The Victorian Era

What Were Victorian Workhouses Like?

Article · History & Overview · The Victorian Era, 1837–1901

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The Victorian workhouse was the institution to which the very poor could be sent under the New Poor Law of 1834. The workhouse was the centrepiece of the new system of poor relief that replaced the old system of outdoor relief, and it was one of the most controversial institutions of the Victorian era. The workhouse was designed to be a place of last resort, in which the able-bodied poor would be housed, fed, and set to work in conditions that were less comfortable than those of the independent labourer outside. The system was administered by boards of guardians, elected by the ratepayers, and the workhouse buildings were designed by a generation of architects, including George Gilbert Scott and his contemporaries, in a distinctive style that has been called the pauper baroque. The history of the workhouse is examined in The Victorian Economy and Industrialization and in Victorian Society, Class, and Daily Life. The broader historical setting is set out in The Victorian Era: A Complete Historical Overview.

The Origins of the Workhouse

The workhouse had its origins in the old poor law, the system of poor relief that had been in place since the Elizabethan poor laws of 1601. Under the old poor law, the poor of each parish were relieved by a combination of outdoor relief, the workhouse, the apprenticeship system, and the settlement laws. The workhouse under the old system was a small parish institution, often little more than a converted house, and it was used only for the most desperate cases. The outdoor relief, paid in cash or in kind, was the principal form of poor relief, and it was supplemented by allowances to supplement low wages, known as the Speenhamland system after the Berkshire village where the practice was established in 1795.

The New Poor Law of 1834 was the response of the government to the perceived abuses of the old system. The architects of the new law, including the Poor Law Commissioners Edwin Chadwick, George Nicholls, and Nassau Senior, believed that the old system had encouraged pauperism by providing relief to the able-bodied, and that the new system should make relief less attractive than work. The new law abolished outdoor relief for the able-bodied, except in a few well-defined circumstances, and it made the workhouse the only form of relief for the able-bodied poor. The new law also established the principle of less eligibility, which held that conditions in the workhouse should be less attractive than conditions of the poorest independent labourer.

The Architecture of the Workhouse

The workhouses built under the New Poor Law were a distinctive architectural type. The largest workhouses were built to standard plans issued by the Poor Law Commissioners, and they typically had a central administrative block, with a master and a matron, and a series of wings in which the different classes of inmates were housed. The men, the women, the boys, the girls, the aged, the infirm, and the able-bodied were all kept strictly separate, and the buildings were designed to make this separation visible. The dining halls, the workrooms, the dormitories, the yards, the receiving wards, and the schoolrooms were all laid out on a strict plan, and the architecture itself was designed to communicate the moral seriousness of the institution.

The architecture of the workhouse has been compared to the architecture of the prison, the asylum, and the barracks, and the comparison is illuminating. The workhouse, like these other institutions, was designed to be a controlled environment, in which the inmates were subject to a strict regime of work, prayer, and discipline. The workhouse master, the workhouse matron, the workhouse chaplain, the workhouse medical officer, and the workhouse schoolmaster were the principal officers of the institution, and they were responsible for the discipline of the inmates. The cultural history of the workhouse is examined in Victorian Literature, Theatre, and the Written Word.

Life Inside the Workhouse

Life inside the workhouse was harsh. The inmates were woken early, fed a sparse diet, set to work at a range of tasks that included picking oakum (unravelling old rope for reuse), breaking stones for road-building, turning the crank, and grinding corn, and locked in their dormitories at night. The diet was deliberately unappealing, with thin gruel, bread, suet pudding, and a small amount of meat forming the staple fare. The clothing was uniform, the discipline was strict, and the rules were inflexible. The workhouse was, in short, a place of last resort, and the designers of the system had intended it to be exactly that.

The reality of the workhouse, however, was more complicated than the theory. The workhouse accommodated not only the able-bodied poor but also the aged, the infirm, the sick, the mentally ill, the orphaned, and the deserted wives and children. The workhouse was, in many cases, the only institution that would take these people, and the workhouse authorities were often forced to make concessions to the realities of the cases before them. The diet was often more generous than the rules required, the work was often less onerous than the rules required, and the discipline was often more flexible than the rules required. The history of poor relief in the period is examined in Victorian Morality and Social Reform.

The Scandals

The workhouse system was marked by a series of scandals. The most notorious was the Andover scandal of 1845, in which it was discovered that the inmates of the Andover workhouse in Hampshire, set to the task of crushing bones for fertiliser, had been reduced to gnawing the marrow from the bones and fighting the rats for scraps. The scandal was exposed by a letter from Reverend Benjamin Symons, the workhouse chaplain, to the Morning Chronicle in February 1846, and led to the resignation of several Poor Law Commissioners. The Cosford scandal of 1866 revealed systematic brutality and starvation of elderly inmates at the Cosford workhouse in Suffolk, and led to the establishment of the Local Government Board in 1871, which took over from the Poor Law Commissioners. The 1842 report of the Royal Commission on the Condition of the Poorer Classes in Ireland described conditions in the Irish workhouses that were widely held to be as bad as any in England.

The Workhouse in Literature and Memory

The workhouse was one of the most important settings in Victorian literature. Charles Dickens, the novelist of the period, used the workhouse in several of his novels, including Oliver Twist (1837 to 1839), in which the young Oliver spends his early years in a workhouse, and A Christmas Carol (1843), in which the spectre of the workhouse is a constant threat. The workhouse also appears in the novels of Elizabeth Gaskell, the novels of Benjamin Disraeli, and the novels of Charles Kingsley. The literary treatment of the workhouse was often critical, and it contributed to the gradual reform of the institution. The history of the novel in the period is examined in The Victorian Novel.

The workhouse has also become a part of the popular memory of the Victorian era. The workhouse, with its harsh regime, its bleak buildings, and its grim reputation, has come to symbolise the worst aspects of the Victorian approach to poverty. The workhouse is, in popular memory, a place of cruelty, of callousness, and of social exclusion. The memory of the workhouse has been kept alive by the survival of many workhouse buildings, several of which have been converted into flats, hospitals, museums, and other uses, and by the continued scholarly interest in the institution.

The Reform of the Workhouse

The workhouse was gradually reformed in the late Victorian period. The system was criticised by the Charity Organisation Society, the settlement movement, the social investigators, and the new social scientists. The Royal Commission on the Poor Laws, appointed in 1905 and reporting in 1909, produced a unanimous Majority Report and a Minority Report that disagreed over the solution. The Majority Report, signed by the chair Lord George Hamilton and the majority of the commissioners, concluded that the workhouse system was a failure and should be abolished; the Minority Report, signed by the socialist Beatrice Webb and others, advocated a comprehensive system of social welfare. The Local Government Act of 1929 finally abolished the workhouse system, and the workhouse buildings were gradually converted to other uses. The history of social reform in the period is examined in Victorian Morality and Social Reform.