How Victorian Workhouses Changed Charity | European History | Extra History

Huddersfield, Yorkshire, 1848 When they enter the house, the masters divide people by gender, separating parents from children, husbands from wives, even siblings. Unwed women are clothed in yellow dresses to make them stand out, and one of the male staff leers at a young woman who just arrived. These people have been promised beds and food, but they find the thin mattresses already filled with bodies, shivering from typhoid, and smeared in their own filth. One living woman, burning with fever, lies next to a corpse. But soon men will come to sell that body to the surgeons. It's the kind of place that would later inspire Charles Dickens. But those living here toil for the privilege, doing monotonous jobs like picking apart tarred rope, or crushing bones for fertilizer. They work because that's what this is. It is a workhouse, one of the worst in all England. These people have committed no crime, mind you. Rather, it is a punishment for being poor and asking for help. Thanks so much to GiveDirectly for making this Extra Extra History episode possible. What they do is deliver your donations as cash to people in need, empowering them to escape poverty. But more on that after the episode. Poverty has, by some theories, always existed. Even the New Testament recorded Jesus as saying that the poor will always be with us. And that was largely where it stood for a thousand years, with poverty considered simply a fact of life. Some people were just poor. And as a Christian, it was part of your moral imperative to give direct charity to the less fortunate in order to relieve their suffering, especially if they were your neighbors. But in the early modern period, ideas about poverty and charity began to change. The poor were increasingly looked at as morally inferior, lazy and dependent, and that they should show they were deserving of subsistence-level support. This change was partially due to the French theologian John Calvin, who helped detail the concept of predestination, that in God's omnipotence, he already knew which people were going to heaven. It also followed that you could, to a certain extent, guess who those people were by looking at how living Christian values led to success. Now, mind you, that is a huge theological oversimplification. But that's also kind of the point. Complicated ideas often get abridged and misinterpreted when they filter into the public consciousness. And even though Calvin himself pushed back on the idea that wealth was a sign of moral virtue, it was almost inevitable that someone would draw that conclusion. And if wealth did indicate divine favor, what was poverty an indication of? Maybe it was an indication you weren't working hard enough. Maybe your business would do better if you were, I don't know, smarter? You can see how, particularly in a frontier environment like the English colonies in America, where survival did depend heavily on individual effort, this might take root. Though that didn't mean that Calvinists like the Pilgrims avoided charity altogether, especially in small settlements like Plymouth or the rural villages of England. Charity in the form of almsgiving and food donations continued. However, it was usually individual. These small communities knew who needed help and why they did. They were sick, a harvest had been poor, a family breadwinner had died, and knowing that, acted accordingly. Charity was extremely personal. But it was the kind of charitable system the English government decided to set up with the Poor Laws, an Elizabethan attempt to assist the poor through legislation. It was essentially a decentralized effort to address poverty by having landowners donate to the local parish, who would then distribute those funds to the deserving poor. This generally meant the elderly, orphans, the disabled, and anyone temporarily out of work due to the seasonal needs of rural agriculture. Many of those able-bodied poor would just do whatever they could, scraping by by growing crops on village common land, or through traditions like wassailing, which you can see our Christmas episode for more on that. Women might take in hand-weaving work or other small at-home jobs in the mercantile economy, manufacturing parts of goods, and once a year, glean the landlord's fields, picking up bits of wheat that had fallen during the harvest. While this did institute changes, the local nature of the Poor Laws had a certain humanity to them. The aid was given by a local clergy, who knew their parishioners and who were in need. And need was the only requirement. Except, even as the Tudors tried building charity into law, economic changes were about to overwhelm the Poor Laws system, just as it was getting its footing. First, landlords increasingly relied on a legal system called enclosure to expand their lands, wall off their property, and swallow up village commons. This destroyed the old tradition of gleaning, and meant that the poor could not grow crops on the common or supplement what was grown on their small land holdings. The English Civil War also massively disrupted the country, causing large movements in population. More people began moving to cities and market towns, working in artisan trades or serving in the military. And by the 18th century, the first true industrial machines such as looms and threshers began to appear, meaning there was less work available on both farms, and in the at-home mercantile work women especially depended on. All this swelled urban populations as people were looking for work wherever they could find it, especially in the wake of numerous wars Britain fought in the 18th and 19th centuries, which always left populations of unemployed ex-soldiers and sailors in their wake living in London or port cities. Also, many people no longer lived in the parishes of their birth, where they would have had claim to poor relief. London's streets filled with beggars. In fact, it was so common that when gentlemen went out, a standard part of their outfit were coins kept in an easy-to-reach pocket specifically brought to distribute. They even tracked and budgeted for it as a daily expense. Now, a lot of these beggars actually worked where they could, doing small jobs here and there. Actually, today we'd probably call them gig workers, or even adopting types of street performance like writing people ballads on the spot in return for coins. Then, as poverty became more visible, philosophers, early economists, and what we'd now call sociologists began to worry over the causes of poverty and the proper means to end it. One London academic ran a study where he surveyed beggars by asking people to pass out tickets instead of change to be cashed in later. And when the recipient came to him to cash out those vouchers, he collected their