Welcome to the London History Podcast.
I am Hazel Baker, tour guide and CEO of London guidedwalks.co.uk.
Today we are looking into the life of one of Britain's most
famous orphans, a figure whose story begins in hardship yet
goes on to shape literature, imagination and even how we
think about childhood itself. Orphans have a long captured
public sympathy and creative fascination, embodying both
vulnerability and resilience. But the orphan at the heart of
today's story is more than a character on a page or a tragic
tale from the past. So join me as we step back into
the world that shaped him, the work houses, the streets of
London and the changing attitudes towards poverty,
charity and social responsibility.
This is not just the tale of an orphan, but how one boy came to
symbolise hope, survival and the fight for dignity in the most
difficult of circumstances. First appearing in print in
1837, Oliver Twist is no fairy tale foundling.
He is a child of the workhouse, born into poverty and forced to
navigate a city of crime, cruelty and corruption.
His story shocked Victorian readers because he didn't flinch
from exposing the brutal realities of child poverty,
hunger and exploitation, issues that many preferred not to see.
Out of sight, out of mind, right?
But Oliver Twist is more than just a character.
He became a symbol for Dickens. Oliver was the innocent, at the
mercy of a system that failed him at every single turn.
For readers, he was both a mirror and a moral test.
Would they, too, want some more? In this episode, we will trace
Oliver's world from the workhouse to the London
rookeries, and explore how Dickens's most enduring orphan
helped to shape not only the novel itself, but public debate
about the city and the society that created him.
Charles Dickens published Oliver Twist in monthly instalments
from 1837 to 1839, just as London was hatzling into the
Victorian age. What makes a novel so enduring
is not simply Oliver's plight, but the way the city itself
looms over the story. London isn't merely A backdrop,
it is a character in its own right.
Suffocating, dangerous and yet strangely full of possibility,
many of the novel's most memorable episodes are tied to
recognisable districts of the capital.
Dickens blended real geography with fictional invention,
producing a cityscape that felt familiar to contemporary readers
and compellingly atmospheric. He often walked the streets
himself at night, making mental notes of alleys, courts and
slums that resurfaced in his fiction.
Take, for example, Oliver's arrival in London after fleeing
the workhouse and then his apprenticeship with the
Undertaker. Exhausted, starving and
bewildered, he trudges along the Great North Road and finally
ends in Barnet. This is where he meets a boy, a
little shorter than him, a little scruffier than him, but
suddenly with a twinkle in his eye.
That boy is the Artful Dodger, and he offers Oliver an
introduction to a gentleman who can provide him with food,
lodgings and not want any rent. Too good to be true?
Of course it is. But Oliver Twist, with little
alternative, follows the Artful Dodger into the bowels of
London. And that's exactly what we do on
my Oliver Twist walking tour. We start at Angel and work our
way into London itself, looking at what Oliver and the Artful
Dodger, had they been real, what they would have experienced
walking those streets and following the words of Dickens
from Chapter 8, Dickens's readers would have instantly
recognised London, the setting where one was a vulnerable child
and could easily fall into danger.
And danger could come in different shapes and sizes.
Artful Dodger, who leads him to Fagin's den.
While Dickens never exactly pins down the address, scholars often
place the gang's lair in the labyrinth of narrow lanes around
Saffron Hill. Now, in the 1830s, this district
was described as the most notorious Rookery in London.
Dickens's readers would have instantly recognised the setting
as one of where a vulnerable child might easily fall into
danger. And of course, danger comes in
all different shapes and sizes. It is the Artful Dodger who
leads him to Fagin's Den. While Dickens never pins down
the exact dress, scholars often find the gang's lair in the
labyrinth of narrow lanes in and around Saffron Hill.
In the 1830's, the district was described as the most notorious
Rookery in London, home to dilapidated houses crammed with
families, pickpockets and St. traders.
Henry Mayhew later wrote about the stench, noise and crowding
were almost beyond belief. It was a world where the
boundary between survival and criminality was perilously thin.
We do cover this and some of the exploitation of children in
episode 134, Organ Grinders of Little Italy, which is the same
area. And then there's Jacobs Island
in Bermondsey, the setting of the novel's violent climax.
