WHEN HE was writing the final parts of Oliver Twist in 1838, Dickens was on a meteoric trajectory of success. With a wife and family of his own, plus servants, he had taken a lease on a fine house in Doughty Street, a genteel gated road a dozen or so blocks east, and parallel to, Norfolk Street.
He had designed an important chapter to lie near the end of the book, between Sikes’s desperate pursuit into Jacob’s Island, and Fagin’s last night alive. It was one of those intervening chapters which earlier in the book he had likened to the layers in streaky bacon: allowing a release of tension after Sikes’s terrible death, and a gentler interlude with the atmosphere of the fresher air outside central London, before the dramatic scene inside the dark confinement of the condemned cell at Newgate.
Chapter 51 of Oliver Twist contributes in an important way towards the conclusion of the novel: it serves to tie up loose ends within the plot, and brings the story back full circle to its opening scenes. It features the great showdown with Monks, in which the now adolescent Oliver is at last allowed to understand his own identity, and comes to know about the pillaging and pawning of the locket from his mother’s corpse. To get us to that scene, Dickens carries the reader on a journey through countryside, towards Oliver’s birthplace.
In the carriage during the journey, there’s a conversation between Oliver and Rose Maylie, which serves to remind the reader that Oliver is returning to the scenes of his childhood in markedly different circumstances from those in which he left it: he is now loved, happy, safe, and prosperous. Oliver expresses a longing to see his poor friend Dick at the branch workhouse, who had given Oliver a blessing as he began his flight to London near the start of the book. Rose comforts him by gently taking Oliver’s hands between her own—a rare moment of kindly human touch for him. She observes—and I think Dickens wanted readers to sense a kind of mutual comfort and contentment here—that Oliver will be able to share with Dick news of his good fortune, and can be even happier because he will be able to help his friend. Rose’s suggestion is expressed in a Victorian do-gooding sentimental tone, with which it is difficult for the modern reader to empathize: but we can nevertheless recognize what Dickens was trying to say for his own contemporaries, who were more habituated to expressions of this kind.
Oliver’s return to the scenes of his childhood conveys some of the strangeness the adolescent Dickens might have felt returning again to live in Norfolk Street in 1829, after the gap of a dozen years. It would not be surprising if, while he was writing, Dickens had thought himself back into the time of his own return there: the place much the same, but himself irrevocably altered:
they approached the town, and at length drove through its narrow streets … There was Sowerberry’s the undertaker’s just as it used to be, only smaller and less imposing in appearance than he remembered it—there were all the well-known shops and houses, with almost every one of which he had some slight incident connected—there was Gamfield’s cart, the very cart he used to have, standing at the old public-house door—there was the workhouse, the dreary prison of his youthful days, with its dismal windows frowning on the street—there was the same lean porter standing at the gate, at sight of whom Oliver involuntarily shrunk back, and then laughed at himself for being so foolish, then cried, then laughed again—there were scores of faces at the doors and windows that he knew quite well—there was nearly everything as if he had left it but yesterday.1
Taking Oliver back to these scenes of his growing up, Dickens in Doughty Street was carrying many-layered memories of that parallel thoroughfare not far away, memories dating from childhood, from his return there as a young man, and—to judge by his use of Sykes’s shop board—from more recent visits. The street and its vicinity held his life in a grasp, enclosing the Marshalsea years like bookends, in a way nowhere else did: from his early childhood to his young adulthood, the start of his own present success. The years between—the family’s slide towards the Marshalsea and the blacking factory and the uncertain climb back out—were like the layers in streaky bacon: those years had taught him what impoverishment and hunger were like, how easily one might fall into poverty, how grim it was to be stuck in it, and how painfully uncharitable the society was in which he was beating a path to success.
Oliver has been traumatized, orphaned, alone, starved, maltreated, bullied, kidnapped, and inveigled into the orbit of a murderous London criminal underworld. He thinks back to his old self: ‘a poor houseless, wandering boy, without a friend to help him, or a roof to shelter his head’. Now, safe from all this, comforted and cared for by loving friends, he arrives at the realization that he has the power to help others who yet remain in the bleak clutches of the workhouse system. If one was led to ponder why Dickens chose to confront the workhouse system in Oliver Twist, Rose Maylie’s comment about little Dick suggests a powerful motivation: ‘in all your happiness you have none so great as the coming back to make him happy, too.’2
Dickens’s decision to create this novel at the height of his success with Pickwick, it would seem, bears a marked affinity to Oliver’s resolution to help his pauper friend.
