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A Christmas Carol in 1843 was affected by the turbulence surrounding the updated system dealing with the poor – the poor laws passed in 1834.
In A Christmas Carol there is this confrontation between 2 men who want Scrooge to give a donation to the poor at Christmas:
‘At this festive season of the year, Mr. Scrooge,’ said the gentleman, taking up a pen, ‘it is more than usually desirable that we should make some slight provision for the Poor and Destitute, who suffer greatly at the present time. Many thousands are in want of common necessaries; hundreds of thousands are in want of common comforts, sir.’
‘Are there no prisons?’ asked Scrooge.
‘Plenty of prisons,’ said the gentleman, laying down the pen again.
‘And the Union workhouses?’ demanded Scrooge. ‘Are they still in operation?’
‘They are. Still,’ returned the gentleman, ‘I wish I could say they were not.’
‘The Treadmill and the Poor Law are in full vigour, then?’ said Scrooge.
The expression “the Poor Laws” usually refers to two main laws: the Old Poor Law, as developed in the first Queen Elizabeth’s reign and codified in 1601, and the New Poor Law which was introduced by the
1834 Act as part of a wave of reforming legislation introduced by the Whig Government in the wake of the Great Reform Act.
However, although the first traces of Poor Law legislation can be detected in Edward III’s reign, it was the dissolution of the monasteries in 1536, removing as it did a major source of voluntary charitable relief, that accentuated the need to raise money for the relief of the poor through some form of mandatory local tax. In London the first compulsory Poor Rate was introduced in 1547 (thereby replacing Sunday collections in Church), and the first House of Correction was initiated in 1553. This institution, housed off Fleet Street in the former royal palace at Bridewell, did double duty as a place where poor children might receive shelter and work opportunities and to which justices could send the disorderly poor for punishment after a fairly summary process
Further legislation then followed in fits and starts until the Act for the Relief of the Poor Act 1597 represented the first Parliamentary attempt to codify the system. By this Act every parish had to elect two Overseers of the Poor, whose unpaid labors were under the supervision of a local justice of the peace. Four years later the Elizabethan Poor Law 1601[3] first introduced the concept of relief being available for the “deserving poor”. It also created the arrangements by which a parish might pay occupiers of property (local farmers, for instance) to employ applicants for relief at a pre-fixed wage that was dependent on the applicant’s needs and not on the value of the work done. The parish would then reimburse the employer out of the poor rate for any wages he advanced in excess of a certain sum. This was known as “the roundsman system”.
At that time the parish was the main unit of local government. It was an ecclesiastical unit, based on the parish church. There used to be about 15,000 parishes in England and Wales, and each parish was given the power to raise a poor rate. Under the 1601 Act parents and children were responsible for each other if they were deemed capable of accepting this responsibility, and elderly parents were required to live with their children. Those who were too ill or too old to work (the so called “impotent poor”) were provided with relief in the form of payments of money or items of food or clothing. Alms houses for old people were for the most part private charitable institutions, although some of them were owned and run by the parishes. Able-bodied beggars would be placed in a House of Correction if they were offered work and refused to do it: they might even be subjected to beatings in an effort to alter what were perceived to be their work-shy attitudes.
The next 200 years saw a number of changes being made. Some parishes clubbed together to build a local workhouse for the poor, and there was also a growth in the establishment of Houses of Correction after the Bridewell model
By the end of the 18th century nearly 2,000 parish and corporation workhouses had been established, and about a million people were in receipt of some kind of parish poor relief. The cost of implementing the Old Poor Laws fell on the property-owning upper and middle classes, and ways were being sought to mitigate their burden.
The Poor Law was the way that the poor were helped in 1815. The law said that each parish had to look after its own poor. If you were unable to work then you were given some money to help you survive. However, the cost of the Poor Law was increasing every year. By 1830 it cost about £7 million and criticism of the law was mounting.
- The money was raised by taxes on middle and upper class people, causing resentment. They complained that money went to people who were lazy and did not want to work.
- Critics also suggested that allowance systems made the situation worse because they encouraged poor people to have children that they could not afford to look after.
- Another criticism of the old Poor Law was that it kept workers’ wages low because employers knew that wages would be supplemented by money provided by the Poor Law.
The Poor Law system was now coming under increasing fire for distorting the operation of the free market. By 1820 more workhouses were being built in an attempt to reduce the spiraling cost of poor relief, and ten years later matters came to a head when widespread rioting by agricultural laborers accelerated the pressure for reform. When political reform was advocated as a means of reducing popular unrest, the Duke of Wellington, who was then Prime Minister, responded to the effect that the existing constitution was so perfect that he could not imagine any possible alternative that would be an improvement. The London mob responded by breaking the windows of his London townhouse.
The Commission suggested two principles that should guide the preparation of the laws needed to combat these evils, although neither was carried into legislation in a purist form. The first was the principle of “less eligibility”[6], whereby a pauper ought to be confined in a workhouse which provided conditions worse that those being endured by the poorest free laborer outside it. The other was “the workhouse test”. This was founded on a belief that the deserving and the undeserving poor could be distinguished by a simple test: anyone prepared to accept relief in a repellent workhouse must be lacking the moral determination to survive outside it. The Commissioners’ aim, in short, was to create a system of workhouses that were so uninviting that anyone who was capable of coping with life outside them would never choose to live in one instead.
