Historian Finds Likely Inspiration for Oliver Twist in Punished Hendon Pauper

Theresa Musgrove, researching a new book on Dickens, found 1836 newspaper reports about Shepherd. According to those reports, Shepherd endured starvation and solitary confinement after a magistrate ruled she should be punished for asking to go for a walk. The reports also record that she was placed in a “straightjacket” after being “in a state of great agitation.”

Rev Theodore Williams, acting as a magistrate and chair of the local board of guardians responsible for overseeing the conduct of Hendon’s old workhouse, recommended punishment for what he called her “disgusting conduct.” Shepherd was put in solitary confinement for 24 hours and fed only bread and water until the next meeting of the board, which met once a fortnight.

Another local magistrate, who was also a workhouse guardian, tried without success to defend her. He argued that such a “thin spare woman apparently suffering from consumption” was the “last person” to whom such a punishment should have been inflicted.

In Oliver Twist, published in monthly instalments from 1837 to 1839, Dickens wrote that nine-year-old Oliver was brought before a magistrate and imprisoned in a “dark and solitary room” for asking for a second helping of gruel. The boy’s plea—“Please, sir, I want some more”—leads to him being locked up for a week. Dickens wrote: “Oliver was the victim of a systematic course of treachery and deception.”

Musgrove told The Guardian that the report of Shepherd’s punishment read almost word for word like the description of Oliver Twist being punished after asking for more. She said the reaction to Oliver’s “impertinence” in asking for more food was perhaps an echo of Alice’s daring to ask to go out for a walk: a reasonable request met by fury from those whose job was to enforce the authority of the board of guardians, by whose mercy the undeserving poor were granted the means of a bleak subsistence.

Her research appears in Charles Dickens and His Hidden Family History, published this week by Pen & Sword Books. In it, Musgrove writes that both Oliver and Alice were subjected to solitary confinement. She notes that Oliver’s punishment was considered less severe because he was allowed into the stone yard to wash under the pump, just as Williams pointed out that the room used for Shepherd’s solitary confinement and starvation “looked upon the yard where all the other paupers were, and therefore, was not a very severe punishment.”

Musgrove also points to timing. In mid-January, within weeks of the newspaper story being reported, Dickens wrote to his publisher Bentley that he had “hit upon a capital notion for myself, and one which will bring Cruikshank out.” The creation of Oliver Twist had begun, and its first chapters were published in February 1837 with illustrations by George Cruikshank.

She writes that Dickens knew Hendon, in what is now the London borough of Barnet. Hendon and Barnet are mentioned in Oliver Twist, and Musgrove says Dickens’s letters and journalism reveal a knowledge of Hendon and a fondness for the area, then a quiet landscape of villages and farmland within walking or riding distance of the city. In the later stages of the novel, after Bill Sikes kills Nancy and goes on the run, he heads towards Hendon; the people there seem suspicious of him, and he returns to the Heath.

Oliver Twist exposed the brutality of poverty in Victorian Britain. Dickens became a campaigner for social reform, shaped by his own childhood: his father was incarcerated in a debtors’ prison, and at about the age of 12 Dickens was sent to work in a blacking factory.

Leon Litvack, a leading Dickens expert and professor of Victorian studies at Queen’s University Belfast, told The Guardian it was “perfectly feasible” that Dickens was inspired by Shepherd. He said newspaper reports were part of “an amalgam of influences that sparked his imagination, distilled into a coherent narrative,” particularly early in Dickens’s career. He added that Dickens was a journalist before he was a novelist, was aware of the power of sensation, and was fascinated by the workhouse and press accounts of particular abuses.