The Workhouse

  

The following information should

 help with homework about the care of 

the poor in Victorian England

  

A typical days food in the workhouse

Look at the plan of a workhouse. Note how people were separated.

Women having dinner at the St Pancras workhouse in London in 1900

 

 The Victorians were very concerned with the growing number of people who were seeking poor relief. They believed that the poor could be split into two clear groups; the deserving poor (old and ill) and the undeserving poor (lazy and greedy).

They believed it was important to make any poor relief so harsh that only people who really needed it would apply. Conditions in the workhouses were terrible. Families were split up, men and women were kept apart and the idea was to keep everyone as busy as possible. Food was extremely poor and famous cases such as Andover workhouse in 1845, when people were witnessed fighting with each other for horse bones, to suck out the marrow eventually convinced ordinary people that things had gone too far.

WORKHOUSE REGULATIONS (1835)

The following offenses are to be punished:

* Making a noise when silence is ordered

*Using obscene language

* Refusing to work

*Pretending to be sick

* Climbing over the boundary wall of a workhouse

 

The limits to punishment are:

* No child under 12 years of age shall be punished by confinement in a dark room

* Only a schoolmaster will apply corporal punishment to a child under 12

*No corporal punishment to be inflicted on a girl

*No corporal punishment shall be inflicted on a child except than with a rod approved by the Guardians.