One of Cruikshank’s illustrations to Oliver Twist shows Mr Brownlow and his housekeeper cossetting Oliver back to health, after his fever. He sits comfortably by their cosy hearth. There are signs of food having been eaten, and he’s warm and safe. Over the mantelpiece in this domestic setting, above a clock and a vase of flowers, is a framed image of the Good Samaritan, which looks to have been inspired by Hogarth’s famous painting. It’s a small detail, but a significant one, and it feels as if it is likely to have been asked for by Dickens himself.
The image underlines a central theme in Oliver Twist, which concerns the workings throughout society of the opposite of Christian charity, the obverse of the Samaritan impulse: a pervasive culture of predation. Pickpocketing and burglary were among its bestknown forms, but so, in Dickens’s book, was the workhouse system.3 It may be that something he had read in Smollett’s translation of Gil Blas had lodged in his mind: ‘everyone loves to prey upon his fellows; it is an universal principle, though variously exerted.’4
Oliver Twist begins, we discover, with predation from a workhouse corpse by an old pauper nurse. The purloined locket is pawned, and the old nurse’s corpse is itself preyed upon by the workhouse Matron; then she herself is preyed upon by the villain, Monks. Dickens reveals the food chain. The child Oliver and his fellows are starved by the woman employed under the Poor Law to ‘farm’ the children, to benefit herself. Gamfield the chimney sweep would prey upon the child, and the Poor Law authorities (personified by the man in the white waistcoat) would indeed invite it, by advertising a financial inducement for him to be removed from the House. The undertaker hopes to use the boy as a mute to prey upon the gullibility of the public, and so the book continues: kidnapping, burglary, prostitution, spying, murder, all of them predatory.
At the lowest and least defended end of the social pecking order is the orphan child: starved, punished, used as cheap labour, provoked, inveigled, and kidnapped, used as a tool by criminals, his identity stolen, in danger at every turn, but finally saved by good fortune and the power of kindness, by the parallel determination of Mr Brownlow and the bookshop proprietor not to pass by on the other side.
It’s a grim story, with an upbeat conclusion, but not a happy ending: the domestic happiness at the very end of the book is tempered by irreparable losses (Oliver’s mother, Dick) and the knowledge of the existence of real evil at loose in the world, not just among criminals but in the institutional cruelties inflicted on vulnerable human beings by the workhouse system. The novel works rather as a political parable, a modern fairy tale. No one in power at the time, and few ordinary readers, wanted to think about the real fate of such a child: it was only through fiction that Dickens was able to invite them imaginatively to do so. The workhouse passages in Oliver Twist develop into a melodrama of enormous power, dealing with contemporary issues of crime, punishment, and reclamation by goodness. When the young Queen Victoria recommended the book to the Prime Minister, Lord Melbourne, he gave it up as distasteful.5
The power of the story is evident in our own culture: we celebrate Oliver Twist in plays, stories, musicals, adaptations for film and TV, where Oliver and Sikes, Fagin, Nancy, and the Artful Dodger are almost bywords. But a London doctor writing factually at exactly the same time about the actual treatment of real parish children by the Poor Law system—a contemporary of Dickens—is almost unknown and unread.
Dr Thomas Pettigrew is one of the unsung medical heroes of London’s past. He was a surgeon working at the Charing Cross Hospital, which was then a new building in the West Strand. Towards the end of 1836, Pettigrew wrote a courageous and principled remonstrance against the pauper farming system then being used against the children of the parish of St James Piccadilly.6 Dickens was probably finalizing his plans for Oliver Twist at the time. Pettigrew described the regime of malnutrition and effective starvation under which the parish children of St James (the same place as the Palace, not a poor parish) were reared from 6 weeks to 7 or 8 years of age, in a private establishment six miles south of London, in the village of Norwood.7 Pettigrew’s title page carried a sad verse which provides an image of the state of the children he had witnessed:
The vigour sinks, the habit melts away,
The cheerful, pure, and animated bloom
Dies from the face; with squalid atrophy
Devour’d, in sallow melancholy clad.8
At the inquest of George Coster, a parish boy, it had become clear to Pettigrew that the children at Norwood were being systematically starved, that economies of scale (the fee to the parish for each child was four shillings and threepence a week) were economies at the expense of child lives: victims, he said, of amalgamated parsimony and negligence. Pettigrew believed Coster’s inquest had been rigged to exonerate the parish, so as to prevent the true verdict of neglect and starvation to be found. At Norwood, he said, over 300 children were crammed into one room, several to a bed, eighty of them profoundly emaciated, seventeen of them seriously ill. In modern times, we have seen news films and photographs of orphanages abroad exposing child neglect and malnutrition: Pettigrew was doing equivalent reportage then, but without being able to document the emaciation and dereliction of these children’s lives on film. Children’s welfare, he urged, should be the parish’s prime responsibility: ‘no temptation should be placed in the way of individuals to make money or derive a profit upon such a subject as the support of the poor.’9 Pauper farming was an ‘incentive to traffic in humanity’, he argued. Pettigrew accused the parish of trying to burke enquiry into excess deaths in the parish. The Poor Law Commissioners, he said, were not unbiased public servants: most especially Dr Mott, who Pettigrew alleged was actually financially involved in a business farming out paupers in an establishment at Brixton. The Morning Chronicle (for which Dickens was working at that time) accused Pettigrew of spreading false and scandalous allegations, but he was supported by several other doctors, who validated his statement concerning the real cause of young Coster’s death.
