The real punishment that mirrors the novel

While researching a new book, Theresa Musgrove unearthed 1836 newspaper reports on Alice Shepherd, a pauper who endured starvation and solitary confinement within a workhouse in Hendon. Her offence, as a magistrate ruled, was daring to ask for permission to take a walk.

What the reports record about the victorian workhouse punishment she received:

• •Rev Theodore Williams, a magistrate and chair of the local board of guardians overseeing Hendon's old workhouse, recommended a punishment for her "disgusting conduct".
• •Shepherd, who had been "in a state of great agitation", was put in a "straightjacket".
• •She was placed in solitary confinement for 24 hours, then kept on a diet of bread and water until the next meeting of the board.
• •Another local magistrate and workhouse guardian failed in his defence of her, saying the thin, spare woman, apparently suffering from consumption, was the last person to whom such a punishment should have been inflicted.

Parallels with Oliver's gruel scene

In Oliver Twist, published in monthly instalments from 1837 to 1839, nine-year-old Oliver is hauled before a magistrate and locked in a dark and solitary room after asking, in the words "Please, sir, I want some more". The starving child was locked up for a week, and Dickens wrote that "Oliver was the victim of a systematic course of treachery and deception".

Musgrove, who names Shepherd as a probable oliver twist inspiration, said that reading the report of Shepherd's punishment felt almost word for word like a description of Oliver Twist being punished after asking for more.

She argues that the response to Oliver's "impertinence" in asking for more food is perhaps an echo of Alice daring to ask to go out for a walk. In her book, she also notes that both Oliver and Alice were subjected to solitary confinement, with Oliver's judged less severe because he could wash under a pump in the stone yard - a detail Rev Williams applied to Alice's room as well, which looked upon the yard where all the other paupers were.

The timing of Dickens's 'capital notion'

In mid-January, weeks after the Shepherd story was reported, Dickens wrote to his publisher Bentley that he had 'hit upon a capital notion for myself, and one which will bring Cruikshank out'. The first chapters of Oliver Twist followed in February 1837, illustrated by the starkly graphic work of George Cruikshank.

Hendon, in the present-day London borough of Barnet, appears in the novel itself, and Dickens's letters and journalism show knowledge of and fondness for the place. In the later stages of the story, after killing Nancy, Bill Sikes flees toward Hendon, but finding the people there suspicious of him, he returns to the Heath.

What scholars and the book say

Leon Litvack, professor of Victorian studies at Queen's University Belfast, said it was "perfectly feasible" that Dickens drew on Alice Shepherd, since newspapers were among an amalgam of influences on him early in his career. Dickens, he added, was a journalist before he was a novelist, fascinated by the workhouse and well aware of press coverage of particular abuses.

Musgrove's research also notes that Oliver Twist exposed the brutality of poverty in Victorian Britain, and that Dickens campaigned for social reform after his father was jailed for debt and he himself was sent to work in a blacking factory at about age 12. The full case appears in her book Charles Dickens and his Hidden Family History, published this week by Pen & Sword Books.