Introduction

OL I VER T W IST A N D THE WOR K HOUSE

Frankenstein, in that every-

O
LIVER TWIST RESEMBLES

one 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 echo-
ing 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.

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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 Cleve-
land Street, just by the foot of London’s Telecom Tower. They had
found an article that I’d written years ago, which concerned a doc-
tor 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 elev-
enth 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 geographi-
cal association between a surviving workhouse and the creator of
Oliver Twist was a most extraordinary and unexpected surprise.

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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 count-
less 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 unex-
plained 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 Dick-
ens’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 Cleve-
land 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

* To avoid confusion, in this book a lower-case ‘w’ is used for the

nineteenth-century workhouse as an institution and as a system,
and also for Poor Law workhouses in general. The Cleveland
Street Workhouse near Dickens’s home, and shortened references
to it, have a capital initial letter.

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status, and while we were running what rapidly became a world-

wide and—happily—eventually, a successful campaign to save this
extraordinary place.