And Dickens paints it as the filthiest, the strangest, the
most extraordinary of the many localities that are hidden in
London. In reality, Jacobs Island was a
network of tidal ditches off the Thames, lined with decaying work
houses and shanty like dwellings.
Visitors in the 1830s recorded children playing in waters black
as ink and open sewers running beneath broken floorboards.
It was the perfect place to stage Bill Sykes's desperate
last stand, a physical manifestation of the moral
corruption Dickens wished to expose.
As the wheels of the Industrial Revolution turned, London's
streets throbbed with ambition and invention.
By the 1830's, the city was being remade almost overnight.
Smokestacks rose above rooftops, smokestacks rose above rooftops,
railway lines slashed through farmland and the air filled with
the sounds of steam engines, printing presses and the
relentless clamour of mass production.
Houston station opened its great iron gates in 1837, one of the
first of London's monumental railway, Terrani, and it brought
with it not only the Thunder of locomotives but an entire new
rhythm of life, clouds of coal smoke, the shuffle of passengers
and the constant vibration of progress.
A reporter for the Morning Chronicle marvelled that the
railway brought the far provinces to London's door, and
no St. was spared the dust and excitement.
For families in rural villages, the lure of London was
irresistible. They arrived from Kent, Devon,
Yorkshire, sometimes with little more than the clothes they wore,
dreaming of steady wages in the city's docks, factories or
workshops. Yet for many, hope quickly
soured. Opportunity was scarce, wages
were low and living conditions were harsh.
The city's rapid growth came at a steep cost.
Slums known as rookeries spread like a stain.
Places such as Saffron Hills, Southern Dials and St.
Giles became synonymous with overcrowding, vice and squalor.
Reforming investigator Edwin Chadwick described conditions in
1842 in London's courts and alleys.
The atmosphere is dense with the perfumes of future fraction.
Sanitation lagged far behind the sitting's swelling population.
Open drains ran along the streets.
Cesspools overflowed into courtyards.
The Thames itself, once celebrated as a royal river, was
reduced to a dumping ground for refuse as the times thundered in
1839. The state of the Thames is an
abomination. It is the great open sewer of
the metropolis. Disease was never far behind.
Cholera struck with devastating force in 1832 and would return
repeatedly in the decades that followed.
Typhus and tuberculosis became everyday killers in London's
poorest parishes. Life expectancy collapsed to
under 35 years. And yet, just a mile or two
away, the contrast was astonishing.
The West End glittered with grand townhouses in Mayfair and
Belgravia, lit by gas lamps and attended by servants.
Families here enjoyed clean water, regular laundering and
manicured squares. As the chronicler Henry Mayhew
would later remark, London is 2 cities, 1 rich, 1 poor, one
thriving, the other rotting. This deep divide provided the
backdrop to Dickens's fiction. When readers encountered Oliver
wandering the city, they recognised the real geography,
the Rookery in the townhouse, the gin shop and the gentleman's
club. But the inequality of London in
Dickens Day was not just social, it was legislated.
In 1834, Parliament passed the Poor Law Amendment Act, a
measure hailed by Summers reform and denounced by others as
cruelty. Its chief architect, Lord
Althorpe, insisted we must make the condition of the pauper less
eligible than that of the independent labourer.
Gone was the patchwork system of local charity, and in its place
London was divided into unions, each governed by a board of
guardians. The centrepiece of the ACT was
the workhouse, designed not to help but to deter.
As Edwin Chadwick explains, the workhouse test would become a
deterrent, not a support. The pauper must pass a trial,
not receive soccer. Inside these institutions,
labour was monotonous and exhausting.
Stone breaking, oakum picking, endsless cleaning.
Meals were scamped bread, thin gruel and little else.
For many, the system stripped away dignity along with
sustenance. Outdoor relief, where families
could receive aid while remaining in their homes, was
virtually abolished. Poverty had become a moral
failing to be punished with discipline and hunger.
Critics raged against it. The historian Thomas Carlyle
thundered. What is the use of a system
which stars virtue and rewards vice with insults and brickbats?
This was the London of Oliver Twist, a city of invention and
dislocation, of wealth and privatisation.
