IT WAS good to read what some of the Andover College students think about Andover (20 March).

However students should carefully check facts and not believe everything they hear or read. It is a myth that Andover workhouse had anything to do with Charles Dickens’ novel Oliver Twist.

Dickens may have based the novel, which first appeared in 1837, on the Chatham workhouse which he called ‘Mudfog’. The novel was published several years before the Andover workhouse scandal of 1846.

Dr Clifford Williams, of Rooksbury Road, Andover