The Cambridge Group for the History of Population and Social StructureJeremy 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.