A Visit to Dickens' Home

Having spent a fair bit of time immersing in the world of the Victorian poor through Charles Dickens' novels, it was time to visit Dickens' adult home in London, which is now the Charles Dickens Museum.

The inside of the house is very much preserved in the same condition as when Charles Dickens was living there.

Of all the rooms in the house, I found the kitchen to be the most interesting place, which probably has muchg to do with my having to spend most of my time at home in the kitchen!  Another eye-opening experience for us was seeing the wash basin in the laundry room that was used to keep the Christmas pudding (as was the practice in the Victorian times).

Two other items in the house also caught our eyes.  The first was part of the Marshalsea prison grille, which represented a very traumatic time in Dickens' childhood. The actual prison is long gone (as we saw on the Dickens tour a few weeks ago) but bits and pieces of it still remains in various locations, and the prison is vividly described in a number of novels, most notably in David Copperfield and Little Dorrit.

The second is a simple-looking window that was mentioned in Oliver Twist as being the window out of which Oliver Twist was pushed by Bill Sikes during the burglary.

The window is very small, so one can imagine how scrawny and malnourished the poor boy must have been to be able to squeeze through it!

Woe to Being Poor

One of the most famous Charles Dickens character is Oliver Twist.  The novel has been adapted so many times that everyone would have heard of it even if they had not actually read the book.

I find the novel difficult to read, less so due to Dickens' language but more because of his depiction of the cruelty operating within the Victorian workhouse system and the predatory nature of human beings upon those who are weak and vulnerable.

Using the same approach as we have done for our Dickens' study so far, we went out in search of the actual workshop that inspired the story of Oliver Twist.  We found it in the abandoned annex (previously the outpatient unit) of the old Middlesex Hospital.

According to a book that has researched into the same topic, this part of the hospital was originally the Cleveland Street Workhouse in the Victorian times and was very nearly demolished had it not been for the campaigning efforts of people to preserve it for its link to the world famous novel.  The building has been boarded up for years without any signs of conservation or redevelopment, so we could only peer through the narrow slits between the boards to look at the outside of the buildings.

The evidence of the close link to this particular workhouse -- for there were a number of workhouses littered in various parts of London -- is that Charles Dickens lived nine doors away and would surely have seen and heard of whatever went on inside and outside of it.

Not satisfied with being shut out of the workhouse, we went to The Geffrye Museum, which used to an infirmary for the elderly poor in east London.

We were there to find out more about the homeless in Victorian times (which inevitably meant admittance to a workhouse at some point under those circumstances).

As expected, it is not a particularly cheerful exhibition but it certainly gave us a very good idea of the plight of homeless people in the Victorian times, the various circumstances that gave rise to their dire fate, and of course, details and artefacts of the inevitable workhouse system.

We have read about and heard of inmates picking oakum in Victorian workhouses and prisons, so Tiger had a go at doing that inside the exhibition.  He only did it for two minutes, yet that was enough to set him off, "This is stupid and pointless!"  Having never set foot in an institutionalised classroom before, Tiger has no concept of people being given meaningless tasks to numb their minds or to punish them for falling on hard times.

The heartbreaking realisation that we have made is that there are currently 3.5 million children living in poverty in the UK.  It is quite inconceivable in a modern day and when one walks about on London's main streets, but it is true.  The difference between poverty in the Victorian times and today is that poverty seems to be 'invisible' today, as in, we don't see beggars and homeless people on the streets but they do exist.