Charles Dickens and the Cleveland St workhouse

Charles Dickens’s second novel, “Oliver Twist”, is well known for the scenes in which young Oliver is born and brought up in a workhouse. Anyone who has seen the stage or screen version of Lionel Bart’s “Oliver” will recall the moment when Oliver is ejected after he is goaded by the other boys to “ask for more”. We see the boys spending hours “picking oakum” under the oversight of Mr Bumble, the pompous and corrupt beadle, and the cruel and degrading treatment meted out to children whose only crime was to have been born poor.

Dickens was not yet 25 when he started to write Oliver Twist in 1837. He already had a reputation, as “Boz”, for writing sketches of London life, many of them with a satirical or amusing slant, and for his rambling comic novel “The Pickwick Papers”. However, the first parts of Oliver Twist to hit the news-stands (like all his novels, it was published as a part-work) were of a somewhat different nature. The reader was presented with dark scenes of death in childbirth, squalor, poverty and child cruelty. What could have prompted this change in the young novelist? What memories was he perhaps bringing to the fore?

British historian Dr Ruth Richardson has linked the existence of a workhouse on a London street with one of Charles Dickens’s early homes, only nine doors down the same street. It seems inconceivable that the presence of this building so close to his own home could not have had a profound influence on young Charles, especially as he lived in the same house on two separate occasions and for a total of five years.


What was a Workhouse?

The reader might not be aware of the nature of a workhouse. These were institutions that go back several centuries, the original ones being built at least as early as the 17th century. They were a means of providing support to the very poorest members of society, so that parish funds for relief of the poor would be compensated by the provision of something tangible in the form of products made by recipients of the relief.

The workhouse provided somewhere to sleep at night and food to eat, but it was also a “house of correction”, in that extreme poverty was regarded as being, to a greater or lesser extent, the fault of the impoverished person. Workhouses were run with the deliberate intention of not being pleasant places, so that people would do everything they could to avoid being sent to one.

In 1834 the Poor Law Amendment Act changed things by preventing parishes from giving relief except via the workhouse. If you fell on hard times you either went to the workhouse or you starved, whereas under the previous system there was the option for some of “outdoor relief”. The Act ended a number of abuses and cruelties, but it reinforced others and introduced some new ones.

It was these abuses that Dickens sought to expose in the “workhouse” chapters of Oliver Twist. It is however of interest that some of the practices castigated by Dickens, writing after the 1834 Act came into force, belonged to the period before the Act, which was when he was living only a stone’s throw from a very prominent workhouse.

The existence of the Strand Union Workhouse in Cleveland Street has long been known about. It was originally built in 1778 as the workhouse for the parish of St Paul, Covent Garden, and took on the function of a union workhouse (i.e. to serve several neighbouring parishes) in 1836. In later years the building was used as the Outpatients’ Department of the Middlesex Hospital, but is now empty.


Charles Dickens and Cleveland Street

It has also long been known that Charles Dickens spent two periods of his early life at a house in Cleveland Street, firstly as a young child when his family first moved to London from Portsmouth, and later when he was aged between 18 and 20 and was starting his career as a Parliamentary reporter. In all, he spent some five years living in the street. The house is 22 Cleveland Street, although the address in Dickens’s time was 10 Norfolk Street. Cleveland Street runs nearly parallel to, and to the west of, Tottenham Court Road, emerging on to Euston Road close to Regent’s Park.

As is often the case with historical discoveries, it is a matter of putting two and two together. The two facts were known, but not set alongside each other until Dr Richardson did so and appreciated their significance.

The nature of Dickens’s awareness of what went on inside the workhouse is a matter of surmise, but it would be incredible to imagine that he was oblivious to the presence of such a prominent institution so close to his home, or that he did not know what it was for. His own family lived very close to the breadline, and indeed his father was at one time consigned to the Marshalsea debtors’ prison when the family fortunes reached a particularly low ebb. The threat of the workhouse must surely have been at the back of his parents’ minds.

It does not therefore call for too great a leap of imagination to see Dickens’s interest in workhouse life as stemming from his early experience of living so close to a striking example of one. Although the workhouse in Oliver Twist is clearly not in London, the conditions in any one workhouse could be assumed to be similar to those in any other. A workhouse was a fairly generic institution.

© John Welford

Franz Kafka

Franz Kafka is widely regarded as one of the most influential writers of the early 20^th century, not least on major writers such as Samuel Beckett and Albert Camus. The word “Kafkaesque” has been coined to describe a form of distorted, surreal reality that can apply to the workings of government and officialdom. This derives from descriptions of such circumstances in his works.

