The real Oliver Twist - with a note on the 2007 Liberal Democrat leadership contest

Literary characters are usually created from a wide range of sources, but I can claim to have worked with the model for someone in Malcolm Bradbury's Eating People is Wrong. 

And on the Guardian website today Nicholas Blincoe advances the claim that Oliver Twist was based on his ancestor Robert Blincoe.

Robert Blincoe became famous on the 1830s after publishing his autobiography, A Memoir of Robert Blincoe. It told of a childhood spent in a workhouse and as a worker in a cotton mill from the age of seven.

Nicholas Blincoe writes:

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.

Now he has published a book called Oliver Twist & Me, which has been described as: "A fascinating family and social history and a savage indictment of the role of child slavery in the growth of the Industrial Revolution."

When I saw the name Nicholas Blincoe, some faint blogging bells rang. Sure enough, I found that he had written an article for the Guardian website during the 2007 Liberal Democrat leadership election in which he attacked Chris Huhne while declaring himself a member of Nick Clegg's campaign team.

I find that I wrote at the time:

The silliest point occurs where Blincoe accuses Huhne of being posh. This is a childish insult at the best of times, but in a contest where both candidates attended the same public school it is simply ludicrous.

Get me. But you have heard James Graham on the subject.

Anyway, the Clegg campaign disowned Blincoe - apparently he had given Clegg some advice on arts policy in the past - and their man went on to win the election.

It was all a long time ago and, as someone who is so obsessed with Oliver Twist that he's published two book chapters on it, I like what Blincoe has to say about the book today:

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.

In fact, I think I shall buy Oliver Twist & Me.