How gruelling was the workhouse?
"Tory spending cuts send us back to the misery of the Victorian workhouse,” cried a Mirror headline in 2010. Workhouses were “bleak, grimly austere and oppressive”, wrote the author of a study of one local institution in 2012. Ever since Dickens’ Oliver Twist began publication in 1837, the establishment he described, and numerous on-screen representations of it, have become the filter through which the institution is invariably viewed. Portrayals of the workhouse habitually take it as read that it was unremittingly horrific, harsh and dehumanising. But was it really that bad?
The Victorian workhouse first came about as a result of the 1834 Poor Law Amendment Act. This act transferred the administration of poor relief from individual parishes to a coordinated national system based on new groupings of parishes, known as Poor Law Unions. Each union, run by a locally elected Board of Guardians, provided a workhouse to serve the whole union area. For the able-bodied destitute and their dependants, the workhouse was intended to be the only help on offer. The operation of the New Poor Law was overseen by a central authority –originally the Poor Law Commission (PLC), later the Poor Law Board (PLB) and then the Local Government Board (LGB).
It’s often assumed that was set in one of the new union workhouses, or “bastilles”, as critics such as MP and journalist William Cobbett labelled them. However, it is clear that it was actually located in one of the pre-1834 parish-run establishments, where there was no uniformity in matters such as work or diet.
