Dickens and the Workhouse ─ Oliver Twist and the London Poor

It's one of the best known scenes in all of literature--young Oliver Twist, with empty bowl in hand, asking "Please Sir. I want some more." In Dickens and the Workhouse, historian Ruth Richardson recounts how she discovered the building that was quite possibly the model for the workhouse in Dickens' classic novel. Indeed, Richardson reveals that Dickens himself lived only a few doors down from this notorious building--once as a child and once again as a young journalist. This book offers a colorful portrait of London in Dickens' time, looking at life in the streets and in the workhouse itself. Illustrated with maps, documents, photos, and illustrations, this fascinating book provides an engaging blend of history, biography and literary criticism, rooted in hitherto largely unexplored historical sources, in Dickens' own fiction and journalism, and in works of biography and criticism. Richardson's discovery made headlines worldwide. Published on the 200th anniversary of Dickens' birth, Dickens and the Workhouse offers an intriguing glimpse of one of the great literary figures of the Victorian Age.

Ruth Richardson is Fellow of the Royal Historical Society and the author of a number of books. The Wall Street Journal described her last book, The Making of Mr. Gray's Anatomy as "one of those rarities, history that reads like a novel." That book won the 2009 Medical Journalists' Open Book Award.