Top Highlights

• This book shares the story of what has been unearthed about Charles Dickens’s associations with the neighbourhood of the Cleveland Street Workhouse. We look first at how little is known about Dickens’s London childhood, at the unexplained silences about his family’s association with the street, and how the discovery was made.
• shedding new light on Dickens’s early life and his development as a novelist.
• CHARLES DICKENS IS just about the most famous literary figure in London’s history, apart from Shakespeare.
• Workhouses were publicly run institutions funded by local taxation (‘poor-rates’), which provided minimal accommodation and sustenance for the desperate poor.
• Oliver Twist is well known as Dickens’s major attack on the New Poor Law of 1834, and its worse than miserly treatment of the poor.