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Historian Ruth Richardson talks to BBC arts editor Will Gompertz about her new book on the discovery that, as a young man, Dickens lived only yards away from a major London workhouse. The discovery made headlines and led to a campaign to save the workhouse from demolition.

Richardson, affiliated scholar in the Department of History and Philosophy of Science, Cambridge, and visiting professor in humanities, Hong Kong University, did a lot of the detective work on the workhouse. She tells the story of the find and reveals how important the two periods spent living in this area of London were for Dickens’s writing career.