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Were all workhouses Dickensian? Indoor relief under the Old Poor Law (1601-1834) « Top of the Campops: 60 things you didn't know about family, marriage, work, and death since the middle ages

Top of the Campops: 60 things you didn't know about family, marriage, work, and death since the middle ages

Were all workhouses Dickensian? Indoor relief under the Old Poor Law (1601-1834)

Jeremy Boulton and Samantha Williams 

Ask most people about workhouses, and they will probably associate them with Dickens’s Oliver Twist (1837-8); that is, with grim Union Workhouses erected under the New Poor Law (1834) which supposedly produced segregated, oppressive, regimented institutions designed to deter all but the most desperate from applying for poor relief.  

Illustration by George Cruikshank from the workhouse scene, with Oliver Twist asking for more food.

The idea that workhouses were an invention of the New Poor Law, however, is yet another historical myth. As far back as the 16th century, there are scattered examples of parishes erecting buildings – sometimes called workhouses or perhaps poor houses where local poor could be cared for and/or made to work. A number of more elaborate experimental institutions were set up in the 17th century, particularly in towns and cities. Indeed, 15 large urban workhouses were established between the 1690s and the 1710s, including in London, Bristol, Exeter and Norwich. However, in England the first great age of workhouse construction was in the 18th century.  

Before the “New Poor Law” 

The passage of the socalled ‘Workhouse Test Act’ (1723) facilitated a wave of parochial workhouse foundations across England. Before that, under the Old Poor Law (1601-1834), most poor relief had been ‘outdoor’ relief, whereby moneys collected by overseers or collectors was redistributed in the form of cash payments to local poor in their own homes, as regular weekly or monthly ‘pensions’ (not confined to the elderly) or shorter-term cash doles.  

The new Workhouse Test’ meant that paupers could be denied parish poor relief if they refused to enter their local workhouse. The main idea behind the Act was, of course, to deter applications for parish poor relief – particularly by the able-bodied poor and thus reduce the local poor rate.

Once inside these new institutions, paupers who were able-bodied might be expected to work, for example spinning wool, beating hemp, pin making, or oakum picking; women might be engaged in housework, and men tending the workhouse garden. They would then receive food, basic medical care, and lodging 

It is important to note that the original Act only facilitated the erection of workhouses by providing a legal framework. This meant, firstly, that only a minority of England’s 9-10,000 parishes opted to set up workhouses, and secondly that (as sometimes happened) parishes were free to abandon them when parish elites found that, in practice, they were expensive, didn’t work to reduce local applications for poor relief, and were unpopular.  

The 1723 Act provided no template about the actual form that workhouses should take: there was no centralised direction, as there would be later under the New Poor Law. Workhouses in the 18th century thus took many different forms depending on local circumstances, from simple converted houses holding a just few local paupers, to huge purposebuilt structures that dominated the local town/city/landscape. Some large rural workhouses – called ‘houses of industry’ – were established from the 1760s, including those in East Anglia 

The old workhouse, Norwich. British Museum, museum number 1871,0610.628.

Further impetus to workhouse building came in 1782, when another Act of Parliament – the so-called Gilbert Act – allowed parishes to combine into unions to build them. These workhouses were aimed at the ‘impotent poor: the aged, children, and the sick and disabled.

Workhouse legislation was thus both over-lapping and contradictory, in that these workhouses were not aimed at deterring the poor. It is worth remembering here that even in parishes where workhouses were erected, outdoor relief invariably returned in some form within a few years of the institution opening its doors – if it ever went away. All this meant that parochial workhouses tended to fluctuate in size over time as the balance between indoor and outdoor relief varied in each parish according to local social policy and levels of hardship. Institutional provision might also vary between a workhouse and a poorhouse, the latter operating more like social housing by providing accommodation.  

How many workhouses were there before 1834?  