Franz Kafka was born on 3^rd July 1883 in Prague, which was then in the Bohemian region of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. His parents were German-speaking Jews. He graduated in law, but always wanted to be a writer. However, for most of his working life he was employed as an official in the accident prevention department of the government-sponsored Worker’s Accident Insurance Institution, which gave him plenty of experience of “Kafkaesque” situations.

His personal life was never easy, due largely to his introspection, hypersensitivity, and inability to form meaningful relationships. He never married, although he did find happiness towards the end of his life when he lived in Berlin with a kindergarten teacher named Dora Diamant.

He was diagnosed with tuberculosis in 1917, when aged 34, and this steadily worsened over his remaining few years, meaning that he spent much of his time in various sanatoriums. He died, aged 40, on 3^rd June 1924.

His writings consisted mainly of stories and essays, which were published during his lifetime, but he also wrote three novels, none of which was completed, and which were only published after his death, with translations into English following several years later. 

Among his best known works were the novels “Prozess” (1925, translated in 1937 as “The Trial”) and “Das Schloss” (1926, translated as “The Castle” in 1937). 

In The Trial, a man is prosecuted for a crime, although he is never told what that crime is, and neither is the reader. In The Castle, a man attempts to gain access to whoever it is in the castle who governs the local village. The novel has been described as a modern “Pilgrim’s Progress” in which no progress is made.

Throughout his work, Kafka portrayed society as being a pointless, over-rational world into which bewildered but unshocked individuals can stray and never escape from.

© John Welford

Phillis Wheatley: a slave who became a poet

She was a young girl from West Africa who was bought as a slave in 1761 by the Wheatley family of Boston, who gave her the name Phillis. Nobody knows what her real name was, but as Phillis Wheatley she achieved fame as the first African American to become a published author.

Northern slaves were usually household servants and ladies’ maids, and Phillis clearly became a favourite with the Wheatleys, whose daughter Mary taught her to read and write. Phillis showed a liking for poetry and the family actively encouraged her interest.

The Wheatleys’ enlightened attitude was rewarded when Phillis began to write poetry that was clearly of a high standard. The result was a volume of verse entitled “Poems on Various Subjects, Religious and Moral”. Despite the backing of the Wheatleys, no Boston publisher would touch the work of a slave girl, so the book had to be published in London. This happened in 1773, following a visit to London during which Phillis met a number of prominent people.

The publication was a sensation, although there were a few doubters who questioned whether it was possible for a female negro slave to also be a poet. The book was to go through eleven editions before 1816, although Phillis did not gain much benefit from her new-found fame.

Soon after the book was published the Wheatleys gave Phillis her freedom. Phillis married a grocer, who was also a freed slave, but their life as a couple was not easy and they were far from well-to-do. Losing two babies was also a huge blow for her.

Phillis wanted to publish more poems, but this was extremely difficult, especially after the senior Wheatleys had died and Phillis could not afford the publication costs on her own. As a result there was no second volume although a few new poems did appear in various journals.

Phillis was forced to work as a scullery maid, and thus had to do work as a free woman that was much more physically demanding than what she had had to do as a slave.

Phillis Wheatley died in 1784, aged 31.

 © John Welford

Henry Fielding: novelist and magistrate

Henry Fielding (1707-54) is renowned as a pioneer of the English novel, particularly due to his best-known work “Tom Jones”. He was also a reforming London magistrate.

Henry Fielding was born on 22^nd April 1707 at Sharpham Park in Somerset, this being the estate of his maternal grandfather. His father was an army general. His mother died when he was aged only 11.

He was educated at Eton, where he was not particularly well-behaved but came away with an excellent knowledge of Latin and Greek. 

When aged 19 he attempted to run away with an heiress, and during the years before he eventually married (when aged 27) his life could be described as “rakish”, mixing with various dubious characters and thoroughly enjoying himself. His fortunes varied between poverty and good living, the latter funded by the writing of popular plays of a generally satirical nature – around 20 in total - and the patronage of a wealthy distant cousin.

His marriage was a happy one, spent mainly on a small country estate in north Dorset, although the Licensing Act of 1737, which introduced much stricter censorship of what could be performed in theatres, led to Fielding having to seek a new way of maintaining his lifestyle. He therefore sold his estate and began to study for a career in the law. He accomplished this aim in three years whereas it normally took twice that long.

He became a barrister in 1740 and began to practice the law, although his health started to give him problems and his career did not last long.

