How gruelling was the Victorian workhouse?

“Tory spending cuts send us back to the misery of the Victorian workhouse,” cried a Mirror headline in 2010. Workhouses were “bleak, grimly austere and oppressive”, wrote the author of a study of one local institution in 2012. Ever since Dickens’ Oliver Twist began publication in 1837, the establishment he described, and numerous on-screen representations of it, have become the filter through which the institution is invariably viewed. Portrayals of the workhouse habitually take it as read that it was unremittingly horrific, harsh and dehumanising. But was it really that bad?

The Victorian workhouse first came about as a result of the 1834 Poor Law Amendment Act. This act transferred the administration of poor relief from individual parishes to a coordinated national system based on new groupings of parishes, known as Poor Law Unions. Each union, run by a locally elected Board of Guardians, provided a workhouse to serve the whole union area. For the able-bodied destitute and their dependants, the workhouse was intended to be the only help on offer. The operation of the New Poor Law was overseen by a central authority – originally the Poor Law Commission (PLC), later the Poor Law Board (PLB) and then the Local Government Board (LGB).

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It’s often assumed that Oliver Twist was set in one of the new union workhouses, or “bastilles”, as critics such as MP and journalist William Cobbett labelled them. However, it is clear that it was actually located in one of the pre-1834 parish-run establishments, where there was no uniformity in matters such as work or diet.

Everyone knows, of course, exactly what workhouse inmates had to eat: gruel. In Oliver’s workhouse, there were “three meals of thin gruel a day, with an onion twice a week, and half a roll on Sundays”. But, in the entire workhouse era, before or after 1834, there was never an establishment with such a diet on offer.

A typical parish workhouse menu was that at Westminster St Margaret, where breakfast was bread with either broth or gruel, and supper was bread with butter or cheese. Midday dinner could be meat and broth, pease pottage, baked puddings, or hasty pudding – oatmeal boiled in milk. In the 1830s, the lucky inmates of the Brighton workhouse received six meat dinners a week, with no limits on quantity, plus two pints of beer a day for the men or one pint for women and children. The inmates were served at table, with the governor carving for the men and boys, and the matron for the women and girls.

The new union workhouses had to adopt one of six standard dietaries issued by the PLC in 1835. Dietary No 1, for example, provided able-bodied men with a daily breakfast of bread and gruel, a dinner of either soup or, on three days a week, meat and potatoes, and a supper of bread and either cheese or broth. The elderly could exchange their gruel for a weekly ration of butter, tea and sugar.

Although this menu compared well to that typically consumed by poor labourers living outside the workhouse, the food was not without shortcomings. Ingredients purchased by workhouses were usually low grade and often suffered from adulteration. A report in 1866 revealed huge variations in the nutritional value of the same dish at different establishments. For instance, a pint of gruel at Scarborough workhouse contained 4 ounces of oatmeal, while at Easingwold it was just 1.5 ounces.

In 1883, in an effort to improve inmates’ health, the LGB suggested that workhouse inmates be given a weekly cooked fish dinner. Although the experiment was successful in some places, such as Bristol, more typical were the reactions at Ludlow, where some inmates claimed that fish “disagreed” with them. In 1897, a trial of dietary improvements at Bethnal Green workhouse hit the headlines after an inmate was said to have died from overeating. From 1901, reflecting the fact that inmates were by then mostly the elderly or sick (and therefore had more limited appetites), workhouses could compile their own weekly menu from a list of approved dishes including treats such as Irish stew, pasties, shepherd’s pie and roly-poly pudding, with an accompanying cookbook to ensure uniformity of ingredients and preparation.

Listen: From daily routines to whether inmates really ate gruel, Peter Higginbotham responds to listener questions about the workhouse, on this episode of the HistoryExtra podcast:

Vermin-infested rags

Another common misconception is that the poor were “sentenced” to the workhouse. Entering a workhouse was essentially a voluntary decision, though many people’s circumstances left them little option other than to accept the offer of a place. The workhouse admission process included the issuing of workhouse clothing, which has sometimes been viewed as a deliberate strategy of dehumanisation. But for new inmates who arrived with just the clothes they stood in, possibly little more than vermin-infested rags, the provision of two sets of clean and serviceable clothes was a very practical – and often welcome – measure.

The clothing did, however, provide officials with a degree of control. Although inmates could discharge themselves at any time, subject to a few hours’ notice, and have their own clothing returned to them, any unauthorised exit from the premises while wearing workhouse clothing could lead to a charge of stealing union property. For those who did decide to leave, there was no financial or other assistance in finding work or accommodation. Thus, to some degree, the workhouse could be viewed as a poverty trap.

For a group known as the “ins and outs”, though, the workhouse clearly held no fear. Such individuals treated the institution like a free lodging house, staying for a few days or weeks at a time and then discharging themselves. During 1901, 81-year-old Julia Blumsun admitted herself into the City of London workhouse on 163 separate occasions. Other individuals appear to have positively preferred to live in a workhouse, such as the inmate of Leigh workhouse in Lancashire, who in 1922 was discovered to have £500 in the bank.

• Read more on the Victorian war on child poverty

One group for whom the workhouse did attempt to provide a route out of poverty was children. Since Elizabethan times, pauper children had been placed into apprenticeships as part of the poor relief system. Although the impression given by the 1968 film Oliver! is that workhouse boys were “for sale”, this was not the case – in reality, their new masters were paid a premium for taking them on. However, by the late 1830s, there was growing evidence of apprentices being exploited or abused by tradesmen whose only interest was the premium. A report in 1842 found that the boys apprenticed as mine workers by the Dewsbury Board of Guardians included five-year-old Thomas Townend, though he was returned after 16 days.

To replace apprenticeships, James Kay-Shuttleworth, an assistant poor law commissioner, proposed giving such children “a careful training in religion and industry”, with instruction in skills such as carpentry, shoe-making and tailoring or, for girls, domestic work, making them employable in adult life. The training could either be within the workhouse or, ideally, in separate accommodation, to remove children from the “contamination” of adult paupers. A number of unions set up their own separate schools or jointly operated district schools, some housing hundreds of children. In 1850, Charles Dickens visited one such school, at Norwood, and wrote that its inmates might leave the establishment “almost with the certainty of becoming good and prosperous citizens”. However, such institutions began to attract criticism as being impersonal and serving as breeding grounds for disease.