame of reference.
This is a very interesting study of the past and how it impacts the present and future.
This is a very interesting study of the past and how it impacts the present and future.
July 9, 2012
I really loved this book. Ms. Richardson goes into the most amazing detail, that only a history and/or Dickens nerd, such as myself can love! I poured over every map and photograph. I luxuriated in each imaginative journey. It is almost impossible to believe that such places as the Strand Workhouse existed, until you stop and consider what happens to most things once you get the government involved with all its unfeeling regulations and number crunching.
I highly recommend this book and will look for more by Ruth Richardson.
I highly recommend this book and will look for more by Ruth Richardson.
September 18, 2019
It was astounding,at first I thought how dull its just supposition,but the more I read and I was reading it every day to my husband in the morning,I found each detail interesting as though we were there and had a window into Dickens world,it has little numbers in some sentences to see at end of book the deeper connections of some phrases.It is guess work if Dickens had or had not seen or done something but there is no way the author can know for a fact but it still gives an insight what was there when Dickens was around.I loved the book.
April 20, 2021
Absolutely fascinating book about Dicken's early life, the writing of Oliver Twist and the history of workhouses. I loved it. I thought I read enough biographies of Dickens but her book provided so much new information and new perspective on the man and his genius. Now I have to reread at least Oliver Twist, Sketches by Boz. And when I'm next in London I have to go to Norfolk Street.
June 7, 2017
It brought me back to the days when I read every Dickens book I could get my hands on. And, of course, the John Forster biography. The book is a bit of a tour around the city of London as it may have been when Dickens was young.
February 3, 2013
A filling out of Dickens' life. There is an awful lot of 'may have' statements but it does conjure up the scene of Victorian London.
November 16, 2014
Was looking for a book on the Workhouses and this is the one that came up at the library. It was an interesting read even though I'm not a huge fan of Charles Dickens.
June 3, 2020
Boz. Poor Law. Historic buildings. We write what we know. Dense.
September 10, 2024
Disappointing
This is a fairly rambling account of Dickenss early life full of conjecture about what he may or may not have experienced or known about the varying places he lived. Interspersed with that are the actual nuggets of information about workhouse and prison conditions.
20% of the book is an index, a further 20% are footnotes that would have been better in the main body of the text and references.
This is a fairly rambling account of Dickenss early life full of conjecture about what he may or may not have experienced or known about the varying places he lived. Interspersed with that are the actual nuggets of information about workhouse and prison conditions.
20% of the book is an index, a further 20% are footnotes that would have been better in the main body of the text and references.
December 20, 2023
Very well researched and written book
I came across the book by accident whilst researching my own ancestors stint in the workhouse in the 1850s. Much of the area Dickens lives was frequented by members of my own family. Ruth brings alive the people and the atmosphere at that time.
I came across the book by accident whilst researching my own ancestors stint in the workhouse in the 1850s. Much of the area Dickens lives was frequented by members of my own family. Ruth brings alive the people and the atmosphere at that time.
October 2, 2012
This should have stayed a 10 page article for an academic journal. To expand it into a book the author wasted too many pages speculating on what aspects of early nineteenth century London might have influenced Dickens. I wish I had just spent the time reading Dickens instead of this book.
Want to read
February 16, 2013I have not read this yet.
Dickens is supposed to have discovered a workhouse boy and listened to his story and about his job when he left the workhouse.
Dickens is supposed to have roughly based the character Oliver Twist on the boy.
Dickens is supposed to have discovered a workhouse boy and listened to his story and about his job when he left the workhouse.
Dickens is supposed to have roughly based the character Oliver Twist on the boy.
Want to read
September 3, 2012Heard the author on a rebroadcast of The Diane Rehm Show on 9/3/12 (Labor Day in the US).
Read
December 10, 2012Hear the author on NPR and bought the book. Lots of good tidbits about Dickens' life and London. Now I want to go see things for myself...
June 19, 2013
Loved finding out what the area was like where Dickens lived in the 1800's. many influential scenes from childhood on his work...
August 14, 2014
From cover to cover it was a colourless, odourless and lifeless book.
Displaying 1 - 22 of 22 reviews