A twisted tale

John Waller is a science historian at the University of Melbourne, and his new book is a study of the life and times of one Robert Blincoe. Though he is hardly a household name, Blincoe’s career is interesting in that he is the first factory worker in Britain’s Industrial Revolution whose biography can be reconstructed in some detail. Born in London around 1792, Blincoe was a bastard child, abandoned as a baby to the scant mercies of the beadles of the St Pancras workhouse. As soon as he was old enough, he was sent north and apprenticed – ‘sold into slavery’ would be a more apt description – to the owners of cotton mills, who had an insatiable demand for child labour. His first employer was cruel enough, but the second mill, situated in an isolated valley of the river Wye, was operated as a concentration camp for children. One inventive punishment the inmates suffered was having vices screwed to their ear lobes. Blincoe spent sixteen hours on his feet every day, managing the dangerous machinery, until the bones of his young legs were warped forever. Yet he was a spirited lad, given to challenging his masters and seeking redress from the rare investigative committees. Somehow he survived his apprenticeship, and after years of wandering, settled in Manchester. His story, amply supported by his crooked appearance, became sufficiently well known to the activists of the city for his image to be used on banners during demonstrations. Eventually, he made good as a dealer in cotton waste and became prosperous enough to send his son to Cambridge. He died in 1860. Blincoe’s story might have been lost to history were it not for a fortunate circumstance. When he was in his twenties, he was sought out and interviewed by John Brown, a minor journalist, who captured for posterity what his subject told him of his appalling early life. Brown published his Memoir as a pamphlet in 1832. At once verbose and uninformative, melodramatic yet maddeningly incurious about Blincoe’s motives and personality, Brown’s Memoir is a feeble piece of work, manufactured as a piece of political propaganda for the radical press. On top of that, Brown suffered intermittently from paranoid delusions, which eventually led him to suicide. Still, for all its sketchiness, omissions and evasions, Brown’s Memoir tells us most of what we know about Robert Blincoe; and Waller shows that much of it can be substantiated from other sources. Well aware of its problematic nature, he skilfully expands what he calls the ‘noisy verbosity’ of its brief pages into a lengthy book, contextualising Blincoe’s experiences in great detail. It is true that the period with which it deals – the repressive political scene during and after the aftermath of the Napoleonic Wars, rising working-class agitation and the long push for the improvement of working conditions in factories – is a familiar tale. But Waller has plenty of narrative drive, as well as a fluent style, an eye for colourful detail and a formidable way with his primary sources: he has produced a lively piece of popular socio-political history. The real talking point in this book is, of course, the claim that Blincoe was the ‘real’ Oliver Twist, in the sense that Charles Dickens, when he was working on his novel in 1836, came across the Memoir and took over some of its details in developing the character and experiences of his workhouse boy hero. No reputable Dickensian biographer has given much credence to this, but Waller asserts that there are ‘many intriguing parallels’ between the two stories that make his case convincing. In truth, none of these ‘parallels’ amounts to much. Both boys were workhouse-reared, but Blincoe’s Alma Mater at St Pancras, while no holiday camp, was a well-run and humane institution by the prevailing standards. It was certainly not the horrific slave camp of Dickens’s flamboyant imagination. In any case, Blincoe left it at the age of seven for the industrial heartland of northern England, and never returned to the south. By contrast, Oliver Twist’s later story takes place exclusively in London and its outskirts. Its most memorable scenes are set in the rookeries of the East End, and the supporting cast, all the way from Fagin and the Artful Dodger to the bourgeois Brownlow and the Maylies, are Londoners born and bred. Waller notes that, according to the Memoir, little Blincoe, while still at St Pancras, was perversely attracted by the idea of becoming a chimney-sweeper’s boy, a fate which he escaped only by chance. Oliver Twist narrowly avoids the same fate. Yet apprenticing workhouse boys to this trade was too common a practice, as Dickens knew, for this to be more than coincidence. Waller also makes much of the fact that Blincoe may have believed that his parents were persons of consequence; that he may have been the son of a clergyman, and that this made him particularly resistant to knuckling under to oppressors. (He remembered being called ‘Parson’ as a child.) In his novel, Dickens makes it plain that Oliver is able to resist the temptations of Fagin’s gang because of the moral superiority conferred by his gentlemanly genes. Yet it is unknown how seriously Blincoe really believed this, and the description put into his mouth that ‘his veins coursed with a bluer blood than those of his fellow inmates’ is entirely Waller’s interpretation. In any case, the foundling who is really a prince is a folk-tale element too familiar to need a real-life source. Waller takes seriously the question why Dickens, with his putative knowledge of Blincoe’s life, ‘did not set the later parts of Oliver Twist’s life in a secluded cotton mill alongside a fictional river in northern England’. His answer is that perhaps Dickens had no time for his usual scrupulous research at the scene, so ‘it would not have been his style to follow his parish orphan there’. Surely a more parsimonious explanation of why Dickens stuck to the London streets is simply that he had never heard of Blincoe. If we are not afraid to enter the realm of pure speculation, a much better case could be made for Dickens having used Blincoe when he shaped the character of the saintly factory worker Stephen Blackpool in Hard Times (1854). Consider the many striking parallels. Hard Times is the only novel by Dickens set in the north of England that deals exclusively with the problems of industrialisation. Its hideous ‘Coketown’ is a representation of a Lancashire mill town, indistinguishable from the real places where Blincoe spent all his adult life. Both Stephen Blackpool and Blincoe are factory hands, speaking the same dialect; both are worn out by years of grim labour; both are superior samples of their class, both intellectually and morally; both refuse to kowtow to the bosses and are martyred accordingly; both suffer at the hands of brutal employers, personified by Bounderby and Gradgrind in the novel. These comparisons are specious, of course, but they may sound convincing to anyone who does not know how Dickens’s creative imagination worked. The Real Oliver Twist is a biography that can easily stand on its own merits. It is a mystery why Waller needed to persist with the claim that gives his book its catchpenny title. Could it be that his publisher persuaded him along this path of futile ‘what ifs’ to hook on to the publicity for Roman Polanski’s film of Oliver Twist?

Peter Morton

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