Dickens and Pettigrew were later friends, but in 1836, Dickens was probably already disgusted by the position taken by his own newspaper, which preferred to malign the messenger rather than hear the message concerning the terrible death of a child. The Chronicle’s coverage of the issue may have provoked one of Dickens’s clashes with his own Editor, and would certainly have made him painfully conscious of the conflict between his own interests as a salaried journalist and his humanitarian views. One can appreciate why he left the newspaper with such alacrity as soon as he had signed the contract with Bentley to become an Editor himself, and appreciate too, why he started almost immediately on Oliver Twist.
In fact Pettigrew was ignored by both St James’s parish and by the Poor Law Commissioners, and rather than being closed down, the proprietors of these south London ‘farming’ establishments were allowed to expand their facilities greatly, eventually leading to hundreds of unnecessary deaths.10
In the opening chapters of Oliver Twist, Dickens addresses closely similar issues to those raised by Pettigrew—especially the starvation and maltreatment of parish children, and the ugly profiteering the Poor Law system encouraged on the part of the proprietors of such establishments. But compared to the real inhumanity of the system Pettigrew described, Dickens’s criticism is understated, achieved by satire, using ridicule, laughter, and a tone of voice that engenders ironical disbelief, rather than (like Pettigrew) by direct confrontation. An anonymous reviewer in a contemporary journal, John Bull, recognized immediately the subversive power of the ridicule, observing apropos of the opening chapters:
The second number of Bentley’s Miscellany has appeared, and contains an exceedingly good article by Boz … called ‘Oliver Twist’, and casts the bitterest satire upon the New Poor Laws that can well be imagined. Upon political questions it is always agreeable to find a coadjutor who can strengthen by the force of ridicule the powers of opposition to Whig tyranny.11
Dickens certainly captures the spirit of the new dietary, when he allows the reader to discern Oliver’s thoughts on the nature of the workhouse soup. Rescued from the aggressive magistrate by Mr Brownlow, the kindly housekeeper Mrs Bedwin serves up a bowlful of good broth to help Oliver recover from his near-fatal fever. Looking at it, he thinks it strong enough ‘to furnish an ample dinner, when reduced to the regulation strength, for three hundred and fifty paupers, at the lowest computation’.12 Of course this is Dickens’s thought rather than Oliver’s, yet the pertinence of the irony was not lost upon his contemporaries. Kathleen Tillotson has noted a report in his old newspaper, the Morning Chronicle, during the serialization of Oliver Twist, which serves to illustrate contemporary perceptions of the book’s powerful effect: ‘Boz has produced so strong an impression … that in Chelsea, for instance, people have gone about lecturing for the purpose of counteracting the effect of his writings.’13
The portrayal of the workhouse in Oliver Twist, and the poor child’s desperate request for more, was fiercely topical when it was written, and the book’s relevance, if anything, increased with time. As the Poor Law continued longer in force, the truth of Dickens’s perception of the real inhumanity of the workhouse system became increasingly evident. Much suffering went on behind closed doors, but sporadic evidences of the system’s inhumanity reached public consciousness through the national newspapers: for example, the revelations concerning the workhouse in Andover (Hampshire) in 1845–6, where paupers were so starved that they fought each other for the rancid meat on bones they were employed to crush for fertilizer; and the disastrous events of 1849, in which hundreds of neglected and malnourished London workhouse children died when cholera broke out at an overcrowded and insanitary baby farm run by a private contractor, Drouet, at Tooting, south London.14
Dickens was already famous when he wrote the ‘autobiographical fragment’ in the 1840s, having already published Sketches by Boz, Pickwick, Oliver Twist, Nicholas Nickleby, The Old Curiosity Shop, Barnaby Rudge, and Martin Chuzzlewit, and then being engaged in writing Dombey and Son.15 He must surely have been conscious of having used materials from his own life in his writings. From what we now know, it is possible to suppose that his silence about Norfolk Street in the ‘autobiographical fragment’ is likely to reflect a knowing discretion in the adult Dickens, not a failure of memory.
