Charles Dickens is London’s greatest biographer. Our city is a continual backdrop for his novels, or is even a co-star, one half of his Tale of Two Cities. He was not only an author, but a social campaigner who cared deeply about its citizens, especially the poor — a theme embedded in most of his books from Oliver Twist to David Copperfield. It’s no surprise then that he was an early supporter of the ragged school movement, schools set up for those children who are “too ragged, wretched, filthy and forlorn to enter any other place”. In late summer 1843 he visited Field Lane Ragged school, and it inspired him to write A Christmas Carol that same winter.
The ragged school movement had begun in the late 18th century when a few free schools were set up for poor children in towns across the country, but things were still sufficiently bad to change the life of a young trainee doctor, freshly arrived from Dublin in 1866. What Thomas Barnardo saw in this city shocked him: the slums, particularly in the east, were rife with cholera and other diseases; these, alongside poor nutrition and unsanitary living conditions, led to a death rate that left many children without their parents, struggling to survive. His solution was to abandon his studies, although he always used the title Dr, and set up schools and homes for vulnerable children. By the time of his death in 1905, Thomas had established 96 homes caring for 8,500 children.
