Was the remarkable Robert Blincoe The Real Oliver Twist?
[ UniNews Vol. 15, No. 3
6 - 20 March 2006 ]
By John Waller
An early 19th century child apprentice who might have provided the model for Charles Dickens’s fictional character Oliver Twist, is the focus of a new book, The Real Oliver Twist, by University of Melbourne history lecturer Dr John Waller. The child, Robert Blincoe, withstood – at lasting physical cost – horrific conditions and treatment familiar to thousands of others like him. He fought free to eventually run a business, raise a family, and become a hero to thousands of working men and women. Dr Waller’s account draws on a priceless memoir of Blincoe’s life which he encountered during research into the health of early 19th century child apprentices. His book has met wide acclaim: “Waller’s book combines a gripping story with a historian’s attention to detail and context. ... The Real Oliver Twist is history approaching its best.” The Australian (Feb 18, 2006); “This is not mannered, detached history ... but an outraged, relieved, vengeful, openly cheering and mightily engaged piece of scholarship.” The Age (January 28, 2006); “Waller’s well-written and fiercely argued narrative is a persuasive reminder of the merits of periodical revisits to the familiar … [He] writes with a passion and flair which commands the reader’s attention.” Times Literary Supplement; and “A remarkable narrative ... easy to read ... Waller carries his scholarship lightly.” Times Educational Supplement (Book of the week). Dr Waller outlines here Blincoe’s amazing story.
London, August 1799. Thirty children filed past a line of parish beadles and into the gloom of two horse-drawn wagons. Minutes later they were being thrown about as the vehicles’ unsprung wheels bumped over ruts, rocks and other debris on the coaching road that stretched north from the ancient parish of St Pancras. Sons and daughters of parish paupers, these children were destined for a cotton-spinning mill a few miles outside Nottingham. Their native parish had signed them over to the mill’s owners, Messrs Lambert, until they reached the age of 21.
Despite the nausea and discomfort, the children were in high spirits. For they had been told that their new masters would give them ‘roast beef and plum pudding’ every night, ‘plenty of cash’ and even allow them to ride their horses. These poor cast-offs, average age just 11, were expecting to be transformed into pampered ladies and gentlemen.
We know of the parish’s cynical wheeze, and what happened next, courtesy of a remarkable and priceless historical document, a memoir of one of the St. Pancras rejects called Robert Blincoe. Its title is: A Memoir of Robert Blincoe, An Orphan Boy; sent from the workhouse of St. Pancras, London, at seven years of age, to endure the Horrors of a Cotton-Mill, through his infancy and youth, with minute detail of his sufferings.
First published in instalments in 1828 and then as a pamphlet in 1832, this is arguably the first English working class biography. As such, it provides us with rare insight into the lives of the labouring poor at a time when cotton mills were springing up in hundreds of remote English valleys. And it tells the remarkable story of a man consigned by poverty and bastardy to the lowest caste of the age, who nonetheless managed to make himself heard.
Parish bastards in Georgian England usually vanished without trace, perishing on the gallows, in gaol, on the streets, or amidst the calculated squalor of the workhouse. But Robert Blincoe had the good fortune to meet John Brown, a Lancashire-born Radical. Brown’s tormented mental state gave him a deep sympathy for others in pain. And he empathised with such keenness that he was able to do something truly timeless. He wrote the biography of a young man hailing from a class whose sufferings were below the notice of the vast majority of those with the freedom and the education to write.
The Memoir that Brown wrote in 1822 and 1823, a few years before his tragic suicide, began its account in 1794 when Blincoe, aged four, was dumped at the parish workhouse in Camden. Blincoe was never to see his family again. As the Memoir movingly explains, there followed five years of terrible emotional deprivation, during which he seized at every opportunity to escape the filth, the overcrowding and the ubiquitous vermin of the workhouse.
In 1799 his prayers were finally answered when he was sent, with 29 other boys and girls, to work for Messrs Lambert. It was because stories of abuse and overwork in the mills were by now widespread that the parish authorities, desperate to save money, resorted to the expedient of promising the children gentility if they would only hurry along and climb aboard the wagons. And so in August 1799 they set off without incident. But the children’s innocent imaginings were en route for a cruelly bruising encounter with reality.
The Memoir of Robert Blincoe charts the appalling ill-treatment and malnutrition Blincoe had to endure first at the hands of the Lamberts in Nottingham and then at the whim of perhaps the most callous boss of the early factory age, Ellis Needham of Litton in Derbyshire.