In a letter to Forster while he was writing David Copperfield, Dickens mentions that he had devoted a long week to the ‘very complicated interweaving of truth and fiction’, spending a great deal of thought on what from the Marshalsea era he could properly use in the novel.16 After finishing Little Dorrit, Dickens went back to Southwark in 1857, to look at the prison itself:
Went to the Borough yesterday morning before going to Gadshill, to see if I could find any ruins of the Marshalsea. Found a great part of the original building — now ‘Marshalsea Place.’ Found the rooms that have been in my mind’s eye in the story. Found, nursing a very big boy, a very small boy, who told me how it all used to be. God knows how he learned it (for he was a world too young to know anything about it), but he was right enough …. There is a room there — still standing, to my amazement — that I think of taking! It is the room through which the ever-memorable signers of Captain Porter’s petition filed off in my boyhood. The spikes are gone, and the wall is lowered, and anybody can go out now who likes to go, and is not bedridden; and I said to the boy ‘Who lives there?’ and he said, ‘Jack Pithick.’ ‘Who is Jack Pithick?’ I asked him. And he said, ‘Joe Pithick’s uncle.’17
In the case of the Marshalsea, Dickens was balancing family pain and the danger of revealing his social origins, with his own time-tempered view of the place and the desire to write his novel. He had to consider besides that he had already featured Mr Pickwick in a debtors’ prison. The creative process of hiding biography in obvious places—what Forster called ‘taking the world into his confidence’—is one at which Dickens was adept.18 But he really hid things too, and not only in his fiction. During the writing of Oliver Twist, he had been asked by a German admirer to provide some information about his own biography for publication in Germany. His letter had ended ‘I have said more about myself in this one note than I should venture to say elsewhere in twenty years’, which serves to show how careful he had been with personal information. His summary is interesting because it shows that at that stage he was either hazy about the details of his own childhood, or that he had already begun knowingly to obscure parts of it:
I was born in Portsmouth, an English Seaport town … on the 7th February 1812. My father holding in those days a situation under the Government in the Navy Pay Office, which called him in the discharge of his duty to different places, I came to London, a child of two years old, left it again at six, and then left it again for another Sea Port town—Chatham—where I remained some six or seven years, and then came back to London with my parents and half a dozen brothers and sisters, whereof I was the second in seniority. I had begun an irregular rambling education under a clergyman at Chatham, and I finished it at a good school in London—tolerably early, for my father was not a rich man, and I had to begin the world.19
Dickens describes arriving in London at the age of 2 and leaving it at 6—which seems to double the two years he is actually known to have been in London as a child, and which differs markedly from the brief version in Forster’s later biography. The contemporary documentation concerning his father, John Dickens’s, working career at the Navy Office has been well excavated: after two years in London, the family went to Sheerness early in 1817 when Dickens was not quite 5 years old.20 The dating error suggests that Dickens was mistaken, or that he felt subjectively that those two years in Norfolk Street were much longer than they really were. Alternatively, he may have been trying to add a couple of years somewhere to conceal the Marshalsea/blacking factory period which—as we would expect—he did not share with his German correspondent. The mistake of the double departure in this letter (he leaves, and leaves again) may indicate that Dickens was discomfited by having to write a direct untruth, fictionalizing his own past.
