For almost my entire life, I’ve known there’s a connection between my family and Oliver Twist. There’s little chance I could forget it. Charles Dickens’s story has exploded into an Oliver multimedia universe, with as many as a hundred screen adaptations, the brilliant Lionel Bart musical, two current TV shows based on the frenmity of Fagin and the Artful Dodger, and an Audible dramatisation starring Brian Cox and Daniel Kaluuya.
I remember one Easter Sunday we were watching Oliver! on TV when my father snapped out of his post-lunch stupor to announce: “Oliver Twist was a Blincoe. He’s my great-great-grandfather.” The original Robert Blincoe was a foundling, abandoned in London’s St Pancras district in around 1792. He spent his early years in the care of the parish, entering the workhouse at four years old. By seven, he was one of 30 “parish apprentices” contracted to work in a Nottinghamshire cotton mill without pay until the age of 21. London’s parish councils shipped thousands of pauper children north between the 1790s and 1830s, but little was known of their lives until Robert’s memoir. His account of brutality, sadism, sexual abuse and starvation became a national sensation, running to five editions between 1828 and 1833.
Twenty years ago, the historian John Waller wrote a new biography, The Real Oliver Twist, which traced Robert’s role in the early battle for workers’ rights. But only when I wrote my own history, Oliver Twist and Me, did I really understand how Dickens’s best-loved novel came about, which in turn brought me closer to my great-great-great-grandfather.
My father knew nothing of Robert’s life when he enrolled at Manchester University in the early 1960s, but he had the good fortune to catch a new wave of social history, inspired by EP Thompson’s declaration that “the working class was present at its own making”. A lecturer named Albert Musson was researching a labour organiser of the 1820s and 1830s named John Doherty, an Irish-born Catholic who Musson describes as “the most outstanding Trade Union leader of that period”. Doherty shaped the emerging working-class identity not only through unions and strikes, but by publishing their stories. In 1832, he brought out a new edition of Robert’s memoir in support of the Ten-Hour Movement, the campaign for a shorter working day. At university, my father was asked if he was related to that Robert Blincoe. He doubted it, but was prompted to hunt down Doherty’s publications in Manchester Central Library. He found letters and testimonials from people who knew Robert, alongside updates on his later life. There were references to Robert’s son, another Robert, born in 1826, who my father knew was his great-grandfather. Robert Jr had gone on to Queens’ College, Cambridge, before being ordained as a priest at Lichfield in 1848, and in 1853 becoming curate of St Luke’s Old Street, London.
On my desk is a scrapbook, passed down through my family, that the young vicar started in his days at St Luke’s. I coincidentally moved to Old Street, east London, while writing Oliver Twist and Me, and discovered from a wedding certificate tucked inside the scrapbook’s cover that my great-great-grandmother had lived just a few doors from my new home. After four generations and 160 years, a Blincoe has circled back to old family haunts. Yet given this strange proximity, it’s odd that we knew nothing of the original Robert Blincoe until my father went to university.
Musson’s rediscovery of Robert Blincoe’s memoir was a source of pride for my father in 1960s Manchester, but the book was a blight on the life of an ambitious Victorian cleric. Robert Jr would not give his enemies any more reasons to look down on him. His scrapbook reveals a bitter man, once celebrated as a young preacher, who found his chances of preferment blocked, something he blamed on the jealousy of his superiors. Towards the end of his life he moved his family back north, where he was supported by a wealthier older sister, Martha, the wife of a mill owner. John Waller tracked down Martha’s ancestors to New Zealand and discovered they had always known the story of Robert and the workhouse. Only we had been kept in the dark.
The Reverend Robert was also the chaplain of St Luke’s workhouse, which appears in David Copperfield. The Micawbers do a flit from their home opposite the workhouse, abandoning their orphan servant in the street. In real life, too, Dickens’s mother Elizabeth callously dumped the family maid in Camden. The girl was a parish apprentice, recruited from a workhouse. His mother’s cruelty explains Dickens’s deep feelings for both parish orphans and teenage prostitutes, the likely fate of their maid. The character Nancy is his archetype of an exploited girl.
