Dickens & The Workhouse

The recent discovery that the young Charles Dickens had lived next-door to a major London workhouse made headlines worldwide. 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, close to London’s Telecom Tower. The campaign to save the workhouse building from demolition captured the public imagination, and his old home now bears a London Blue Plaque.

In this lecture, the historian who did the sleuthing behind these exciting findings tells the story behind the discovery, and explains how it had been missed by Dickens’s biographers. She shows that Dickens’s residence in that London neighbourhood - before and after his father’s imprisonment in a debtors’ prison – was profoundly important to the development of his career as a writer.

ABOUT THE SPEAKER

Dr Ruth Richardson MA., DPhil., FRHistS is an interdisciplinary historian, currently Senior Research Fellow at the Centre for Life-Writing Research at King’s College London, and Writer in Residence, Gordon Museum of Pathology, King’s College London Guy’s Campus. A Past President of the Dickens Society, Dr Richardson was for several years Visiting Professor in Humanities & Medicine at Hong Kong University and an Affiliated Scholar in the History & Philosophy of Science at the University of Cambridge, UK. She is the author of Death, Dissection & the Destitute (Chicago University Press, 2000); Vintage Papers from The Lancet (Elsevier 2006); The Making of Mr Gray’s Anatomy (Oxford University Press, 2008) and Dickens & the Workhouse (Oxford University Press 2012). She is the co-editor two books on Medical Humanities published by the Royal College of Physicians of London, and has published numerous papers in a wide range of learned journals, including The Lancet, the British Medical Journal, Dickens Quarterly, and the Notes & Records of the Royal Society.