While the Marshalsea and the blacking factory are perfectly understandable silences, the omission of Marylebone, despite its focal importance in his own biography, and that of his family, is altogether less explicable. It may be noteworthy that Dickens doesn’t elaborate here about where in London his roots were. London is a very large place in which to locate oneself without any further detail: it’s a collection of villages, and most Londoners will usually tell you without asking whereabouts in London they’re from. Dickens was very well aware of this: there’s a lovely moment, for example, in Pickwick, where a servant girl’s behaviour is explained by the fact that she was ‘brought up among the aboriginal inhabitants of Southwark’.21 In another passage from the same book, Mr Weller senior, trying to persuade his son not to write verses in a Valentine to his sweetheart, says delightfully:
I never know’d a respectable coachman as wrote poetry, ’cept one, as made an affectin’ copy o’ werses the night afore he wos hung for a highway robbery; and he wos only a Cambervell man, so even that’s no rule.22
Dickens looks to have decided quite early on in his literary career to keep his own counsel: not just about the prison and the factory, but also about his own family back story in east Marylebone. But why this should be so currently remains mysterious. I am not entirely convinced that it was simply about concealing his social background—if that is all it was, why should Bayham Street and Somers Town (which were meaner streets) and even the shameful Marshalsea, nevertheless be known to and discussed with Forster? At this stage, alternative explanations—that Dickens had used too many stories from the street as inspiration, had grievously offended someone, or perhaps was protecting someone—are entirely conjectural. There must be a reason, but it is completely obscure. Just a shadow of a clue may perhaps reside in a reference in Oliver Twist; when Monks and the workhouse matron are about to discuss the locket, Monks says: ‘if a woman’s a party to a secret that might hang or transport her, I’m not afraid of her telling it to anybody.’23 It is just possible that the locket story at the heart of Oliver Twist was derived from some real event associated with the Cleveland Street Workhouse, and/or the local pawnbroker’s shop in Norfolk Street, and that the locality of the workhouse would have revealed the guilty party Dickens had hoped to conceal in fiction. An object like a gold locket and a gold ring stolen from a dead body might indeed have merited transportation.24
The depiction of the workhouse in Oliver Twist is fictional, but the real long-term effects of the Poor Law continued well into the twentieth century. What the Poor Law Commission’s own doctors had known in the early years of the ‘great economical experiment’ of the New Poor Law—that most of those needing support from the system were not work-shy, but elderly, sick, or dependent—was ignored and overlooked for more than a generation. J. P. Kay, reporting to the Poor Law Commission back in 1838, had observed: ‘The metropolitan workhouses chiefly contain aged paupers, more or less infirm,’ and he recognized and recommended then, in 1838, the need for proper nursing.25 While poor children were farmed out to places like Drouet’s at Tooting to starve and die, the Poor Law Commissioners delayed the provision of decent healthcare or nursing provision for the sick and the elderly until well after Florence Nightingale’s work in the Crimea, and in the process, rendered many lives and many deaths profoundly wretched, desolate, and agonizing.
When in the late 1840s Louisa Twining visited the Workhouse in Cleveland Street, to see an elderly woman she had known from her own parish, who had begged not to be forgotten, Miss Twining found it more depressing than a prison.26 The master and matron ran what she described as ‘a reign of terror’ within the institution, which no one in authority would end because ‘they kept order and were economical’. Miss Twining’s hope of being able to organize regular visits for all those who might benefit was declined, and she was shuttled between the Strand Guardians and the Poor Law Board, each fobbing her off with official objections to ‘interference’. Miss Twining wrote letters to the press, and eventually became a key figure in the establishment of the Workhouse Visiting Society, the women of which went determinedly into workhouses to carry flowers, prayers, and pictures to the poor creatures inside, and to witness, supported from behind by funds from Miss Burdett Coutts, the philanthropist with whom Dickens worked closely for many years.
FIGURE 41. Louisa Twining, a portrait photograph c. 1860, from her autobiographical Recollections of Life and Work. Miss Twining was the instigator of the ‘Workhouse Visiting’ movement, which took her years of dogged lobbying to organize, in the teeth of relentless official opposition.
In the aftermath of the Crimean War it at last became obvious that nursing reform was not only a military matter. Florence Nightingale’s efforts to train nurses had their greatest effects at the outset in the charitable ‘voluntary’ sector of hospital care. Even in the 1860s, most of the workhouses of London employed not a single trained nurse: all the nursing—as in the days of Oliver Twist—was still being done by paupers themselves. Louisa Twining, like Florence Nightingale, Frances Power Cobbe, and many other women pushing at the same door believed that sickness transformed a pauper into a patient, that sickness and poverty—as the Marylebone Dispensary philanthropists had so eloquently put it in the 1790s—was ‘complicated Misery’ deserving aid.
At about the same time as Miss Twining’s efforts, in the mid-1850s, Dr Joseph Rogers was appointed as Medical Officer at the Workhouse in Cleveland Street. For the Guardians at the Strand, the appointment was a genuine mistake: Rogers, a deeply humane and dedicated doctor, was to prove a determined and successful champion of the poor, and for his fellow doctors. As far as is known, Rogers is also the only Poor Law Medical Officer who left a published memoir, so the Cleveland Street Workhouse is unique in having the testimony of its own doctor concerning its internal governance, for the period he was there. No other workhouse in the country has an insider’s memoir to match it.27
When Rogers arrived at the Workhouse, only two of the twenty wards at Cleveland Street were officially designated for the sick, but he found elderly infirm, sick, and dying patients in every ward. In his estimate, only 8 per cent of inmates were well. He also discovered unmarried mothers in the lying-in ward suffering from extreme exhaustion, being on a ‘starvation dietary’. Rogers was told that the lying-in ward was not under his jurisdiction. Assuming that the punitive diet was official policy, he wrote to the Poor Law Board at Whitehall to urge a more humane diet, and was informed that the Medical Officer had the power to specify the dietary: ‘a power which’, he later wrote, ‘I did not hesitate to use’. His kind efforts were censured by the Guardians, who had devised the starvation dietary themselves to discourage other such women from giving birth there. This was the first of many difficulties with the Guardians, who supported the Master to the hilt, even when he was deliberately obnoxious or provocative towards Rogers.
