Historian links real woman’s treatment to Oliver Twist
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Historian Teresa Musgrove connected the case of Alice Shepherd, a young woman with tuberculosis, to the plot of Charles Dickens’s Oliver Twist.
Musgrove discovered newspaper reports from 1836 detailing Shepherd’s punishment in a London workhouse. Authorities isolated and starved Shepherd for requesting permission to take a walk, a decision made by a judge. Dickens published Oliver Twist in monthly installments from 1837 to 1839.
In the novel, the nine-year-old Oliver faces a judge and is imprisoned in a solitary room after asking for a second helping of soup. Newspaper accounts reveal that workhouse officials confined Alice Shepherd for 24 hours, providing only bread and water, after a decision by Reverend Theodore Williams due to her “reprehensible behaviour.” Another workhouse board member attempted unsuccessfully to defend Shepherd, arguing that the “frail woman who appeared to suffer from tuberculosis” should not have received such a punishment.
Musgrove noted the parallels between Shepherd’s treatment and the scene in Dickens’s novel, stating the accounts were “almost, word for word, identical” to the description of Oliver’s punishment. Dickens, a former journalist, often drew inspiration from news reports, particularly early in his career.