At Lowdham, Blincoe explained, he was constantly “spotted as a leopard with bruises”. But at Litton he looked back almost fondly on the Lamberts’ regime. Under Ellis Needham’s rule, if the children were too slow, clumsy, or even just happened to be there, they were flogged with belts, the metal buckles cutting into flesh; they had heavy metal rollers hurled at their heads, occasionally cracking against skulls and causing bleeding, bruising and severe swelling; they were lifted up by the ears and hurled to the ground having been shaken violently; they were forced to eat dirty pieces of candle, tobacco spittle, and to open their mouths for the overlookers to spit into; they had sharp nails dug into their ear lobes; they had hand-vices screwed to their ears; and they even had their teeth filed so as, guffawed the manager, they “may’st eat thy Sunday dinner the better.” All this came on top of working 17 hour days, on a diet consisting of water porridge, occasional turnips and a few maggoty rice-balls.
At times John Brown’s account sounds almost too extreme to be believed. But there is plenty of evidence to corroborate it. And when Blincoe left Litton his legs were buckled, his shoulders unnaturally narrow, his eyes were deep-set through anxiety and malnutrition, he walked with difficulty, and scars like seams ran across his head and ears. In trying to turn cotton into gold, some early factory masters – like Ellis Needham – ruined hundreds of young lives. But while emotionally damaged, Blincoe’s character somehow remained unbroken.
Robert Blincoe was a victim of faceless historical forces out of his power to control or divert. But he was no ordinary parish orphan. Unwilling to accept the regime of abuse at Lowdham and Litton mills, he had repeatedly escaped in search of justice. Emboldened by the simple belief that it could not be lawful for a master to beat, starve and torture children, nor for them to be made to work seven days a week for as many as 17 hours a day, he took his case to local magistrates. Risking his life, Blincoe traversed miles of moorland in search of squires with the conscience to intervene.
The source of Blincoe’s self-belief is hard to identify. After all, early lives bereft of parental love but rich in discipline and disdain robbed most young orphans of the self-respect required to protest. Where did Blincoe’s self-respect come from? The Memoir tells us that workhouse gossips said he was the bastard son of a clergyman. If Blincoe believed this rumour, then it is possible that he always felt that as the son of a parson he deserved better.
Either way, Blincoe’s strength of character paid dividends. Alarmed by this young man’s rare determination and his keen sense of justice, during the last years of his apprenticeship his overlookers spared him the rod. He finally left Litton in the summer of 1814 and made his way to Manchester. And it was there that Blincoe managed to turn his life around. Till then he’d been one of the many losers from the factory age. Now, thanks to a mixture of ability, good luck and his sheer determination to avoid the workhouse, Blincoe seized the new opportunities and started his own cotton business.
By the time the Memoir appeared in pamphlet form, he was an independent man, a benevolent employer and a devoted father of three children. But the Memoir’s publication also made him into a hero for thousands of working men and women who read of his terrible sufferings and doubtless relished Brown’s – entirely accurate – account of how Ellis Needham was eventually brought to ruin.
Blincoe rose to his celebrity. As The Real Oliver Twist relates, he took a lead role in the campaign to reduce the length of the child’s working day, he gave eloquent testimony to a physician appointed by a Royal Commission to investigate factory conditions, his story formed the basis of Fanny Trollope’s 1840 novel, Michael Armstrong, Factory Boy, and there is even reason to believe that it inspired the opening chapters of Dickens’ Oliver Twist.
But Blincoe’s greatest triumphs were closer to home. He and his wife, through hard work and abstemiousness, sent their children to decent schools, saving them from factory drudgery. Blincoe’s eldest daughter worked in the family shop and his younger daughter married into a family of wealthy manufacturers. Most spectacular of all, his son went up to Cambridge University and became a much-admired London cleric who attracted famously large congregations. Few could have imagined that the self-confident, well-spoken and erudite minister who preached from the pulpit of St. Luke’s and served as the honorary chaplain to the local workhouse was the son of a parish bastard.
As he lay dying in 1860, on clean sheets and with physicians in attendance, his father was entitled to feel proud of all that he had accomplished. As his direct descendant, the Shakespeare scholar G B Harrison, summed up: Blincoe truly was “a most remarkable young man.”
Dr John Waller is a lecturer in the University’s Department of History and Philosophy of Science and the Centre for Health and Society.
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