Do you believe Robert Blincoe was the real Oliver Twist?

Question

Do you believe Robert Blincoe was the real Oliver Twist?

Answer 1

I believe some part of it could be loosely based on Robert Blincoe's life. Because Charles Dickens often used his pen to make people aware of societal ills, the biography of Blincoe would, most likely, have had a profound effect on him. Some parts of the horrendous conditions experienced by Blincoe would have found their way into Dickens' novel. Charles Dickens does expose the true conditions of the so-called "charitable institutions" in Oliver Twist. Oliver and Robert do not have identical lives, however, outside the orphanage.

This is taken from an article by a descendant of Robert Blincoe: "Both Oliver Twist and the memoirs are polemical works, but their targets are different. Dickens was taking aim at the Poor Law. As the first, most strident chapters of Oliver Twist appeared in the magazine Bentley's Miscellany, they were immediately reprinted in the Times as part of an anti-Poor Law campaign. The target of The Memoirs of Robert Blincoe was indentured apprenticeships, a system that dated from Tudor times but had taken a new and darker turn with industrialisation. The northern cotton mills were water-powered, set in remote and under-populated countryside by fast-flowing streams. With too few candidates to work for them, the mill-owners looked to pauper children living in workhouses." If you want to read the entire article, check http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2005/sep...