Continuity and Change
In May 2014, The Express , a middle-market British daily newspaper, ran a brief feature based on a recently published book by Peter Higginbotham. The book was a popular, informative historical guide called The Workhouse Encyclopedia, and the title of the Express article was: âBefore welfare: True stories of life in the workhouseâ. The actual tone and content of the article was, however, far more evident from the strapline, which read: âBritainâs workhouses were so harsh they reduced their inmates to fighting over scraps of rotting meatâ.1 There then followed, in the Express feature, a series of lurid, and very familiar, accounts of hardship and cruelty involving cholera, gruel, stone-breaking and bone-grinding, pillories and stocks, and drunken masters seducing young female inmates. Yet, interspersed with these well-known cultural tropes, almost hidden beneath the copious tales of misery and woe, were some less familiar snippets, such as the fact that beer was freely available in some institutions, Christmas dinner consisted of baked veal and plum pudding, and (apparently) âmany workhouses made special provision for the inmates to pursue music as a hobbyâ. Nowhere could the deep ambivalence that characterises both our modern understanding of Victorian workhouses, and the attitudes of contemporaries towards them, be clearer. The appetite for stories and âtrueâ accounts of workhouse life has always been substantial, and it shows no sign of abating. Yet, it can (and, indeed, will) be argued that our expectations about precisely how these stories should read have tended to get in the way of an objective understanding of the lived experiences of the indoor poor in the nineteenth century. This book explores how this situation came about: it looks at how the workhouse came to be constructed in the public mind during, and even before, the nineteenth century; at the reasons why its reputation for cruelty and oppression has persisted for so long and has been so difficult to shift; and at the ways in which public debate about workhouses both informed, and was informed by, the experiences of workhouse paupers themselves. Our discussion covers the longue durĂ©e of workhouse history, from the enabling Acts of the early eighteenth century to the end of the Victorian period; but our main focus is the New Poor Law workhouse, possibly the most iconic institution of Victorian England and Wales, which emerged directly as a result of the reforms instituted by the 1834 Poor Law Amendment Act (PLAA).
At the heart of the New Poor Law were four changes that frame our book. First, the locus of welfare shifted from the parish to âunionsâ of parishes, and from largely amateur administrators to paid staff. More slowly and rather less smoothly than those behind the reforms intended, more than 15,000 parish administrations collapsed into some 620 union-centred structures. That is, the prospective and actually dependent poor would no longer know and inevitably have connections with the people who administered their welfare, something which the architects of 1834 hoped would generate a tightening of relief levels and attitudes towards eligibility. Secondly, the PLAA created a new central authority, the core function of which, once unions and their apparatus had been formed, was to bring much more uniformity to the administration of relief and local welfare practices than could ever have been the case under the Old Poor Law.2 Centrally appointed inspectors and auditors ranged over this New Poor Law landscape. Although their numbers and powers were never really sufficient to achieve the tasks envisaged for them in the PLAA, they were successful (in the short-term at least) in achieving a third aim of that act: restricting the diversity and scale of benefits offered to those who were granted relief while continuing to live in their own homes, so-called outdoor relief.3 Finally, and most importantly for our volume, the 1834 act established a moral case that welfare for groups such as the able-bodied should only be given through enforced residence in the workhouse, with labour tasks attached to benefits and at a standard that would make accepting such welfare less attractive than seeking low paid work outside, the so-called workhouse and labour âtestsâ. It is all too easy to overstate the speed with which new workhouse facilities were built, their capacity, the degree to which the able-bodied (as opposed to other vulnerable life-cycle groups such as the aged or sick) ended up in them, and the effectiveness and sustainability of less eligibility.4 We return to these issues later in the chapter. Nonetheless, the workhouse has, as we have said, become the iconic signal of the New Poor Law. Indeed, it is arguably the most emblematic institution of England and Wales in a period that we might characterise as the century of institutions. Against this backdrop, it is striking that the early work of Anne Crowther, touching on the nature and experience of workhouse life, has not resulted in an avalanche of studies on the workhouse or indeed the New Poor Law more widely.5 A small number of individual union studies, and David Greenâs totemic work on London, all of which stress the fragility of the 1834 reforms in different ways, have been more than balanced by a tendency for welfare historians to view the New Poor Law and its workhouses through the lens of scandal.6 Telling the stories of scandal almost inevitably involves seeing the workhouse as a grim stain, with incarceration, punishment, control and abuse at the heart of pauper and community experiences of the institution.7 Such perspectives meld seamlessly into early public commentary on New Poor Law workhouses (as we see below), but they are also founded on limited (often non-existent) engagement with the central archives of the poor law and particularly with the documents written by, on behalf of, or for the poor. These can offer welfare historians a first-hand (and alternative) sense of how ordinary people and their advocates experienced, understood and contested both the workhouse and the New Poor Law as a system. It is these themes that underpin the rest of this volume.
Here, in Chap. 1, we first look at the way attitudes to the workhouse developed in the long-term, arguing that the ambivalence and disquiet that characterised public discourse about the post-1834 institution cannot be understood without recognising that it had very long roots going back as far as the earliest incarnations of the deterrent workhouse. We then move on to consider the mechanisms by which this deep ambivalence blossomed in the mid-nineteenth century into an outpouring of public criticism in the popular press, and explore the relationship between that public dialogue and a growing âmovementâ for key reforms to workhouse administration and practice. Chapter 2 focuses on the work of one member of that âmovementâ, Joseph Rowntree of Leeds, who (like his more famous namesake) dedicated a large part of his life to social investigation and reform on behalf of the poor. This Joseph Rowntree has, until now, been entirely neglected in the literature. Yet his labours as an amateur workhouse inspector and reporter on the treatm...