The inspiration for Mr Brownlow was himself a foundling, just like Oliver Twist

When I published a book chapter on Charles Dickens and antisemitism a couple of years ago, I managed to slip in the expression 'well-behaved orphans'. But it turns out that the original Well-Behaved Orphan wasn't Oliver Twist but his benefactor, Mr Brownlow.

For the Wikipedia entry for Mr Brownlow says:

Mr Brownlow's name and character generally believed to be derived from John Brownlow, the director of the Foundling Hospital, which was dedicated to looking after abandoned and unwanted children. Dickens, a regular visitor to the hospital, knew Brownlow well. 

Dickens scholar Robert Alan Colby argues that "in naming Oliver's benefactor Mr Brownlow, Dickens seems to have been paying a tribute to one of the most dedicated social servants of his age".

The Foundling Hospital mentioned here is the one in Bloomsbury founded by Thomas Coram in 1739.

And, fascinatingly there is more about Mr Brownlow:

In 1831, seven years before Dickens wrote Oliver Twist, John Brownlow had written a novel about an orphan called Hans Sloane - a Tale, which has a plot broadly similar to Dickens's later work. Several critics have suggested that Dickens took aspects of the basic plot of his novel from Brownlow's earlier work, so the name may have been a tribute for two reasons.

Look up John Brownlow and you soon find Roy Sloan's History Hamper blog:

John Brownlow was the most famous and esteemed servant of the Foundling Hospital in the more than two centuries of its existence, from the opening of its doors in 1741 to final closure in 1954. He was himself a foundling. The son of Mary Goodacre, he was admitted on 9 August 1800 at the age of three months and given his new name and a number, 18,607. 

Like all of the foundlings, he spent his early years with a foster family (that of Mary Skinner of Hadlow, Kent) before being returned to the Hospital.  In 1814, instead of leaving to be apprenticed to an employer, he was taken into the Secretary’s office as a clerk, an arrangement that was formalised in 1817.  This was possibly an acknowledgement of his exceptional ability, although the formal register says ‘Invalided 18 June 1817’. 

He was promoted to Treasurer’s Clerk in 1828 and became Secretary, in charge of the day-to-day running of the institution, in 1849.  He was with the Hospital almost from cradle to grave, retiring in 1872 just a year before his death in August 1873.

While we're talking about Mr Brownlow, here are a couple of pieces of trivia connected with his appearance on the cinema screen.

First, in David Lean's 1948 Oliver Twist, Brownlow was played by the actor Henry Stephenson. He was born in 1871, which was the year after Charles Dickens died.

Second, in the BBC 'Ghost Story for Christmas' adaptation of M.R. James's short story Lost Hearts, the evil Mr Abney, who takes in a young orphan boy out of apparent benevolence but really out of a wish to consume his heart in pursuit of eternal life, is played by Joseph O'Conor. And Joseph O'Conor played Mr Brownlow in the 1968 film of Lionel Bart's Oliver.

G.K. Chesterton once said that Dickens' characters would soothe their optimistic creator with something less terrible than the truth. Could it be that Mr Brownlow was guilty of that too?