The Real Oliver Twist

Highly readable rewrite of the rather unreadable biography of Robert Blincoe, a workhouse boy sold as an apprentice to the 'white slavery' of a cotton mill where he was severely abused and exploited. John Waller explains the background of parish politics, the rise of the cotton trade very clearly and is able to help people understand the period as well as sympathise with the tribulations of Robert Blincoe himself who, amazingly, became a small businessman himself and was an influential figure for the reform of factory work.

Robert Blincoe was a workhouse orphan who in 1799 at the age of 7 began an "apprenticeship" of some 14 years in cotton mills in appalling conditions that left him partially disabled for life. The core of this book is based around Blincoe's memoir, told to a radical journalist John Brown in the 1820s. Interspersed with what we know of Blincoe's life from that source, is well researched information from other sources bearing on his life and times, including an account of the factory reform movement and the long-running campaign for a maximum 10 hour working day which dominated the early decades of the 19th century. The book also traces what we know about Blincoe's later life as a fairly successful businessman who had overcome huge show more adversity, and recounts the lives of his children, especially his son Robert who was a popular clergyman.

The book contains accounts of the lives and actions of a wide range of personalities involved in the campaign to better the lives of children working in factories in the early industrial revolution, including radical journalists like John Brown, early trades unionists such as John Doherty, benign factory owners such as Robert Owen, and, within Parliament, figures like the Tory Lord Ashley (future Earl of Shaftesbury) who led many successful parliamentary campaigns for progressive social causes. One noteworthy point at the political level was how quite often it was Tories who were in the forefront of the campaigns for progressive legislation in Parliament, rather than Whigs (future Liberals), as one might expect from a modern viewpoint. Whigs were more closely identified with the rising class of industrialists like the mill owners, whereas there was a strain of paternalistic and romantic Toryism that saw the industrialists as upstarts interfering with the old fashioned relationship where a benevolent landowner at least decently looked after the workers and peasants on his estate, despite the huge gulf between them.

The title of the book stems from the possibility that the young Charles Dickens had read Blincoe's memoir before he wrote Oliver Twist; at the time he was also a Parliamentary reporter so would have been well aware of the debates around factory reform legislation. There is no direct evidence, but the events in Oliver's early life do match quite closely to those of Blincoe's. A closer literary link is with Frances Trollope's Michael Armstrong, the Factory Boy, which we know for a fact draws for its dramatic incidents on many features of the memoir - a pity that this novel has not achieved the fame of Dickens's masterpiece.

This is a great read about a key turning point in Britain's history, and one man's involvement in it as a victim but who also overcame adversity and made a decent life for himself and his family. show less

A good, if occasionally over the top history of mill children in "Merrie Olde England". Could use some redacting. How many pages of children suffering under the hands of cruel masters are necessary for the reader to understand the concept. This book proves one thing - Nothing has changed - the rich still beat on the poor any way they can to maximize their profits.