The World of Oliver Twist

Dickens wrote Oliver Twist (1837–9) while living at 48 Doughty Street in Bloomsbury in 1837, now home to his blue plaque and the Dickens Museum. But the inspiration for the setting of the novel may have come while he was living at 10 Norfolk Street (now 22 Cleveland Street) in Fitzrovia. He first lived there as a child before the family moved to Kent, but returned with the family as a teenager in 1829. During both periods he would have been aware of the operations of the Cleveland Street Workhouse, just a few doors down the road.

Workhouses offered lodging and basic food in exchange for labour, but conditions in them worsened following the introduction of the Poor Law Amendment (known as the New Poor Law) in 1834. The Act abolished ‘outdoor relief’, forcing people to go the workhouse to seek help, but the regimes were so harsh that only the most desperate would admit themselves. The workhouses became like prisons – inmates had to wear uniforms and children were separated from their parents.

Dickens wrote Oliver Twist partly in protest at these conditions. The severe punishments handed out to Oliver for asking ‘Please Sir, may I have some more?’ weren't just the product of Dickens’s imagination – the system seemed designed to punish rather than nourish the poor. Even one of the novel’s characters had grounding in reality – the tallow-chandler’s shop opposite Cleveland Street Workhouse was owned by a man called Bill Sikes. The real Sikes may not have been a murderer like the one in Oliver Twist, but the memory of Cleveland Street Workhouse was clearly fresh in his mind while he was writing the novel just a few streets away at Doughty Street.

Chaplin and the Workhouse

In 1896 some 60 years after Dickens wrote Oliver Twist, 7-year-old Charlie Chaplin was admitted to Newington workhouse with his mother and brother. The children were separated from their mother, given uniforms and had their hair cut short. After three weeks Charlie and Sydney were transferred to the Central London District School at Hanwell in rural Ealing. The school was a version of the workhouse, intended solely for destitute children. 

It was a formative period for young Charlie. He recalled being taught to write his name ‘Chaplin’ (‘The word fascinated me and looked like me, I thought’), but he also remembered the stigma of poverty:

Although at Hanwell we were well looked after, it was a sad existence. Sadness was in the air; it was in those country lanes which we walked, a hundred of us two abreast...the locals staring at us! We were known as inmates of the ‘booby hatch’, a slang term for workhouse.

During this time Charlie and Sydney were briefly reunited with their mother. Desperate to see her sons, Hannah Chaplin discharged herself from the workhouse and spent a day with them in Kennington. They played in Kennington Park and visited a coffee shop but, with few other options, they all returned to the workhouse at the end of the day. 

Sydney was eventually sent to the naval training ship Exmouth but Charlie – still too young – was dragged between Hanwell school, his mother, the workhouse and his alcoholic father.

It’s little wonder that when the brothers finally secured their own accommodation at 15 Glenshaw Mansions, they grew extraordinarily fond of it. Now marked by a blue plaque, Charlie called the flat his ‘cherished haven’.