Dickens and the Workhouse

• The story of the recently discovered London workhouse that inspired Charles Dickens - now told for the first time
• Told by the historian who initially did the sleuthing behind these exciting new findings
• Shows how profoundly important the time Dickens spent living in this area was to his subsequent literary career

Readership: All those interested in the writings of Charles Dickens, nineteenth century English literature, and the history of Victorian London.

Ruth Richardson, Fellow of the Royal Historical Society; Affiliated Scholar in the History & Philosophy of Science, University of Cambridge; Hon. Professor of Humanities and Medicine, Hong Kong University.

Ruth Richardson is a historian and the author of a number of books. The Wall Street Journal described her last book, The Making of Mr. Gray's Anatomy (Oxford University Press) as 'one of those rarities, history that reads like a novel'. That book won the 2009 Medical Journalists' Open Book Award.

"Richardson's enthusiasm for her subject shines throughout this hugely engaging and informative book" - BBC History Magazine

"The important discoveries in this surprising book come from an intimate knowledge of Dickens and London, coupled with a historian's passion. We're seized by the hand of a detective and walked into Dickens's world. Unputdownable." - Miriam Margolyes

"The book offers a detailed study of the Dickens's family home and its surrounding neighbourhood, as well as an evocative and damning portrait of Britain's de-facto 'prison system to punish poverty'." - New Yorker

"Gives an intimately evoked view of Dickens's childhood and the New Poor Law of 1834 by which workhouses became 'a sort of prison system to punish [the poor]." - New York Review of Books

Introduction
1: Discovery: threat, silences, discovery, Dickens' first London home
2: Vicinity: environs of gentility, Norfolk-street, medical charity, environs of poverty
3: Home: house, landlord, inside, views: upstairs/downstairs
4: Street: looking down, and around
5: Calamity: gap years, catastrophe, blacking factory, Marshalsea, Somers Town, schooling
6: Young Dickens: Return to Norfolk Street: clerk, young professional, Parliament, first essays
7: Workhouse: government/management
8: Works: family moves, Sketches by Boz, Oliver Twist, Marylebone borders, human heaps
9: Poor Law: visitor, doctor, master, commission, change
10: The Most Famous Workhouse in the World
Notes
Index