Robert Blincoe’s memoir has remained in print since the late 1960s and the claim that it is the source for Oliver Twist has become well established. There is solid textual evidence for it. The workhouse chapters that open each book introduce the same events in the same order, ending with a dramatic confrontation with the local chimneysweeps. I discovered that the 1828 edition of the memoir had been published on Fleet Street, out of a bookshop that Dickens passed daily, running between his shorthand shifts at a courtroom near St Paul’s and his night shifts at parliament, where he worked for a rival to Hansard. Dickens was employed there when Doherty’s work was debated, and when Robert appeared as a witness at a parliamentary inquiry.
The relationship between Robert’s memoir and Dickens’s novel is strengthened by a personal connection between Dickens and John Doherty’s circle in Manchester, through the reformer Lord Shaftesbury (then Lord Ashley). In the late 1830s, Shaftesbury organised tours to view the working conditions in Manchester’s factories, with Doherty as a guide. Dickens accepted Shaftesbury’s invitation in November 1838, one of a series of public events Dickens undertook with his illustrator, in a pairing known as Boz and Phiz. During the trip, Dickens – who had grown tired of sharing the limelight – abruptly returned to London and halted the printing of the stand-alone edition of Oliver Twist changing the author’s name from Boz to Charles Dickens.
Two months after Dickens, rival novelist Frances Trollope also took Shaftesbury’s tour. Her meeting with Doherty went well, according to her son Thomas (brother of the author Anthony). Dickens felt Frances was dogging his footsteps. She turned her tour into a promotional vehicle for her new book Michael Armstrong, the Factory Boy, which began its serialisation on her arrival in Manchester. The novel lifts scenes from Robert’s memoirs, including a devastating account of starving children stealing from a pigsty. Dickens felt compelled to alter his plans for his next book, Nicholas Nickleby, to avoid repeating Trollope’s account of the factory system.
Dickens keenly felt the loss of his family’s orphan maid. Yet, he appropriated the stories of parentless children to burnish his image as a self-made creative. On his Shaftesbury-funded trip to Manchester, he was given a snuff box which proclaimed him, “The Inimitable”. He turned this incident into a piece of branding: from then on, he was the Inimitable, a true original who owed nothing to anyone else.
Twenty years ago, I saw Waller’s biography of Robert Blincoe as the story of a self-made man. He walked to Manchester crippled and penniless, starting on the lowest rung as a dealer in waste rags. He arrived at a time when even the abomination of slave cotton could not keep up with world consumption. The price of rags steadily increased, not least because of their use in the paper industry, booming thanks to writers like Dickens. Robert became a loved and respected figure around Manchester, seeing one of his daughters marry well, and his son become a vicar. It was a remarkable turnaround.
But these days I feel I misinterpreted his story, and a different picture has revealed itself. Dickens frequently spoke of “conviviality”, the fellow-feeling that enhances life. This was a value also held in high esteem by Robert, who saw his friendships as a political bulwark against the brutality of Manchester’s factory system. He was proud that his partnership with John Doherty made him an emblem for the working man. Doherty commissioned a woodcut of Robert from the artist William Knight Keeling, which was used as a banner at a rally for the Ten-Hour Movement: Robert was literally the poster boy for an emerging working-class identity. But he never separated himself from the world of his upbringing. His memoir was a collaboration, combining his story, told through interviews, with letters from other parish apprentices.
Thinking of Robert’s memoir as a group effort has made me reassess Dickens’s work. In the period around publication of Oliver Twist, he created his own legend as the great singular author. But his writing continues to hold such power because it blossomed into a multiverse thanks to contributions that came later, like Oliver!. Dickens lives not because he is unique, but because he has become part of a collective endeavour. God bless us, everyone.
• Oliver Twist & Me by Nicholas Blincoe is published by Bridge Street. To support the Guardian order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.