It was in these divided communities, amid roaring
factories, glittering boulevards and festering slums, that
Dickens set his tale, forcing people to confront the urgent
truths of their own time. Childhood in 19th century London
was rarely the protected stage of life we imagine today.
For the majority, it was a time of hardship, work and survival,
the social investigator Henry Mayhew once reported of the
climbing boys, the sweeps, the match sellers.
I counted a score in one hour, all under the age of 13.
Children were everywhere on the streets of the capital, working
up to 14 hours a day. They swept crossings, sold
matches, carried water, all tiled in grim factories, chimney
sweeps, often no older than 8 or 9, they were prized for their
small size and their ability to wriggle through narrow flus
coated with soot. Many suffered burns, suffocation
or the slow disease known as sootwort.
Orphaned or abandoned children had even fewer choices.
The city's crowded alleys provided little protection, and
they became easy prey for exploitation, whether as cheap
labour, petty thieves or beggars under the control of
unscrupulous adults. Dickens's portrayal of Oliver
under Fagin's tutelage was not mere invention.
It reflected the very real networks of child crime that
authorities struggled to contain.
Education was scarce. A handful of Sunday schools and
ragged schools fought to teach basic literacy, often relying on
charitable donations and volunteer teachers.
For most poor children, though, the only institution open to
them was the workhouse, once a refuge, a prison and a place of
punishment. In 1837, pamphlet issued The
Borders of Guardians captured the unease of the time.
Are we breeding a generation for the Treadwell and the gallows,
or for the shop and the parish? And so where we picture Oliver
Twist wandering the streets of London, we must also picture the
children who inspired him. Barefoot boys Hawking matches at
St. Corners, girls carrying baskets
through the rain, chimney sweeps coughing such into
handkerchiefs. Hope and despair mingled in
every alley. Charles Dickens, a writer whose
own life in 1837 was as dramatic and layered as any of his
novels. At just 25 years old, Dickens
was already a household name. The Pickwick Papers had been his
first great success, and he'd taken Britain by storm.
His domestic life seemed happy, at least at first.
In 1836, he had married Catherine Hogarth, daughter of a
respected critic. By January 1837, their first
child, Charles Junior, had been born.
Dickens wrote with evident pride.
My domestic happiness is complete.
My little boy is already the delight of our house.
But joy was swiftly overshadowed by tragedy.
In May that same year, Catherine's younger sister Mary
Hogarth, only 17 years old, died suddenly while living with a
couple. Dickens was devastated in his
general, he confessed. The loss has so unsettled me, I
find it hard to work or concentrate upon my labours.
Many scholars believe Mary's death left a lasting mark on his
imagination, shaping the figures of innocence and suffering in
his fiction. Characters such as Rose Maylie
in Oliver Twist beneath this public and private turbulence,
laying the deep scars of Dickens's childhood.
At 12 he was forced into Warren's blacking factory near
Hungerford Stairs, pasting labels for hours in grim, rat
infested rooms. His father, John Dickens was in
present for death at the Marshall Sea, leaving young
Charles effectively abandoned and responsible for his family's
upkeep. He never recovered from the
humiliation. Years later he confessed.
No words can express the secret agony of my soul.
I suffered far too much to ever forget it.
That experience runs like a dark current through Oliver Twist,
the cruelty of workhouses, the vulnerability of children and
the city as both oppressor and the saviour.
Dickens's own life that year moved in step with Oliver's
journey, a restless search for meaning, a confrontation with
suffering, and an unrelenting belief that stories could awaken
a nation's conscience. Our first location today is in
Cleveland St. just off Tottenham Court Road, where the Strand
Union Workhouse 1 stood. At first glance, its brick walls
and plain facade might not have looked especially remarkable,
but inside it was a place that seared itself into the
imaginations of all who walked through its gates.
For Charles Dickens, who lived nearby as a boy, the workhouse
was not an abstract institution. It was part of the landscape of
his own life, one of the grim realities that shaped both his
outlook and his fiction. In Oliver Twist, Dickens
describes A workhouse, a large stone building with a high paved
yard in front and a grimstone step at the door, as cold and
heartless as the faces within. And of course, it was within
those walls that young Oliver dared to utter the most famous
plea in Victorian literature. Please, Sir, I want some more
in. That simple request, so shocking
to Dickens's readers, was not a fantasy.
