‘Oliver Twist’ workhouse saved

The derelict building that may have served as Charles Dickens’s workhouse in his famous novel has been given listed status It was, wrote the 25-year-old Charles Dickens with heavy irony and no little fury, “a regular place of public entertainment for the poorer classes, a brick and mortar Elysium”. And now the building that may have served as his model for the workhouse where Oliver Twist asked for more is to be preserved from demolition. The derelict Georgian building in Cleveland Street, London, which in Dickens’s day was known as the Strand Union workhouse, has been given listed status by the Department of Culture, Media and Sport. The decision, on the advice of English Heritage, came on the grounds of its literary and historic associations rather than architectural merit, to prevent its being demolished and replaced by an apartment block. The workhouse – one of three such buildings surviving in London, but the only one still in operation in the 1830s when Dickens was writing his novel – has been identified as his possible model. The author lived 100 yards away on the same street as a teenager. As he wrote Oliver Twist a few years later, Dickens was living less than a mile away in Doughty Street, although in the original 1837 serialisation of Oliver Twist, the workhouse was placed in a town called Mudfog, 75 miles north of the capital. Dr Paul Schlicke, editor of the Dickens Companion, told the BBC Radio 4 Today programme: “I think it is inconceivable that it was not that workhouse because Dickens lived so close to it. He would have been seeing it, hearing it, seeing paupers coming in and beadles walking by. It would have been the workhouse he knew best.” Built in 1775 as the workhouse for the parish of St Paul’s church in Covent Garden, by the mid-1830s the building had been taken over under the New Poor Law legislation – the real target for Dickens’s anger – to serve a number of poor central London parishes. Conditions there were notably harsh and it became a target for later Victorian reformers such as Louisa Twining and Joseph Rogers. The lintel over the entrance bore the message: “Avoid idleness and intemperance.” From the 1920s, it served as the outpatients’ department of the Middlesex Hospital. The department’s decision means that the application to redevelop the site is unlikely to be allowed, though English Heritage said that so long as the facade remained it might be possible to redevelop the interior as apartments. Heritage Charles Dickens Stephen Bates guardian.co.uk

Posted by on March 14, 2011. Filed under News, Politics, World News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.