FIGURE 42. Dr Joseph Rogers, the humane Poor Law Medical Officer at the Cleveland Street Workhouse in the 1850s and 1860s, and author of important Reminiscences. It was Dr Rogers who read aloud Dickens’s letter to the inaugural meeting of the Association for the Improvement of the Infirmaries of London Workhouses in March 1866.
It is interesting to discover from the Guardians’ Standing Orders that it took Rogers less than two years to persuade them to remove the chains of restraint in the ward assigned to pauper lunatics, something I cannot find mentioned in his Reminiscences. Rogers seems to have managed this humane act by finding an authority beyond the Poor Law Commission, namely the Lunacy Commission, to enforce the change. The Standing Orders of the Strand Union Workhouse record in 1857: ‘That the chains by which the strap is fastened to the iron bedstead used for violent lunatics be substituted by leather to meet the recommendation of the Commissioners in Lunacy.’28 The bleak and barbarous atmosphere of the Cleveland Street Workhouse during the time Rogers worked there is well described in his book: the overcrowding was so bad that patients could get out only at the end of their beds; in 1866 556 people were sharing 332 beds. The cubic footage of space available per person was half that of the London prisons. But these were closed institutions, with no democratic oversight.
Rogers describes a rather Dickensian event inside the Cleveland Street Workhouse in 1857, when Mr Catch, the vile workhouse master who ran what Louisa Twining had described as the ‘reign of terror’ was finally dismissed. He had conspired to provoke Rogers into being sacked for dereliction of duty, but his plan backfired. ‘So intensely tyrannical and cruel had been the rule of this man’ said Rogers, that as he and his wife were leaving the building, the entire Workhouse ‘rose up in open rebellion’, and erupted in a noisy celebration of rough music, bashing any implement they could lay hands on to make a clamour, ‘old kettles, shovels, penny trumpets’, creating a celebratory cacophony that would have been audible up and down Cleveland Street, echoing along the nearby alleys, and in the streets around.29
Real reform was very slow in coming, but Dickens did live to see its beginnings before his death in 1870.
After the death of Thomas Wakley, the founding Editor of the medical journal The Lancet and a campaigning MP, the journal decided to appoint its own medical Sanitary Commission to investigate the condition of workhouse infirmaries. Wakley had long been an implacable parliamentary opponent of the Poor Law Commission, describing the law under which it acted as ‘odious, detestable, and detested’.30 The Lancet began publication of its Sanitary Commission’s findings in the journal itself during the early summer of 1865, creating such a sensation in the press that the government soon intervened to announce its own enquiry.31
Rogers was personally abused and vilified by the Guardians at the Strand Union, who believed that he had written the Commission’s Report on the Cleveland Street Workhouse himself. But he was quite able to prove them in error, when the author, Dr Francis Anstie, challenged them to show where, in his Report, he had departed from the truth. The press had a field day with the various revelations. The immediate upshot of the Commission’s exposures was that—with wide and eminent support—a new association came into being. At the inaugural meeting of the Association for the Improvement of the Infirmaries of London Workhouses, Dr Rogers as Secretary read out to the cheers of the audience a letter of support from Charles Dickens. Apologizing for being unable to attend, Dickens wrote:
My knowledge of the general condition of the sick poor in workhouses is not of yesterday, nor are my efforts, in my vocation, to call merciful attention to it. (Cheers) Few anomalies in the land are so horrible to me as the unchecked existence of many shameful sick wards for paupers, side by side with a constantly recurring expansion of conventional wonder that the poor should creep into corners to die rather than fester and rot in such infamous places. (Cheers)32
When Dickens referred in this letter to his efforts in his own vocation to call merciful attention to the shortcomings of the Poor Law, he meant not only in Oliver Twist. He had created, or commissioned and published in the journals he had founded, over a period of almost thirty years, a remarkable and remarkably consistent output of stories, characters, and articles on the theme of the Poor Law. Among the most recent of these had been the character of Betty Higden in Our Mutual Friend, who takes to the road rather than die in a workhouse. The book was the last novel Dickens completed before his death, published in parts over the period 1864–5—just ahead of and in parallel with the Lancet Sanitary Commission’s Reports. The words the audience at the great meeting heard Rogers read aloud referring to the poor creeping into corners to die rather than fester and rot in workhouse wards, refer to those—young and old—who preferred to sleep out under the stars rather than enter those hateful places, and to the incomprehension which met their deaths. Dickens’s creation Betty Higden addresses this incomprehension, by way of explaining the self-respect that refused to be browbeaten by the coercive humiliation of applying for help to the workhouse. ‘It is a remarkable Christian improvement’, Dickens says regretfully, ‘to have made a pursuing Fury of the Good Samaritan; but it was so in this case, and it is a type of many, many, many.’
