Published: 9 February, 2012
by JOHN GULLIVER

WHAT better time for a literary spat than during the week of Charles Dickens’s 200th birthday!

As readers may know, the great writer lived in Cleveland Street, Fitzrovia, then known as Norfolk Street, during his youth.

This is where historian Ruth Richardson enters the fray.

And it all centres on an 18th-century building in Cleveland Street which she helped campaign to save from the bulldozers.

She claimed the building, then a workhouse, had been the inspiration for Dickens’ workhouse in Oliver Twist as he lived just a few yards from it.

This upset local residents who said all this was common knowledge – and that Richardson was going too far in her literary expedition.

The spat re-surfaces this week as Richardson’s new book, Dickens and the Workhouse, enters the bookshops.

A testy Richardson told me she had checked local archives and books on Dickens and no one had connected him with the workhouse.

She accused her detractors of “not reading my book”.

This is a spat Boz would have relished.

Town Hall: ‘Charles who?’

WHO doesn’t know all about the great Charles Dickens?

He is probably our most popular novelist, and as English as Shakespeare.

And this year is his 200th birthday!

Celebrations galore are taking place all over the place – except in Camden where the great man lived and worked.

Uniquely, he lived in or wrote about several parts of the borough – Greenland Place, Cleveland Street, Doughty Street and Covent Garden.

But all Camden Council can do is yawn.

No street parties, as in other parts of the capital, no special articles in the council’s magazine, not even a talk or a special press release!

Well, they are doing one thing.

“We are supporting the free self-guided walk in association with the Dickens Museum,” said the council’s press office.

“We host it from our Love Camden website so if you could direct people there it would be good.”

What more can be said!