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.

Introduction. 1. Discovery: threat, silences, discovery, Dickens' first London home. 2. Vicinity: environs of gentility, Norfolk-street, medical charity, environs of poverty. 3. Home: house, landlord, inside, views: upstairs/downstairs. 4. Street: looking down, and around. 5. Calamity: gap years, catastrophe, blacking factory, Marshalsea, Somers Town, schooling. 6. Young Dickens: Return to Norfolk Street: clerk, young professional, Parliament, first essays. 7. Workhouse: government/management. 8. Works: family moves, Sketches by Boz, Oliver Twist, Marylebone borders, human heaps. 9. Poor Law: visitor, doctor, master, commission, change. 10. The Most Famous Workhouse in the World. Notes. Index.

Ruth Richardson is a historian and the author of a number of books. The Wall Street Journal described her last book, The Making of Mr. Gray's Anatomy (Oxford University Press) as 'one of those rarities, history that reads like a novel'. That book won the 2009 Medical Journalists' Open Book Award.

The important discoveries in this surprising book come from an intimate knowledge of Dickens and London, coupled with a historian's passion. We're seized by the hand of a detective and walked into Dickens's world. Unputdownable.