Life in Victorian Britain: The Workhouse

If you have ever read Oliver Twist by Charles Dickens you will probably have heard of Workhouses. Oliver was born in a Workhouse and Dickens wrote about the terrible conditions in these places. Workhouses were places where the poor and destitute would go to received food and shelter in return for work. If any of your ancestors were poor for part or all of their live, and most people have at least some who were, they may have been in contact with a Workhouse at some point in their lives. My great-great grandfather was born in a workhouse and his birth was registered by the local Workhouse Master.

Workhouses had started in the 1700's as an attempt to help the poor. However it was the 1834 The Poor Law Amendment Act that changed the way they operated. The view at the time was that the poor were poor only because they avoided work and therefore should be punished. This government legislation actually proposed that conditions in workhouses were to be made very harsh to discourage people from asking for help! Deciding to enter a workhouse, when both going into and leaving a workhouse was voluntary, must have been very difficult and we can only imagine the desperation of those entering them.

Perhaps the only compensating features of the workhouses was that they did provide medical care at a time when private medical care was both expensive and hard to obtain for the poor. It also gave a place where people knew they could go if they were truly desperate. For example, unmarried mothers in the 1800's were often disowned by their family and, unable to provide for themselves whilst pregnant, would have very few options open to them other than going into a workhouse until the birth.

For more information of British institutions in the 1800's an excellent free site is
workhouses.org.uk

Links to other useful free family history resources can be found on the
www.findbritishancestors.co.uk website.