Workhouse

“ Each of the buildings which we so absurdly call a workhouse is, in truth (1) a general hospital; (2) an almshouse; (3) a foundling house; (4) a lying-in hospital; (5) a school house; (6) a lunatic asylum; (7) an idiot house; (8) a blind asylum; (9) a deaf and dumb asylum; (10) a workhouse; but this part of the establishment is generally a lucus a non lucendo, omitting to find work even for able-bodied paupers. ”

“ To take first the maintenance in the workhouse, any attempt to restrict, either in quantity or quality, the food, warmth, accommodation, leisure or rest afforded by the workhouse down to the standard in practice attained by the lowest grade of independent wage-earners has long since been abandoned. ”

“ The children were to be taken away from the workhouse into a home—or, rather, the great uncomfortable building was, in some cases, to be itself altered and made home-like. But, for the most part, the workhouse was to be true to its name. If a man refused to work 307for his wife and children, he was to be captured and brought there with them, and compelled to support himself and them, unless he preferred to starve. ”

“ There, with the workhouse surrounding him as it were, he got daily glimpses of the misery that hovers round the Poor Law. Men and women would sit for hours huddled on the pavement in front of his home waiting for the casual ward to open. ”

“ But, instead of this, we say to those who can't find work, 'Go into the workhouse.' If indeed it were what its name implies, a house for work, an 'Adult Industrial Home,' there would be some sense in it.
But our national common sense has not yet arrived at this result: take out all the sick, infirm, those who have lost either for a time or for life all producing power, cure them or make them as comfortable as you can. ”

“ To make sure that relief be applied for only in the most extreme cases and after every other effort had failed, the workhouse has been made the most repulsive residence which the refined ingenuity of a Malthusian can invent. ”

“ How altered is now the appearance of the workhouse! The pretty garden, where once I plucked a flower, has long since disappeared, and on its site are erected extensive buildings, to afford necessary accommodation for the vast increase of inmates. Since the period to which I first alluded many additions have been made to the original workhouse, and consequently it was altogether devoid of uniformity; but as it has been within the last few years almost rebuilt, under the direction of G. Handford, Esq., architect and surveyor, of the King’s Road, the defect mentioned is no longer apparent. ”

“ One thing all reformers seem to be agreed upon, and that is that the General Mixed Workhouse with good, bad, and indifferent men, women, and children herded together within its four walls is an abomination of desolation. ”

“ A Work-house for the poor, the treasurer of which pays for the several rooms, chambers, and apartments, belonging to the Newhall, let to the corporation of the said workhouse, from Michaelmas 1712, for 60 years, 20l. per annum. ”

“ All arguments in support of the workhouse test which assume the existence of a 'well-regulated workhouse' (to use the language of the Poor Law Commissioners of Inquiry, 1833) must fail at once when addressed to guardians whose workhouse offers attractions to the indolent. ”

“ Now, the workhouse is utter ruin to the class who look for their work daily. A man goes into the casual ward; before he leaves it in the morning, he must do a certain amount of work. It is quite right that he should, but what is the result? When he gets out it is too late to look for work that day ”

“ Among other public buildings in a certain town, which for many reasons it will be prudent to refrain from mentioning, and to which I will assign no fictitious name, there is one anciently common to most towns, great or small: to wit, a workhouse; and in this workhouse was born; on a day and date which I need not trouble myself to repeat, inasmuch as it can be of no possible consequence to the reader, in this stage of the business at all events; the item of mortality whose name is prefixed to the head of this chapter. ”

“ In one place, the Newgate of the Workhouse, a company of boys and youths were locked up in a yard alone; their day-room being a kind of kennel where the casual poor used formerly to be littered down at night. ”

“ Though no alteration has been made in the General Consolidated Order of 1847, by which the internal economy of the workhouse is professedly governed, the Central Authority laid it down in 1895 that "in every workhouse in which there are several children too young to attend school, a separate nursery—dry, spacious, light, and well ventilated—should be provided, and should be suitably furnished." ”

“ Now, the mass of the people do not expect to go to the workhouse and do not intend to go there. But through the first forty years of this century almost every workman and every labourer expected to go there sooner or later. ”

“ Improvement in the sanitary state of the workhouses, and of the labouring population generally, is said always to follow the increase of workhouse accommodation, and the substitution of in-door for out-door relief ”

“ A God that starves in thousands, and ashamed,
Or shameless in the workhouse lurks; that sweats
In mines and foundries! An enchanted God,
Whose nostrils in a palace breathe perfume,
Whose cracking shoulders hold the palace up,
Whose shoeless feet are rotting in the mire! ”

“ They suffer from many deficiencies and defects in locality and organization, in medical supervision and proper nursing and watching, in moral discipline, and in the means of classification, recreation, and employment.
Workhouses are commonly town institutions ”

“ At this point some hard-headed person says, "What about the workhouses?" This brings us face to face with another astounding problem to solve which at all satisfactorily requires no little research and thought. I know that there are good workhouses ”

“ The workhouse principle was never recognised in these establishments, which were all either poorhouses for the maintenance of the aged and infirm, or manufactories for setting to work vagrants, mendicants, and other idle persons. All these institutions were established under the notion that profitable labour could be always found, and that pauper labour could be made profitable to the community, and their management had reference to these objects. ”