It reflected the lived truth of thousands of children for whom
hunger was constant and compassion rare.
The workhouse system, formalised by the Poor Law Amendment Act of
1834, was designed to make relief for the poor.
Deliberately harsh conditions were made as grim as possible in
order to deter what the authorities called idleness.
Families who crossed the threshold of Cleveland St. were
torn apart, husbands separated from wives, mothers from their
children. For those inside, the workhouse
was not charity, it was punishment, and Dickens himself
once confessed in a letter. I've always felt weariness of
spirit at the site of that prison house for want and
misfortune. And prison house is exactly the
right word. Workhouses were locked
institutions. Inmates lived under strict
routines, ate food that was often inadequate or barely
edible, and endured surveillance from masters that could be
indifferent or, worse, cruel. The strange Union Workhouse was
particularly notorious in the 1830s and 1840s, Official
reports show overcrowding was chronic.
Sometimes 400 inmates crammed within its walls.
The diet was monotonous gruel, bread and the occasional scrap
of meat. Children were put to work, often
in menial tasks, with little or no education.
The Dickens who, at the age of 12, had been forced into child
labour at Warren's blacking factory while his family
languished in Marshall C prison. These were not abstractions.
They were the echoes of his own childhood suffering.
And that is what makes Oliver's world so haunting.
The workhouse in Oliver Twist is not just a backdrop, it is
Dickens's own indictment of a system that dehumanised the
vulnerable. When Oliver dares to ask for
more food, it's not just a child asking for nourishment.
It is Dickens himself crying out to a society that punished
poverty instead of alleviating it.
Contemporary commentators painted the same picture a Poor
Law inspector noted in 1836. The workhouse is not a refuge
for the poor, but a warning to them, and the Times thundered
against the system in its editorials, pointing out the
cruelty of separating children from their parents, condemning
it as an assault upon the very fabric of family life.
To walk past Cleveland St. in Dickens, time was to see these
realities up close. Imagine for a moment young
Dickens as a boy walking past the gates of the workhouse.
Behind those walls were children just like him.
They were enduring cold and hunger and loss.
This sight never left him and decades later it surfaced in the
pages of Oliver Twist. Today the workhouse is long gone
but some of the building remains and is now 2 townhouses and 13
apartments with a starting price of £1,025,000.
Cleveland St. symbolises something larger than bricks and
mortar. It represents the Victorian
belief that poverty was a personal failing to be corrected
with discipline rather than compassion.
Dickens never forgot that cruelty and through his writing
he ensured that we would not either.
Next, let me take you by the hand as we slip into the shadowy
labyrinth of Saffron Hill and Fields Lane, a Rookery alive
with a pulse of Victorian London's underbelly.
The air here is thick, the daylight barely squeezing
between leaning tenements, and every cobblestone seems to
murmur tales of hardship and cunning.
Picture it. You turn a corner of bustling
Holborn and step into a squalid St. full of filth and misery,
the haunt of the lowest and most debased of London's population.
As Dickens himself wrote. The noises change, shouts,
whispers, laughter tumbling from gin shops, the clatter of boot
black boys dashing for a penny, the slower shuffle of the weary
and the desperate. The very walls close in, patched
and shattered, holding secrets in every crack.
This isn't just a novelist's fancy, Edwin Chadwick, reporting
on the slums, wrote. The abodes of poverty hold
upwards of 20 persons in two rooms.
Imagine the Press of bodies, the smell of damp and decay in a
thrum of life, children sleeping beneath tables, mothers boiling
what little food they could find and shadows moving in doorways,
always watching. A local constable, Charles
Cochrane, patrolled these maze like lanes and he remarked.
Here the thief and the beggar rubbed shoulders daily.
The boundary between an honest meal and a stolen purse could be
measured in inches. Every step, every doorway is
edged with risk and necessity. Here Fagin's den sits out of
sight but within earshopped of every commotion.
