Please, sir, can I have a walk? Dickens biographer finds likely inspiration for Oliver Twist

Could a consumptive young woman called Alice Shepherd have been the inspiration for Oliver Twist? That is a question now being posed by a historian, who has discovered parallels between the brutality suffered by a real-life pauper incarcerated in one of Victorian London’s notorious workhouses and Charles Dickens’s fictional orphan.In researching a new book on Dickens, Theresa Musgrove unearthed 1836 newspaper reports on Alice Shepherd, who endured starvation and solitary confinement within a workhouse in Hendon, after a magistrate ruled she was to be punished for daring to ask for permission to take a walk.In his classic novel, which was published in monthly instalments from 1837 to 1839, Dickens wrote that nine-year-old Oliver was hauled up before a magistrate and imprisoned in a “dark and solitary room” for having the temerity to ask for a second helping of gruel, with the poignant words: “Please, sir, I want some more.”The starving child was locked up for week. Dickens wrote: “Oliver was the victim of a systematic course of treachery and deception.”An illustration by James Mahoney from The Adventures of Oliver Twist, Chapman and Hall edition, 1838. Original caption: ‘Stop thief; Oliver is pursued by an angry crowd.’ Photograph: Bridgeman/Getty ImagesNewspaper reports record that Alice Shepherd was put in a “straightjacket”, having been “in a state of great agitation”. A Rev Theodore Williams, in his capacity as a magistrate and chair of the local board of guardians responsible for overseeing the conduct of Hendon’s old workhouse, recommended a punishment for her “disgusting conduct”.She was put in solitary confinement for 24 hours, and starved on a diet of bread and water until the next meeting of the board – which met once a fortnight.Another local magistrate, also one of the workhouse’s guardians of the board, tried in vain to defend her, arguing that such “a thin spare woman apparently suffering from consumption … [was the] last person … to whom such a punishment should have been inflicted”.Musgrove told The Guardian: “When you read the report of her punishment, it is almost, word for word, like a description of Oliver Twist when he is punished after asking for more.”She said: “The reaction to Oliver Twist’s ‘impertinence’ in asking for more food is perhaps an echo of Alice’s daring to ask to go out for a walk: a reasonable request met by fury by those whose job it was to enforce the unremitting authority of the board of guardians, by whose mercy the undeserving poor were granted the means of a life of such bleak subsistence.”Her research features in her new book, titled Charles Dickens and his Hidden Family History, which is published this week by Pen & Sword Books.She writes: “Both Oliver and Alice were subjected to solitary confinement, and yet, as we learn, the parish boy’s punishment was to be considered not so bad because he was allowed out into the stone yard to wash under the pump, just as Reverend Williams pointed out … that the room appropriated for the solitary confinement and starvation of Alice Shepherd ‘looked upon the yard where all the other paupers were, and therefore, was not a very severe punishment’.“In mid-January, within weeks of this story being reported, Dickens was writing to his publisher Bentley that he had ‘hit upon a capital notion for myself, and one which will bring Cruikshank out’. In other words, the creation of Oliver Twist had begun, and indeed the first chapters would be published in February 1837, illustrated by the starkly graphic work of George Cruikshank.”skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionShe notes that Dickens was familiar with Hendon, in the present-day London borough of Barnet: “Hendon and Barnet are mentioned, for example, in Oliver Twist … but also there are other references in his letters and journalism that reveal a knowledge of Hendon and a fondness for the area, which was within walking or riding distance of the city itself, a quiet landscape of villages and farmland.“In the later stages of Oliver Twist, after his brutal killing of Nancy, Bill Sikes goes on the run … After sleeping rough, Sikes heads off towards Hendon, but the people there seem suspicious of him and he goes back to the Heath.”Oliver Twist exposed the brutality of poverty in Victorian Britain. Dickens became a tireless campaigner for social reform, having been scarred by his own childhood experiences after his father was incarcerated in a debtors’ prison and, aged about 12, he was sent to work in a blacking factory.Leon Litvack, a leading Dickens expert and professor of Victorian studies at Queen’s University Belfast, said it was “perfectly feasible” that Dickens was inspired by Alice Shepherd, as newspaper reports were among “an amalgam of influences that sparked his imagination, distilled into a coherent narrative”, particularly early in his career.He added: “Dickens was a journalist before he was a novelist, so he was well aware of the power of sensation. He was fascinated by the workhouse and aware of what was appearing in the press about particular abuses.”