nd people moved into the Workhouse if they had no relatives to look after them. Couples and families were separated. Life in the Workhouse was harsh, often brutal, with hard work and severe punishment, particularly toward the children.illustrations show some of the conditions in the workhouses.A Workhouse yard, c. 1840Inside a WorkhouseA new ward in a WorkhouseIn 1841, G R Wythen Baxter published his famous The Book of the Bastiles – a somewhat lurid compilation of newspaper reports, court proceedings and correspondence, which graphically illustrated some of the horror stories relating to the New Poor Law. For example:An enquiry has taken place this week at Rochester, before the county magistrates, into several charges preferred against James Miles, the master of the Hoo Union-House, for cruelly beating several young pauper-children of both sexes. Elizabeth Danes stated that she was 13 years of age, and that the defendant, James Miles, had punished her three times while she was in the Union-House. The offence she had committed was leaving a little dirt in the corner of a room, and the defendant made her lie upon a table, and took her clothes off, and beat her with a birch-broom until blood came.7Two years later, in 1843 the satirical magazine Punch reported how in Bethnal Green ‘An infant, only five weeks old, had been separated from the mother, being occasionally brought to her for the breast.’8Meals were dull, predictable and tasteless. The quantity, quality and lack of nutrition meant that workhouse inmates were on a slow starvation diet. Charles Dickens confirmed this, in his description of the diet in the workhouse as ‘starving quickly in the street or slowly in the workhouse.’ A giant in the literary world, he was interested in the subject of social reform and often reflected in his literary work, is the conditions and living standards, of the Victorian era. A typical workhouse diet.9BreakfastD...