Returns to parliamentary enquiries show that something like 1,800 parishes used workhouses by 1776. By 1803 this figure had grown to 3,765 – about a quarter of all English and Welsh parishes. Most workhouses were small – the average size was only 22 persons – although those in urban areas or which served multiple parishes could be much larger.

The key point is that there was nothing new about workhouses when the New Poor Law was introduced in 1834. 

The Westminster parish of St George Hanover Square was one of London’s wealthiest. This plan of its workhouse c. 1725/30 (below) includes provision for the storage of food (salt and ‘small beer’), coal, and clothing, and envisaged the construction of a kitchen, ‘Wash-house or Laundry’, a brewhouse, a bakehouse and a central ‘Working Room’.

Elevation and ground plan of the workhouse on Mount Street, London, with a reference explaining what each room was used for. British Museum, Museum number Q,8.48.

Men and women were expected to dine separately. Sleeping arrangements were similarly segregated. As was the norm at this period, beds were shared so that total capacity was, in theory, 160 persons. The institution contained two charity schools and offices for parish officials and workhouse staff. The plan notes provision of materials for inmates to work on. Outside privies were provided in two yards. There was also provision for medical care. Many of the bigger workhouses provided sick wards or infirmaries either from the outset or soon afterwards, and these often became more elaborate – sometimes even separate buildings – over the 18th century.  

Over time workhouse buildings were altered, enlarged, reconfigured and sometimes entirely replaced as local needs changed. By 1799, a new detailed map of London shows that the St George’s workhouse was now a large rectangular structure, and by 1803 it was reported that it contained 708 persons – the second biggest in London at that time, and more than four times the capacity of the building envisaged in 1725. 

The local impact of Old Poor Law workhouses: benign institutions? 

How did these workhouses impact on inmates and the wider community? The English Old Poor Law itself was a revolutionary concept. Rather than rely on voluntary Christian charity to relieve the poor which was the usual practice in the rest of Europe from 1601 England established by statute compulsory local taxation known as the ‘poor rate’ levied on all those deemed able to pay. This unique poor relief strategy may be an important reason why the English population escaped the threat of famine much earlier than other European countries. But what impact did the introduction of workhouses have on this system of welfare?  

To begin with, where workhouses were set up, the poor often lost some of their previous access to the traditional cash dole. Instead, much of the money that would have previously gone directly to paupers went instead to maintaining them in the workhouse. Much of this cash thus went to local tradesmen who built, maintained and supplied the local workhouse. One reason why workhouses remained popular with parish elites – despite their relative expense – were the commercial opportunities they provided. There were local and statutory attempts to limit the resulting corruption. 

The question of the ‘generosity’ or otherwise of these new 18th-century workhouses is particularly important. This is because, as part of the ideological assault on the Old Poor Law in the late 18th and early 19th century, workhouses were often accused of over-generosity and wastefulness, and it was claimed that the Old Poor Law encouraged rather than discouraged feckless and immoral behaviour amongst the English poor.

One of the reasons New Poor Law workhouses were designed to be harsher than life outside was a response to the impression that Old Poor Law workhouses gave the poor – particularly the so-called able-bodied poor an easy ride. Over generous, ill-disciplined, poorly run institutions, it was thought by reformers, could not possibly act as a proper deterrent to those seeking poor relief. Nor could they inculcate proper work-discipline and appropriate behaviour.  

Was there any truth in such charges? To answer these questions historians have looked in detail at individual workhouses, reconstructing the lives of inmates. Rather than simply acting as a deterrent, it turns out that many poor families used workhouses to look after their children on a temporary basis, as a local hospital or hospice, and sometimes simply to get a bed for the night and a meal or two. Women tended to outnumber men. Although such cases were atypical, some local poor racked up huge numbers of short visits, as they drifted between cheap lodgings and workhouse wards.

Workhouses also came to play a significant role in the last days of the poor and elderly: in the parish of St Martin in the Fields in the second half of the 18th century, 40 percent of all female parishioners aged 60 or more died in its workhouse. 