He therefore turned to writing prose fiction, the result of which was “The Adventures of Joseph Andrews”, published in 1742. Fielding had been annoyed by “Pamela” a prose work published in 1740 by Samuel Richardson that had proved to be highly popular but which Fielding considered to be pretentious and over-sentimental. He first wrote an anonymous satire entitled “Shamela”, but followed this with the more extensive “Joseph Andrews”, which purported to be the adventures of Pamela’s brother.

“Joseph Andrews” can be regarded as the first comic novel in English. The author acknowledged on the title page his debt to Cervantes and “Don Quixote” for the loose plot structure, but his use of comic situations and presentation of well-rounded characters such as Parson Adams was entirely original to him. It is easy to see how Charles Dickens in turn made use of Fielding’s example when writing his “Pickwick Papers”.

Tragedy struck in 1743 when Henry Fielding’s wife Charlotte died and he became seriously depressed. He was helped through this time by Mary Daniel who had been the family’s maid but became a firm friend. They were married in 1747. 

In 1748 Henry Fielding was appointed Justice of the Peace for Westminster, which served to broaden his already extensive knowledge of the London underworld of criminals and ne’er-do-wells. This experience provided much material for his greatest prose work, “The History of Tom Jones”, published in 1749.

At the heart of the story is the interplay of the three main characters – exuberant and sensuous Tom, cold and heartless Blifil, and the object of desire for both of them, Sophia. There are several other memorable characters including Squire Western, Mr Allworthy and Harriet Fitzpatrick.

Fielding’s gift was to base his characters on aspects of real people that he had come across in his travels and work as a magistrate, and also to create situations that interest the reader and make him/her want to continue turning the pages. There is a certain amount of coarseness in the book, and plain descriptions of sexual encounters, but none of this was at all false to contemporary society in Fielding’s time. 

Dr Samuel Johnson was highly critical of “Tom Jones”, much preferring Henry Fielding’s third and final novel, “Amelia” (1751), although this is rarely read today. This is a domestic novel, set around the marriage of Amelia and Captain Booth, which is generally regarded as a pen-portrait of Fielding’s own blissful love affairs. 

Most people today would regard the depictions of squalor in Newgate Jail, a pawnshop in Monmouth Street and a bailiff’s lock-up in Gray’s Inn Road as being of much greater interest.

The book was a huge success, with Fielding being paid a thousand guineas for the copyright and a second edition being called for on the first day of publication. 

Fielding was a magistrate for only five years, but he made a considerable contribution during that time to improving the lot of his fellow Londoners. For one thing, he set an example in his own court by refusing to take the customary cut from fines imposed on people found guilty of minor offences, which tended to lead to innocent people being convicted in error. 

He wrote a pamphlet that pointed to connections between crime, poverty and the consumption of cheap gin. This inspired his friend William Hogarth to produce his series of prints on “Gin Lane and Beer Alley”, with the net result being an Act of Parliament that restricted the sale of spirits.

Another pamphlet by Henry Fielding sought to tackle the causes of crime by proposing that hostels, workshops and infirmaries should be established to help alleviate overcrowding and unemployment. However, these suggestions were never acted upon.

In 1753 the Prime Minister, Henry Pelham, asked Henry Fielding to suggest a plan for breaking up robber gangs that were then terrorizing London. Fielding was not at well at the time, but he delayed a visit to Bath, designed as a health cure, to undertake the work, which had an entirely successful outcome. With winter approaching he decided to go to Portugal instead of Bath, but did not live long enough to return.

However, his final piece of literary work was his “Journal of a Voyage to Lisbon” that he wrote when on board ship. This piece is notable for its humour and freshness as he notes the idiosyncrasies of the ship’s crew and fellow passengers and bemoans the incompetence of bureaucrats and the insolence of Customs officers.

Henry Fielding died in Lisbon on 8^th October 1754, at the age of 47.

© John Welford

D H Lawrence: method and sources

David Herbert Lawrence (almost universally referred to as D H Lawrence) was one of the foremost novelists in English during the early 20^th century. He was also a noted poet, short-story writer and critic.

D H Lawrence was born on 11^th September 1885 at Eastwood, Nottinghamshire, the son of a miner. He won a scholarship to Nottingham High School and, after a spell as a pupil teacher, qualified as a teacher after studying at University College, Nottingham. 

He began writing poems and stories in his late teens and achieved recognition for this work by winning a short-story competition at the age of 22. After that he turned to writing virtually full-time, eventually producing ten novels as well as stories, poems, plays, essays and travel books.