“ As it is not all light and cheerful employment, most of the work is downstairs. Joyfully we ascend the big stone p. 27staircases and reach the upper air, where again we admire the beautiful order and the exquisite machinery; and the neat appearance of the women and girls employed in this, which is the weaving factory—large, airy, and well lighted—excite our admiration. I must add, the place is not a little noisy, with the clack and click, and whirr and whizz, of no end of looms. Here the first thing done is to wind the yarn on spools for warp, and pirns for weft. ”

“ Again, work in a private house is infinitely more desirable, from the point of view of the influence of one's surroundings, than daily labor in a factory or store. The variety of domestic duties, the freedom of moving about from one room to another, of sitting or standing to do one's work, are much to be preferred to the work that compels the worker to stand or sit in one place all day long. ”

“ The social worker has an office in the factory. A clubhouse is fitted up for the mill hands to make merry in. A room in the factory is reserved for a lunch room, with plants, tables, and chairs for the comfort of the women. Parties are given by the employer to the employees, which he himself attends. ”

“ Under the old domestic system the employer resided as a rule in the neighbourhood of his work-people, but the new captains of industry, whose fathers had perhaps been content to follow the example of the domestic master by living next to their workshops and factories, built themselves country houses farther away from the town, whilst their employees festered amidst the appallingly insanitary streets and alleys which had grown up around the factories. ”

“ Let me give two concrete illustrations of the practical application of housework on a business basis.
Mrs. A. lives in a small city in the Middle West. Her household consists of herself, her husband, and her twelve year old son. She had had the usual string of impossible maids or none at all until she tried the new system. Through a girls' club in a factory in the city, she secured a young woman to work for her at factory hours and wages. Her assistant came at seven-thirty in the morning. ”

“ It takes a stolid, enduring temperament to bear factory labor. Now look at Marianne’s house and family, and see what is insured to your protégée there.
“In the first place, a home,—a neat, quiet chamber, quite as good as she has probably been accustomed to,—the very best of food, served in a pleasant, light, airy kitchen, which is one of the most agreeable rooms in the house, and the table and table service quite equal to those of most farmers and mechanics. ”

“ I peer into shop windows, not so much for the wares displayed as for glimpses of the men and women engaged in their disposal. I watch laborers trudging home with the tired clink of their implements and pails. I gaze into cellarways where tailor and cobbler sit bent upon their work—needle and peg, their world—and through fouled windows into workrooms, to learn which livelihoods yield the truest happiness. ”

“ The individual worker is drawn into the factory. Chippendale today would have been employed sketching designs; the chair would have been put together by fifty workers, each one trained to perfection in his own particular department. Why does the hotel, with its five hundred servants, its catering for three thousand mouths, work smoothly, while the desirable family residence, with its two or three domestics, remains the scene of waste, confusion, and dispute? ”

“ The factory hand spends his working day in a great, dingy shop, with the maddening din of machinery in his ears. His associates are strangers, with whom he has little or nothing in common besides his work. He labors for an indefinite, far-away consumer whose manner of life is unknown to him. ”

“ Back of the factory system lies the household and neighborhood system. Those of us who are here today need go back only one, two, or at most three generations, to find a time when the household was practically the center in which were carried on, or about which were clustered, all the typical forms of industrial occupation. 23The clothing worn was for the most part not only made in the house, but the members of the household were usually familiar with the shearing of the sheep, the carding and spinning of the wool, and the plying of the loom. ”

“ Now, just fancy what a position the world, considered as one great workroom—one great factory in the form of a globe—would have been in by this time, if it had in the least understood this duty, or been capable of it. ”

“ To-day the laborer has eight hours a day of work in a factory well ventilated and well lighted, protected from danger and accident, insured by law, better wages than he has ever had, better opportunities for life and the pursuit of happiness, better fed, better clothed, and better housed than ever before in the history of the world. ”

“ The dress factory job was like another world compared with candy, brass, and the laundry. In each of those places I had worked on one floor of a big plant, doing one subdivided piece of labor among equally low-paid workers busy at the same sort of job as myself. ”

“ The houses are laborers’ rooms, not genteel and comfortable as their employer’s. He says that he makes as much out of the rent of these houses as he does from his factory, for I must say that Robert’s workmen do more work and better. ”

“ The workshop has been transplanted from the home to the factory; both men and women leave their homes for ten, eleven, or even twelve hours a day to carry on their industrial activities; great centers of population collect about the centers of industry; the farm, the flock of geese, the garden, the forest, and the blacksmith shop disappear; food, clothing, and other necessaries of life—formerly the product of home industry—are produced in great factories ”

“ The Ladies Home Journal believes that, no less than factory and commercial worker, the oldest of home workers—the “domestic”—should be protected by standardization of wages, hours and living conditions. ”

“ An admirable House of Industry, built under an act passed in 1792, upon a good plan, and subject to wise regulations, gives comfort and finds employment for that unhappy class of society, the impotent and unprotected poor ”

“ This reader has a little balcony from which he reads to the employees while they are at work, making his selections from current magazines, newspapers, novels, telegrams, dispatches from abroad, and extracts from books on national history. It is an interesting sight to see a factory of four or five hundred workers busily engaged in plying their trade, and listening at the same time to a story read by the paid reader, who, with coat off and suspenders hanging, gesticulates and shouts at the top of his voice. ”

“ Let any landlord who still tunes his pride according to the feudal gamut of his forefathers, acquaint himself with the tone of popular feeling in the manufacturing districts. Let "John" lower the steps, and with earth-directed eyes hold the carriage door, whilst our son of a hundred fathers walks forth into the streets of a manufacturing town, to try the magic of his ancient name among the workmen as they hurry to dinner. ”