Betty Higden is an extraordinary character, whose thoughts Dickens presents almost in a stream-of-consciousness: ‘afeerd that I’m a growing like the poor old people that they brick up in the Unions’. Sewn in the breast of her gown, Dickens explains:
the money to pay for her burial was still intact. If she could wear through the day, and then lie down to die under cover of the darkness, she would die independent. If she were captured previously, the money would be taken from her as a pauper who had no right to it, and she would be carried to the accursed workhouse …. Most illogical, inconsequential, and light-headed, this; but travellers in the valley of the shadow of death are apt to be light-headed; and worn-out old people of low estate have a trick of reasoning as indifferently as they live, and doubtless would appreciate our Poor Law more philosophically on an income of ten thousand a year.33
The critics of the workhouse system were vindicated when the government’s own official enquiry was published in 1866. The inspector reported that most workhouses lacked light, ventilation, and space. Beds were too close together, and there was insufficient sanitation, often with no privacy or toilet paper provided. He recommended that several—including the Strand—be closed immediately.34 The following year, the retiring President of the Poor Law Board, Gathorne Hardy, carried his Metropolitan Poor Act of 1867 through Parliament, establishing new infirmaries in London for the sick poor, quite separate from workhouses. A new body, called the Metropolitan Asylums Board, was created to cope with infectious diseases and insanity. The next decade saw the construction of twenty new hospitals around London, totalling 10,000 new beds. Many of these sites still serve as the core for newer hospitals currently in use under the National Health Service.
The old Workhouse in Cleveland Street also eventually became part of the National Health Service, but by a unique route, having new ‘Nightingale’ wards added at the back in the 1870s when it became the Central London Sick Asylum, and remaining in use as a public infirmary almost until the very end of the Poor Law era.
In the mid-1920s, however, it was acquired by the nearby Middlesex Hospital, and was comprehensively modernized into a ‘voluntary’ hospital, with brand-new surgical operating theatres and maternity facilities. The Middlesex Hospital itself was badly in need of rebuilding at that time, and the added space provided by the Workhouse (now called the Annexe) allowed the Hospital to decant first its own east wing into the modernized Workhouse building—while that entire half of the Middlesex’s own fabric was demolished and rebuilt—and then to repeat the process for its west wing. The complete rebuilding was done with barely any disruption to the Hospital’s services. The Middlesex had acquired almost all the Georgian shops along its own eastern flank, the same shops of the old Norfolk Street, which young Dickens had looked out upon from his upper window from Mr Baxter the pawnbroker’s down to Charles Street. These were now demolished to allow the whole Hospital to expand its footprint, so that it re-emerged from this process on a somewhat grander scale. So in a way, the Workhouse holds within its walls not only its own long story, but also the history of the Middlesex Hospital.
FIGURE 43. The Matron at the Central London Sick Asylum (as the Workhouse building in Cleveland Street was then known), looking rather glum in 1883. She was sketched during a meeting by Charles Chambers Eames, a member of the governing committee. Florence Nightingale had hoped to influence the appointment of the matron, but was resisted. The Matron’s unhappiness probably derived from her unsupported predicament, and the lack of trained staff.
FIGURE 44. Middlesex Hospital Annexe. This fine inter-war photograph looking northwards up Cleveland Street shows the Workhouse on the right, rejuvenated and modernized. The new front wall dates to 1926. The busyness of the street further north gives an idea of what the area might have been like in Dickens’s day, before the Telecom Tower was built on the next block. Had the unknown photographer turned to look south, Dickens’s old home would have been easily visible from the same vantage point.