Only four of Lawrence’s novels were written in England, other locations being Italy, Australia and the American state of New Mexico.

Lawrence’s restlessness was largely due to his love affair with (and eventual marriage to) Frieda von Richthofen, the German-born wife of a former tutor of his at Nottingham. During World War I they suffered a great deal of harassment due to her nationality, leading to suspicions that the pair were German spies. They found it easier to travel than to stay in England. Lawrence’s wanderings influenced several of his novels.

Despite the pressures, Lawrence produced some of his best work during and shortly after World War I, such as The Rainbow (published in 1915) and Women in Love (published in 1920). He found an escape in writing, in which he would immerse himself totally, sometimes writing for several hours at a time with only the shortest of breaks. Lawrence wrote at high speed in longhand, often rewriting complete sections.

The two novels mentioned above were originally conceived of as a single novel, although it ran to more than a thousand pages and needed a lot of revision. He tended to rewrite rather than revise, and several rewritings were needed before the novels reached their final versions. 

A thriving literary industry has arisen based on trying to associate the author with the characters and incidents in his books. This is because they are usually closely based on his own acquaintances and experiences.

However, although he undoubtedly used autobiographical experience as his main source, what he did in most cases was to transform it to fit his own imaginative purposes. This could lead to people who identified themselves as “originals” taking exception to the ways that they saw themselves being portrayed in the novels.

Certain character types recur throughout Lawrence’s novels, notably the possessive mother, the “spiritual” woman who will not acknowledge the sexual imperatives of her body, and the woman who is creative and fulfilling. These archetypes can be related with some confidence, respectively, to his own mother, his first love Jesse Chambers, and his wife Frieda.

D H Lawrence had a tempestuous life. This is reflected in his novels, which are often hard to read because of the high emotional intensity expressed by his characters, particularly the female ones.

His topsy-turvy life began with witnessing frequent arguments between his parents and an intense emotional attachment to his mother. His escape was to elope with a married woman, as well as turning to a literary career that he used to express his emotional turmoil through the words and deeds of his characters.

He was also passionate about his working-class background, and his first successful novel, Sons and Lovers (1913), contains one of the most acute analyses of a working-class environment to be found anywhere in literature.

In later life he faced many conflicts with authority over alleged obscenities in his works, for which exile from England was his preferred solution.

D H Lawrence died in 1930 at the age of 44. His final novel, Lady Chatterley’s Lover, which was his most sexually explicit, was not published in the UK until 1960, following a celebrated court case that was eventually won by Penguin Books, who had been charged with breaking the obscenity laws by publishing an unexpurgated edition. This novel is nowhere near being Lawrence’s best. Unfortunately, it is probably his best known!

© John Welford

A Tower of Strength

It is a familiar enough phrase, but what does it really mean and where does it come from?

To answer the second question first - it’s one of many expressions first coined by William Shakespeare. It comes from Act 5 Scene 3 of King Richard III. Richard is preparing to do battle against Henry Tudor at Bosworth and is considering the relative strength of the opposing forces. He is told that Henry’s army amounts to “six or seven thousand” and he replies:


“Why our battalia trebles that account!
Besides, the King’s name is a tower of strength,
Which they upon the adverse faction want.”


In other words, men who fight for the rightful king will be stronger in battle than those who do not – an interesting and somewhat flawed concept, one might imagine.

Shakespeare’s source for the expression might well be the Old Testament, namely Proverbs 18, verse 10:

“The name of the Lord is a strong tower: the righteous runneth into it, and is safe.”

We know that Shakespeare – writing during the reign of Tudor Queen Elizabeth I – was convinced that Richard III was a villain who deserved everything he got. It is therefore entirely possible that when he made Richard misquote the Book of Proverbs he was implying that Richard was committing a form of blasphemy – the “name of the Lord” has become “the King’s name”. One wonders how many members of his audience at The Globe Theatre would have picked this up?

The misquotation from “a strong tower” to “a tower of strength” might imply that Richard was using empty words. The image of people running into a strongly built tower for protection is clear enough, but the literal meaning of “a tower built from strength” does not make a lot of sense.

On the other hand, Shakespeare might simply have used those words for the purpose of scansion in a poetic line and considered that “a strong tower” is what Richard was implying.

Even so, it is quite a leap from the notion of people relying on the name of God as a protection from evil to soldiers gaining strength in battle because they know that they are fighting for a King.

