As coal replaced wood-burning grates, chimneys became narrower to create a more intense draught. In his memoirs, Robert tells how the desire to escape led him to volunteer as an apprentice chimney sweep, though he was only six years old.
In fact, the workhouse farm was a euphemism for a baby farm for abandoned children Dickens' novel paints a grotesque picture of gin-soaked nurses and hungry kids. In Polanski's uncharacteristically soft-centred film, the farm provokes images of meadowlands and dairies. Oliver Twist was born in the workhouse but was immediately packed off to the workhouse farm. He had no recollection of an earlier life. Robert Blincoe entered the workhouse in Camden Town (on the site of today's tube station) in 1796, aged about four. Robert, who had been disabled by his upbringing, even appeared on political posters of the 1830s, beneath a slogan borrowed from the abolitionist movement: "Am I Not a Man and a Brother?" Dickens would have known of The Memoirs of Robert Blincoe, but the identification of Oliver with Robert rests chiefly upon the opening chapters of the two books. The memoir became a cause célèbre when it was quoted in parliament (where Dickens worked as a reporter), and the focus of a political campaign. His life story was serialised in the Lion, a radical newspaper, in 1828 and republished in book form as The Memoirs of Robert Blincoe in 1832. Robert Blincoe, my great-great-great-grandfather, was a workhouse orphan and illegitimate. The idea that Charles Dickens based Twist on a Blincoe is expounded by John Waller in The Real Oliver Twist, a compelling history of the lives of workhouse children in the industrial revolution. And yet this, apparently, is a picture of my great-great-great-grandfather. Alongside these, Oliver is nothing but a package of tears and pieties, a blank spot of goodness. Behind him stands the Artful Dodger, the most lively character the prostitute Nancy, the most sympathetic and Bill Sikes, the most chilling. In the book and the films - David Lean's 1948 classic, Carol Reed and Lionel Bart's musical, or the latest version from Roman Polanski - the dominant figure is always Fagin.
But Oliver Twist? He's not even my favourite character in Oliver Twist.
Long John Silver would do nicely, or d'Artagnan, or perhaps Spider-Man. I f I could trace my roots back to a favourite character from a book I read in childhood, there are a few I'd like it to be.
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