When the Middlesex Hospital had been completely rebuilt, the Workhouse building became its Outpatients’ Department, and at the end of the ‘voluntary’ hospital era, along with the Middlesex Hospital itself, it was adopted into the National Health Service. The Cleveland Street Workhouse therefore continued to serve sick Londoners from the Appointed Day at the creation of the National Health Service in 1948 until the twenty-first century. It only closed with the closure of the Middlesex Hospital itself in 2005/6.35 The Cleveland Street Workhouse is the only Georgian workhouse in the London region which has survived so many changes of administration since the 1770s, while nevertheless continuing with the core function of housing the sick and infirm of the metropolis. It is a unique survival, and deserves to be appreciated and celebrated as such.36
There are many reasons why the old Workhouse in Cleveland Street should be recognized as a key source of inspiration for the most famous workhouse in the world: the one featured in Oliver Twist. The most weighty is that for more than four years of his life before he wrote that celebrated novel, Charles Dickens lived nine doors from the Workhouse gates. As Peter Higginbotham, an expert on workhouse history and author of the Workhouses website, has observed: ‘Over the years, a number of other workhouses have vied for the recognition as being the one that inspired Oliver Twist. However, until now, the most obvious and convincing candidate has been overlooked.’37
Evidence presented in this book shows how closely Oliver Twist fits the regime at Cleveland Street, and shows too that a number of echoes in other of Dickens’s writings (Sketches by Boz, Pickwick Papers, and Barnaby Rudge among others) parallel his use of local knowledge in Oliver Twist. The brown cloth of Oliver’s pauper uniform in the novel is the same regulation colour as that in use at the Cleveland Street Workhouse, the meagre dietary and the apprenticeship system for pauper children fits, too. So too does the connection with the ‘branch’ workhouse baby farm in rural Hendon, seven (not seventy) miles away, the mistress of which is named Mann in the novel, but Merriman in reality.
We must not forget, either, the identity of purpose between the Strand Union Guardians and the Poor Law Commissioners. The Italian Boy—the personification of the victim child—was buried in the Workhouse graveyard, while Mr Weller sold shoes opposite Dickens’s home, only a stroll from the ‘Marquis of Granby’ in Percy Street.38 Goodge and Marney worked in nearby Berners Mews. Miss Havisham and Mr Bumble, or someone very like them, passed Dickens’s front door. Signor Billsmethi lived in Mr Dodd’s house, while Mrs Maylie’s namesake was buried in the local churchyard; Corney, Bardell, and Rudderforth were other local names, and the undertaker Sowerberry’s surname looks to have been inspired by that of a local publican. The location of the pawnbroker’s shop in Norfolk Street, visible from both the Workhouse and from Dickens’s old home, sustains the central plot line of the stolen locket. Ultimately, no better confirmation could be wanted than that the shop across from the workhouse gates was run by Bill Sykes.
An anecdote is told of a London stroller in the 1860s, who went into a junk shop in Seven Dials to enquire about a picture he’d noticed, in among the odds and ends in the grimy shop window. After examining it, and agreeing a price of five shillings with the shopwoman, he was surprised by a question from behind:
‘May I look at the drawing?’ said a voice.
‘Certainly,’ returned the purchaser: when to his surprise, he discovered that the request had come from none other than Charles Dickens, who was sitting unobtrusively, notebook in hand, in the corner of the shop. After scanning the watercolour for some moments, he handed it back to the owner, observing:
‘T’ (meaning Turner).
‘Yes,’ replied Mr Roe.
‘I congratulate you,’ said Dickens.39
The shop was a dusty junk shop in a down-at-heel part of London, but in the window there was a Turner, and in a corner inside was Dickens. What an extraordinary stroke of luck for that stroller! No wonder the encounter was told, and told again. The tale is worth looking at, because it reveals something of importance about the way Dickens worked, which may be why the author Gladys Storey repeated it. The Turner for five shillings was the stroller’s gem, while the sight of Dickens is also ours: we can see him as he was not expecting to be seen, in his maturity, notebook in hand, sitting in the dark corner of an obscure junk shop, observing and taking notes.40
To occupy that position, there must presumably have been an arrangement of some kind with the shop woman, who had allowed him to be there: some agreement that he might sit there quietly to observe and listen to whatever might pass.41 He had evidently been there long enough to become part of the furniture, remaining unnoticed until, through his own curiosity, he drew a stray customer’s attention to himself. That dark corner might have been a happy place for Dickens, a celebrity in the 1860s and recognized everywhere.
I feel rather like that lucky stroller in Seven Dials. Entering the street to seek the history of the Workhouse, something caused me to turn and find, to my surprise, Charles Dickens, secreted so very unobtrusively that no one noticed he’d been there all the while, nine doors from the Workhouse gates.