© John Welford

The Queer Feet: a short story by G K Chesterton

“The Queer Feet” is the third story in the first book of Father Brown stories by G K Chesterton (1874-1936), entitled “The Innocence of Father Brown” (published in 1911). It revolves around a clever piece of deduction by Chesterton’s priest/detective, but it depends on a highly contrived situation and a statement about human behaviour that, if it applied in 1911, certainly does not do so today.

The situation is the annual dinner of an exclusive men’s club called The Twelve True Fishermen. Their dinner is at the equally exclusive, not to say bizarre, Vernon Hotel in London’s Belgravia. The restaurant only has one table, at which 24 people can sit, but if there only 12 diners, as on this occasion, they can sit in a row and have a view of the hotel garden. The restaurant employs fifteen waiters, who therefore outnumber the guests.

Another fact that is essential to the story is that The Twelve True Fishermen are most interested in the fish course of their dinner, and for this purpose they supply their own cutlery of ornate silver knives and forks, shaped like fish, each with a large pearl in the handle.

On the day of the dinner a crisis occurs when one of the fifteen waiters suffers a severe stroke and is taken to a room upstairs. As the waiter is a Catholic he asks for a priest to hear his last confession, which is why Father Brown is on the premises. The waiter has asked Father Brown to write out a long document, the nature of which is not fully explained by Chesterton. The hotel manager agrees that Father Brown can do this work in a room that is next to a passageway that leads from the waiters’ quarters to the terrace where the guests are mingling and is next to the dining table. This room has no direct access to the passageway but is linked to the hotel’s cloakroom.

While he is working in this room, Father Brown is aware of the sound of footsteps in the passageway. He deduces that they are all made by the same feet, because of the slight creak of one of the shoes, but they keep switching from a fast walking pace, almost on tiptoe, to a steady heavy pace. This keeps on happening until there is a complete pause, followed eventually by a running pace made by the same feet.

Father Brown then goes through into the cloakroom, just in time for a man to come up and ask for his coat from the person he assumes to be the cloakroom attendant. Father Brown then demands that the man hand over the knives and forks that he has stolen. 

The story is then told from the perspective of the diners and waiters. Two courses of the dinner take place, followed by the fish course, after which a waiter collects the plates and the cutlery. A second waiter then arrives and is horrified to discover that the table has already been cleared. It then becomes apparent that the special knives and forks, with their pearls, are nowhere to be found. Father Brown then appears with the stolen items and explains how he was able to reclaim them.

The story revolves around the footsteps heard in the passageway. Father Brown has deduced that the rapid walk is typical of that of a waiter on duty as he dashes about taking orders and serving dishes, however the solid walk matches that of an aristocratic gentleman. Clearly this is one man pretending to be two.

The guests and the waiters are dressed almost identically, so it would not be difficult for a guest to assume that a strange face belonged to a waiter and for a waiter to assume that he was a guest. The only difficult moment for the thief would have been when the waiters lined up before the meal and might have been discovered, by his fellow waiters, to be out of place. However, he was able to avoid this problem by standing just round a corner.

It is a clever idea, but does it really stand up to examination? As with most of Chesterton’s stories there are weak points that are not properly explained.

For one thing, the reader is not told how Father Brown knows about the special cutlery. He has been called into the hotel to deal with an emergency, is sequestered in a locked room, and has no reason to know anything about the arrangements on hand for the dinner. However, he is able to demand that the thief hands over the silverware.

Another difficulty is that the thief does know about the silverware and how the dinner is organised. This is an exclusive club which guards its secrets, but there is no clue given as to why the thief would have known about the dinner, the special cutlery, or the vacancy caused by a waiter’s sudden illness.

It also seems odd that, with a complement of fifteen waiters, only one would clear the table of all twelve plates and 24 pieces of cutlery. Surely, with more waiters than diners, the most efficient procedure would have been for each diner to have their own waiter who would deal with them exclusively? However, the plot of the story would have fallen apart if this had happened.

If there is a passageway along which waiters and guests might be expected to walk, why does only one waiter/guest do so? There is no indication that Father Brown picks out the distinctive steps from among many others, but that they are the only ones to be heard. This is surely highly unlikely, as is the idea that any guest would feel the need to visit the waiters in their quarters, which is assumed here. 

As mentioned above, this story is just too contrived to be really successful. There are too many features that seem improbable and put in place just to make the plot work. The story also fails to work for the modern reader who would find it extraordinary that waiters walk in a distinctively different way from diners. Perhaps they did more than a century ago, but today?

© John Welford