demographic information as well to get a snapshot of London's poor, finding most to be women, often widowed and with children, and that they often did small jobs when they could find them. Yet most philosophers had only a vague sense of the issues. Thomas Malthus thought the problem was overpopulation, that there were more mouths to feed than bread due to the poor having too many children. Others thought the poor were not motivated enough to work and that the problem was charity itself. With roughly 10-15% of the population relying on parish support, they believed the poor had become dependent on aid. Now today, historians agree that the actual problem was the lack of work, that the economy and social changes had eliminated many farming and manufacturing jobs, while industrialization had yet to create new industries. But in the 18th and 19th century, it was taken as gospel that there was essentially an infinite amount of work. People just weren't going out to find it. So to simply give people aid, they argued, would be bad for them, meaning any poor relief should, by its nature, be meager and unpleasant to obtain, so people would prefer to look for work. The result was the New Poor Laws in 1834, a group of measures that were meant to systematize, centralize and reform the system of social aid. Instead of parishes providing direct support, to receive aid, people would now have to enter the workhouse. At best, the workhouse was a helpful institution. It would give someone who entered it hot meals, a place to sleep, a roof over their heads and medical care. Sexes were separated for safety and propriety, but the point of it was for it to be uncomfortable. Being in the workhouse was meant to be a lower, more boring and less free standard of living than working at subsistence level. And some did provide what was promised. Once the institution professionalized, the New Poor Laws would remain in place until after World War II. Workhouses did start functioning as intended. Indeed, we know from letters that many people entering the workhouses relied on the system, appreciated it and took up any lapses with the government. But especially in their first few decades, the workhouses could be a house of horrors. Family separations, uniforms, beds intentionally designed like coffins, filthy sheets and a tendency towards deadly outbreaks of epidemic disease. And increasingly, new workhouses were built outside cities and towns, so going to one meant removing yourself from visibility and social networks, much like going to prison. Then, just over a decade after the New Poor Laws came into being, a series of scandals rocked the government and poisoned public attitudes toward the institutions. At Andover Workhouse, a place where paupers would crush bones to make fertilizer, the staff fed the inhabitants so little that they started eating marrow out of the bones. At Huddersfield in Yorkshire, staff were found to have perpetrated a huge amount of abuses, from sexually exploiting women to allowing disease to run rampant to refusing to allow inhabitants to wash or change their sheets for weeks. And while these examples are extreme and out of the ordinary, the cruelty was to a certain extent the point. The government wanted the workhouse and the New Poor Laws to be the last resort. In fact, this worry about idleness became so pronounced in the Victorian era that some prisons actually installed treadmills or hand cranks that did nothing, yet that prisoners were required to work on, so they were not being housed and fed for free. Yet, by making the conditions so dehumanizing, the British government had not only created a fear of getting public aid, but also encoded a deep shame into it. And this fear of dependence would carry on to horrifying policies during the Irish Potato Famine, which you can learn more about in our series here, where starving people were forced to work on roads that led nowhere just to get a measure of cornmeal. It was the first time the Poor Laws and the ideology behind them expanded to British colonies, but unfortunately, due to Britain's global reach, it was not the last. As the British Empire colonized much of the world, it encountered different economic systems that did not work, like the United Kingdom, often leading colonial authorities to deride African or Asian locals as lazy or irresponsible. And the United States would adopt many of the same worries around government aid. Even before the Revolution, Benjamin Franklin chastised British poor relief as, quote, and worried it would lead to dependence. However, there was also pushback against the new Poor Laws. In both essays and Oliver Twist, Charles Dickens attacked the inhumanity of subjecting children to the workhouse system. Christians also criticized it, feeling that refusing to directly give aid was against the tenets of their religion, which did emphasize direct charity toward the poor rather than work programs. And they also rightly pointed out that the workhouses and other programs were actually far more expensive than just giving people money. Which is interesting, since many modern countries are now experimenting with direct financial aid and universal basic income, and are showing some pretty promising results. Sometimes, old ideas are the best ideas. And in addition to sovereign solutions, we're also starting to see the benefit of organizations cutting out the middleman and getting people in need funds directly. Which is exactly what our sponsor for this video, GiveDirectly, is doing in East Africa. Going beyond the preconceived notion that the poor need advice and cannot be trusted with money, and getting cash directly to the people born in extreme poverty that need it with no strings attached. Which is awesome not only because it's, you know, respectful and dignified, but also because it works. GiveDirectly has run dozens of large research studies that find when you give someone in rural Africa a chunk of cash, they can completely transform their lives, improving their health, nutrition, earnings, and education. Yeah, turns out people in great need are actually pretty great at knowing what they need. So in that spirit of not only giving, but doing so in a dignified way, if you visit GiveDirectly.org slash extra and make a donation, those funds will go straight to a family in the Baringo district of Kenya to spend how they choose. I mean, how cool is that? You'll be directly improving the lives of folks living right here. So please, join me in directly helping a family out of poverty this holiday season by clicking or scanning here. Thanks so much for watching and thanks so much for your generous support. What if I told you that Angelo Valenciana Archelite Games, Dominic Valenciana Foxdoc, Hunter Z, Joseph Blame, Kuyakoya and Zeliad Architectures were fantastic legendary patrons? Because it's true!