Catharine Warman, a member of the ‘outdoor poor’ who never actually entered the workhouse. She wears the parish badge of St Martin’s on her upper arm. The British Museum, Asset Number 1613086138.

Catharine Warman (pictured above) was a member of the ‘outdoor poor’ and never actually entered the large parish workhouse of St Martin in the Fields, but she wears the parish badge on her arm. Catharine was celebrated as a ‘super centenarian’ at her death in 1755. She was not really 107 years at her death – she may, however, have been in her 90s when she died.All this is not to suggest, of course, that 18th-century workhouse inmates never suffered hardship and exploitation. However, on balance, the evidence is that these institutions were often very far from the nasty deliberately off-putting and hard-hearted institutions that Poor Law reformers pressed for – and celebrated after 1834.  

Life in a workhouse

18th-century workhouses were not prisons: they were highly porous institutions. Inmates often left without permission or escaped via open doors, out of windows, over the walls, or absconded whilst ‘on leave’. These were also ‘consensual’ institutions. Most were staffed largely by the poor themselves, who acted as nurses and porters: the number of salaried staff even in huge workhouses was tiny – that of St Martin’s in the Fields, one of the biggest in London in the late 18th century, had only a handful of on-site salaried staff who might find themselves managing as many as a thousand inmates at any one point in time. Without the cooperation or at the least the acquiescence of inmates, workhouses could not have functioned at all.  

The Workhouse, Poland Street, Soho: the interior. Coloured aquatint by T. Sunderland after A. C. Pugin and T. Rowlandson, 1809. Wellcome Collection.

The food and drink that was provided was usually as plentiful and varied as that consumed outside. Recent research reveals that the idea that workhouse diets were monotonous and that paupers were under-fed are also myths. Workhouse diets included some meat and fish, bread, butter and cheese, potatoes, broth and porridge, beer, a wide range of vegetables, beans and onions, thick vegetable soups called ‘pease-porridge’, and fruit. Some Georgian workhouses – like the huge one in St Martin’s in the Fields provided luxuries such as tobacco.  

All this is not to suggest, of course, that 18th-century workhouse inmates never suffered hardship and exploitation. However, on balance, the evidence is that these institutions were often very far from the nasty deliberately off-putting and hard-hearted institutions that Poor Law reformers pressed for – and celebrated after 1834.  

Further reading

  • Boulton, J., and Schwarz, L. ‘The Medicalization of a Parish Workhouse in Georgian Westminster: St Martin in the Fields, 1725-1824’. Family & Community History 17:2 (2014), 122-40.
  • Harley, J. ‘Material Lives of the Poor and Their Strategic Use of the Workhouse During the Final Decades of the English Old Poor Law’. Continuity & Change 30:1 (2015), 71-103.
  • Hitchcock, T. ‘Paupers and Preachers: The SPCK and the Parochial Workhouse Movement’. In L. Davison, T. Hitchcock, T. Keirn, and R. B. Shoemaker (eds.), Stilling the Grumbling Hive. The Response to Social and Economic Problems in England, 1689-1750 (Stroud; Alan Sutton, 1992), pp. 145-66.
  • Hitchcock, T.,  Howard, S., and Shoemaker, R., ‘Workhouses’. London Lives, 1690-1800.
  • Ottaway, S., and Mason, A. ‘Reconsidering Poor Law Institutions by Virtually Reconstructing and Re-Viewing an Eighteenth-Century Workhouse’. The Historical Journal 64:3 (2021), 557-82.
  • Ottaway, S. ‘The Elderly in the Eighteenth-Century Workhouse’. In J. Reinarz and L. Schwarz (eds.), Medicine and the Workhouse (Rochester NY; University of Rochester Press, 2013), pp. 40-57.
  • Shave, S. A. Pauper Policies. Poor Law Practice in England, 1780-1850 (Manchester; Manchester University Press, 2017).
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