The Poor Law (Amendment) Act of 1834, otherwise known as the ‘New’ Poor Law, established the workhouse system. The self-avowed purpose of the Act was to reduce the burden of poor relief on rate-payers
Instead of providing a refuge for the elderly, sick and poor, and instead of providing food or clothing in exchange for work in times of high unemployment, workhouses were to become a sort of prison system. The government’s intention was to slash expenditure on poverty by setting up a cruelly deterrent regime. The old parish poorhouses and almshouses were to be completely changed, no cash support whatever would henceforth be given out – whatever the hardship or the season – and the old gifts in kind (food, shoes, blankets) which could help a family survive together, were now disallowed. The only option would be hard work, forced labor, and only inside the workhouse (which meant entering there to live, full time) in exchange for a thin subsistence. Homes were broken up, belongings sold, families separated.
Groups of parishes – called Poor Law Unions – were formed under the new system, and a network of workhouses was established across the country. They were run by ‘Guardians’ who were usually local business people. The regime inside these places was deliberately intended to deter everyone but the most desperate. Children were separated and sent away, heads were shaved, clothes boiled, uniforms issued. Although centrally-controlled through the Poor Law Board, each workhouse was administered locally
Dickens shows that the administration was run by self-satisfied and heartless men: the ‘man in the white waistcoat’ personifies the smug viciousness of the guardians in Oliver Twist’s workhouse (ch. 2).[ This is likely to have been something Dickens knew about: he had probably reported on such matters in London, and many accurate details in Oliver Twist show that Dickens did a lot of research before he wrote the story. It is true that the workhouse system was patchy: in some places – especially in parts of the North of England – more charitable notions among the ‘guardians’ of the poor meant that management could be kinder. In general, though, the system was harsh and austere. The poor – even if sick, old or dying – were treated punitively, as if their predicament was entirely of their own making, and they were deserving of punishment. This was at a time when there was no National Health Service to help the sick get well, no pension scheme to help the elderly remain at home, no unemployment pay for people with no work, no social services at all for those in need.
The workhouse system was hated, and people did everything they could to avoid becoming subject to it, so those who ended up there were either the most vulnerable, or the most hardened and brazen. Sadly, these groups were often housed in the same wards. Charitable hospitals generally refused access to those suffering from chronic (incurable) conditions, dying patients, and paupers. So workhouse inmates were often people whose medical conditions were regarded as hopeless at the time, and whose social status debarred them from other kinds of help. The Victorian Poor Law system effectively warehoused people the Nazis would have liked to liquidate: the sick, elderly and infirm, people who were chronically ill or incurable, physically deformed, diseased, maimed, lunatic, demented or mentally handicapped
The poor became scared of the threat of having to move into a workhouse for help. In north England they rioted and attacked workhouses. Many people thought that the act was wrong as it seemed to punish people who were poor through no fault of their own, for example the sick or the old.
Many local officials felt that the old system worked well as it was. The taxes that people had to pay to look after the poor were low and the system was adapted to the local area. Many were also unhappy with what they saw as interference by people from London.
Dickens’s personal experience
Most people nowadays know about the Poor Law and its workhouses from Oliver Twist – whether from the book, film or the musical. The image of the skinny neglected little boy asking for more has become a classic. For Charles Dickens writing a novel about the Poor Law was a thoughtful intervention in a contemporary national debate. You can hear in his tone of voice – occasionally heavy with satire or irony – that he regarded the Poor Law as profoundly un-Christian.
Dickens was only 25 when he started writing Oliver Twist in the winter of 1836–37. Because of his own life-experience he understood that accidents of birth or circumstance could make ordinary individuals vulnerable to desperation, hunger, cruelty and crime. His secret (which was only revealed after his death) was that when he was a child, his own family had been imprisoned in a debtors’ prison. However terrible that experience was for him – and it marked him for life – he knew it was actually preferable to being incarcerated in a workhouse. In a debtors’ prison, the family was at least allowed to remain together.
The Dickens family had also twice lived only doors from a major London workhouse (the Cleveland Street Workhouse), so they had most likely seen and heard of many sorrowful things. The family’s lodgings were above a food shop, and it is quite possible that young Dickens felt deeply sensitive about the suffering he knew was going on inside the institution close by. As an adult, Dickens knew that he himself had been fortunate to avoid a fate like Oliver Twist’s.
Dickens intended Oliver Twist, first published in monthly instalments between February 1837 and April 1839, to show the system’s treatment of an innocent child born and raised in the workhouse system, where no ‘fault’ could be ascribed to the child. He shows the boys neglected, ill-treated, and experiencing hunger so bad that one child threatens to eat one of the others if he isn’t better fed. Oliver has the temerity to ask for more food only because the hungry boys had cast lots to decide who would have to do it – and he had drawn the short straw. In the famous illustration by George Cruikshank, the poor orphan Oliver stands utterly alone – with the fearful threat of cannibalism right behind him, and facing him, the bully of a workhouse master preparing to unleash his powers of retribution. The pauper woman helper in the background recognizes the danger of what Oliver has done, throwing up her hands in horror.
The description of Oliver’s punishments for his request – a natural entreaty from a growing boy – occupies quite a chunk of the following chapter. The sheer brutality of the system is exposed. Oliver is maligned, threatened with being hanged, drawn and quartered; he is starved, caned, and flogged before an audience of paupers, solitarily confined in the dark for days, kicked and cursed, hauled up before a magistrate and sent to work in an undertaker’s, fed on animal scraps, taunted, and forced to sleep with coffins.