Please Sir, may I have some MORE!

First, sorry for being a bit late with this posting, but it has been a busy week here at Harlaxton. Among other things, yours truly participated in the annual Harlaxton Variety Show last evening along with about a dozen students, as well as three children of visiting faculty here for the term. It was a grand evening, music, comedy, dancing, etc., held in the Great Hall. We did a couple of John McCutcheon tunes that were very well received (if we do say so ourselves).

Anyway, on Tuesday, the entire school was taken over to The Southwell Union Workhouse, a particularly stark reminder of the official attitudes of the Victorians to those less fortunate members of society who had no job or were in some way prevented from working--age, disability, an economic downturn, things like that. If you have ever read Dickens, watched "A Christmas Carol" on TV,  or seen the musical "Oliver" you will know what I am talking about.

Southwell was actually built in 1824, a decade before the passage of the new Poor Law, ("You're poor, boy. That's why we have poor laws in the country!") which completely revamped the way those in need were to be handled. Its setup was used as a model for the "reform" measure passed in1834. Since the last poor laws had been set up in 1601 when Good Queen Bess was still on throne more than 230 years before, we're thinking that it was probably time for a little tinkering, wouldn't you?

From the outside the facility looks pretty solid and imposing, but not particularly odious.

But behind those walls, there was a whole system of treatment designed to make life in the workhouse so odious  and distasteful that people would do literally anything to avoid having to come to the workhouse.

To understand the system however, you need to know that the Victorians charitably made a distinction between the "deserving" and the "undeserving" poor. The deserving poor were those who through no fault of their own--old age, disability, widowhood, abandoned children--were forced to seek assistance from the state. The undeserving poor were any able-bodied man, woman, or teenage child who couldn't find work. Poverty for these people was seen as a moral failing, i.e. the fact that they had no job was the result of the fact that they just would not go out and get a job because they were no-good layabouts who were just waiting for the benefits to roll in. Unfortunately, there are those in America today who seem to have about the same opinion. Amazing, sometimes, to think how far we have NOT come. Economic conditions--downturns, depressions, bank panics, etc. (financial meltdowns brought on by toxic lending practices)--were never excuses for not having a job.

So, as I said,  the whole point behind the Poor Law of 1834, then, was to make public assistance so odious and distasteful that people would do virtually anything to avoid going to the Workhouse, that public assistance was to be the very LAST option. For example, workhouses were strictly segregated by sex, i.e. men and women--even if married--were forced to live in separate parts of the workhouse. Children were placed in another area away from both their parents. If you were able-bodied, you worked and menial tasks all day or even and tasks that had no point at all except to keep you busy, i.e. like an army fatigue. Rules were strictly enforced.

This particular workhouse could handle up to about 160 people for which there was one privy for each sex--a hole in the ground--and one water pump for each sex in their respective workyards.

The chap holding the clipboard was our guide from the National Trust. He often does this in costume as one of the inmates (and I use that term deliberately as these places were very little better than prisons). Suffice it to say that it was a very sobering experience for the students and your faithful blogster. Also, admittedly a great treat as we are a scholar of the Victorian Era and knew a fair amount about the workhouse system but had never visited one. If you want additional info on this whole era, check out Edwin Chadwick's Poor Law Report to Parliament in 1834, or Friedrich Engels (yes, that Engels) Condition of the English Working Class published in 1844. Or, just read more Dickens!