It's Cellars and backrooms crowded with I'll Got spoils and
sharp eyed boys like the Artful Dodger, forever on the lookout
for the next opportunity. But for all its notoriety,
Saffron Hill and Field Lane are more than a backdrop.
They are the living Organism, nourished by struggle and
ingenuity, a place where hope flickers for some even as the
law closes in. For Dickens, these narrow,
oppressive lanes were the soil from which London's criminal
world sprang, a world's not so far removed from the city's
respectable heart. And 1 He invites us to walk with
caution and empathy at his side. Next, let's linger to the cold,
looming walls of Newgate Prison, a place in Dickens's London
where hope flickers and dies and justice takes its most merciless
form. In the closing chapters of
Oliver Twist, the notorious villain Fagan is finally caught
and LED through the crowded, dirty streets from his den in
Saffron Hill and delivered to Newgate's iron gates.
This is not just any jail, it is the end point for so many in
Dickens world. Dickens description is chilling.
A vaulted chamber lighted by a single narrow grating.
The walls and floor were black and damp.
The streets were alive at every hour, but here all was still.
As the grave time stretches and alone in the darkness, Fagin's
bravado crumbles. It becomes not the arch enemy,
but a desperate man haunted by nightmares and memory.
He pleads. What right of you to butcher me?
But the machinery of the justice system is cold, remote.
Dickens refuses to glorify it. The stench, the cries, the faces
pressed to the bars. I have never left Newgate, nor
has it left me, Dickens Gluntz wrote after a visit, and his
horror at the institution seeps into every page.
The public executions outside Newgate drew thousands, rich and
poor, curious and fearful, all gathering to witness the
spectacle as Thomas Carlisle thundered, the machinery of
justice and suffering unyielding and unfeeling.
In Oliver Twist, the judge is distant, the proceedings
intimidating, mercy a scare commodity.
Dickens offers this There are few among the crowded gate.
There are few among the crowded gazers who do not find something
in the gaunt, pale face that speaks to them of suffering, of
the distance between law and charity.
Fagin's death in Newgate Vaults is not just the end of 1
criminal, but a devastating reminder of the system's brutal
finality. The labyrinth of London streets
might deliver Oliver to danger, but the justice system offers
little relief, and his ultimate mercy comes, if at all, too
late. So as you stand in your
imagination outside those walls, echoing with footsteps, laments
and the toll of the church bell, remember Fagin not just as a
villain, but as a victim of a system Dickens so urgently
wanted to change. Behind every verdict and every
bar, Dickens found a story, a plea for reform and for
compassion. There is so much of Dickens's
London that we could explore, but this is Part 1 of I'm sure
what will be many. Thank you for joining me on this
exploration of Oliver Twists London as a tour guide and a
lover of London's untold stories.
I hope this episode has deepened your sense not only of the
city's geography, but its heart and conscience.
If these streets have enthralled you, remember you can walk them
for yourself on foot with history as your companion or
with me on one of our guided walks.
If you enjoyed this journey, please subscribe to the London
History Podcast, leave a review and share your own reflections
on Dickens's city. If you'd like to experience
Dickens's London first hand, I'd love to show you around.
I offered 2 Dickens themed walking tours.
My original Oliver Twist walking tour, tracing the boy's
footsteps in Chapter 8 from Angel in Islington all the way
to Vagin's Lair, giving you a real sense of the story's
atmosphere and locations. And for all of you Christmas
enthusiasts, my Christmas Carol Walking Tour is a festive
favorite. We already have several public
walk dates lined up for the season, including yes, yes, yes,
Christmas Eve itself. It's a perfect way to get into
the spirit, whether you're a longtime Dickens fan or just
curious about London at its most magical.
And of course, private tours for both are always available and
can be easily booked online at londonguidedwalks.co.uk.
If you have any questions or special requests, drop me a
line. I'll be delighted to help you
plan your Tickens adventure. Come along and step into the
pages of Dickensian London history with me.
There's always more to discover. Next time, we'll step into a new
chapter of London's past. Who knows what stories await the
next corner? Next time we'll step into a
Christmassy Charter of London's past.
Who knows what stories await around the corner?
Until next time.