OLIVER TWIST RESEMBLES Frankenstein, in that everyone knows the gist of his story. Oliver is the poor boy who asks for more, who sings ‘Food, glorious Food!’ and who is taught to pick pockets in Victorian London. Most people know him from the original book by Charles Dickens, or from the spectacular opening scene of the twentieth-century musical, where the chorus of neglected boys belt out their lust for food in the echoing workhouse hall.
Readers and scholars have puzzled over the whereabouts of the original workhouse which inspired Dickens, and why he chose such a grim setting for this major early novel. The location of the workhouse at the centre of Oliver’s story is extremely vague, but an intriguing recent discovery has thrown fresh light on Dickens’s preoccupation with the bleak workhouse at the heart of the book.
FIGURE 1. The defunct Middlesex Hospital Outpatients’ Department—the old Strand Union Workhouse—boarded up to keep out vandals and squatters. Photographed in 2011 from Foley Street, by the artist Gerhard Lang.
In October 2010 I was asked by a group of local people to join their campaign to save an old workhouse, which stands on Cleveland Street, just by the foot of London’s Telecom Tower. They had found an article that I’d written years ago, which concerned a doctor who had worked there in the nineteenth century. I hadn’t known the building was under threat, and agreed to help.
By what now seems a rather circuitous journey, and at the eleventh hour, I made the remarkable finding that before he wrote Oliver Twist, Charles Dickens had lived for several years only a few doors from this particular workhouse. To discover such a close geographical association between a surviving workhouse and the creator of Oliver Twist was a most extraordinary and unexpected surprise. Remarkably, too, the actual house in which Dickens and his family had lived still stands on the next block.
You’d think that nearly 150 years after his death, and after countless biographies and articles, there was nothing more to be known about Charles Dickens. But it turns out that fresh discoveries about him can indeed still be made.1 This book shares the story of what has been unearthed about Charles Dickens’s associations with the neighbourhood of the Cleveland Street Workhouse. We look first at how little is known about Dickens’s London childhood, at the unexplained silences about his family’s association with the street, and how the discovery was made.
By carefully examining the area and what its history holds, it is hoped to reinhabit Norfolk Street, shedding new light on Dickens’s early life and his development as a novelist. The book weaves together the story of the street, the house, and the Cleveland Street Workhouse as we follow Dickens’s life from his family’s arrival in London in 1815, to the publication of Oliver Twist in 1838.
Much of the research for this book was done while the Cleveland Street Workhouse* was under threat of demolition, and while the local campaign group was mounting an appeal to the British government for a reconsideration of the building’s listed-building status, and while we were running what rapidly became a worldwide and—happily—eventually, a successful campaign to save this extraordinary place.
