If you think you're having a bad Christmas, just think yourself lucky that you didn't have to experience the harsh realities of a British Christmas in the 19th Century.
In Victorian Britain, a workhouse was a place where people who were unable to support themselves went to live and work, but conditions in these places were brutal.
Until 1842 all meals were eaten in silence and in the 1830s some workhouses, to complete the humiliation, did not allow cutlery.
Breakfast in a workhouse usually consisted of 7oz (200g) of bread and 1½ pints (0.8l) of gruel. Lunch was not much better and often consisted of a maximum of 1½ pints of poor-quality vegetable soup. For dinner a workhouse member would expect 6oz (170g) of bread and 2oz (60g) of cheese. Due to this poor diet the members of a workhouse often suffered from malnutrition.
In the 1850s the then vicar of Stoughton and Racton in West Sussex wrote to the Guardians of the Westbourne Workhouse requesting that (as a matter of Christian charity) second helpings of gruel be provided on Christmas Day. He was informed bluntly that if the rations were raised above the minimum required to keep body and soul together the result would be laziness, ****lessness, and hordes of otherwise able-bodied people clamouring to get in.
The treatment in a workhouse was little different from that in a prison leaving many inmates feeling that they were being punished for the crime of poverty.
The terrible conditions in some workhouses may have led to depression. There were references to workhouse women who would not speak and children who refused to play.
Some workhouse masters embezzled the money intended for blankets, food and other important items for their own personal use.
Visitors reported rooms full of sick or elderly inmates with threadbare blankets and the windows wide open to the freezing weather.
So imagine spending Christmas in one of these places?
Workhouses weren't abolished until 1930.
December 24, 2008
The Times
Death by plum pudding - Christmas Day in the workhouse
The sentimental monologue by George Sims about a poor woman who starved rather than be separated from her husband at Christmas by the cruel officers of the Victorian workhouse has wrung many a heart. The husband bursts in on the do-gooding visitors as they watch the workhouse inmates eating their Christmas dinner, and berates them for their smugness.
Yes, there in a land of plenty, lay a loving woman dead.
Cruelly starved and murdered for a loaf of the parish bread.
The workhouse Christmas dinner was an annual institution, and the well-wishers of the poor did indeed visit, to make sure the recipients were duly grateful. The Times published an annual report of exactly what victuals had been enjoyed by the inmates, parish by parish, so there must have been some competition to make the offerings sound good. Generally, there was an allowance of beef, potatoes, plum pudding and, for the lucky ones, some snuff and tobacco, and a good pint of London porter.
In 1858 there was something of an uproar when The Times drew attention to the work of the Field Lane Refuge, which was trying to care for the “outside poor”, the homeless of London who were too destitute or hopeless even to be admitted to the workhouse. A leading article catalogued tragic examples of children living on the streets with no apparent adult relations or means of support, which make Dickens at his most angry look pale by comparison.
Charity did have its perils. One news report, from 1858, records the death of a workhouse resident, "Frederick Harding, late an inmate of St Pancras workhouse", from eating too much plum pudding (you'll have to scroll down below the story of the industrial accident to read this on the page).
timesonline.co.uk
In Victorian Britain, a workhouse was a place where people who were unable to support themselves went to live and work, but conditions in these places were brutal.
Until 1842 all meals were eaten in silence and in the 1830s some workhouses, to complete the humiliation, did not allow cutlery.
Breakfast in a workhouse usually consisted of 7oz (200g) of bread and 1½ pints (0.8l) of gruel. Lunch was not much better and often consisted of a maximum of 1½ pints of poor-quality vegetable soup. For dinner a workhouse member would expect 6oz (170g) of bread and 2oz (60g) of cheese. Due to this poor diet the members of a workhouse often suffered from malnutrition.
In the 1850s the then vicar of Stoughton and Racton in West Sussex wrote to the Guardians of the Westbourne Workhouse requesting that (as a matter of Christian charity) second helpings of gruel be provided on Christmas Day. He was informed bluntly that if the rations were raised above the minimum required to keep body and soul together the result would be laziness, ****lessness, and hordes of otherwise able-bodied people clamouring to get in.
The treatment in a workhouse was little different from that in a prison leaving many inmates feeling that they were being punished for the crime of poverty.
The terrible conditions in some workhouses may have led to depression. There were references to workhouse women who would not speak and children who refused to play.
Some workhouse masters embezzled the money intended for blankets, food and other important items for their own personal use.
Visitors reported rooms full of sick or elderly inmates with threadbare blankets and the windows wide open to the freezing weather.
So imagine spending Christmas in one of these places?
Workhouses weren't abolished until 1930.
December 24, 2008
The Times
Death by plum pudding - Christmas Day in the workhouse
The sentimental monologue by George Sims about a poor woman who starved rather than be separated from her husband at Christmas by the cruel officers of the Victorian workhouse has wrung many a heart. The husband bursts in on the do-gooding visitors as they watch the workhouse inmates eating their Christmas dinner, and berates them for their smugness.
Yes, there in a land of plenty, lay a loving woman dead.
Cruelly starved and murdered for a loaf of the parish bread.
The workhouse Christmas dinner was an annual institution, and the well-wishers of the poor did indeed visit, to make sure the recipients were duly grateful. The Times published an annual report of exactly what victuals had been enjoyed by the inmates, parish by parish, so there must have been some competition to make the offerings sound good. Generally, there was an allowance of beef, potatoes, plum pudding and, for the lucky ones, some snuff and tobacco, and a good pint of London porter.
Marylebone Parish: Number of outdoor poor about 6,500. Christmas fare, 1lb of roast beef free from bone, 1lb of potatoes and bread, one pint of porter, and 1lb of plumpudding, with 1 ounce of tea, sugar extra to each adult. The children are fed at the discretion of the master, and in the evening are allowed to partake of various amusements at the expense of the guardians, who had fruit and sweetmeats provided for them.
But the residents of the workhouses were, comparatively, the lucky ones.
In 1858 there was something of an uproar when The Times drew attention to the work of the Field Lane Refuge, which was trying to care for the “outside poor”, the homeless of London who were too destitute or hopeless even to be admitted to the workhouse. A leading article catalogued tragic examples of children living on the streets with no apparent adult relations or means of support, which make Dickens at his most angry look pale by comparison.
Then there is a handsome boy, also a crossing-sweeper. He has come from Bristol, and he has a cancer forming in his foot. When he went to the Hospital they told him to "rest his foot, keep it warm, and poultice it every night." Why did they not tell him that a breakfast-cup full of turtle soup and half-a-glass of old Tokay every three hours, would be a benefit to his constitution? Poultice his foot every.night! Why, if you gave him a poultice the child would eat it! He, too, has come to the Refuge as a last resource. One more instance, and we have done. One of the boys is a member of a family which consists of father, mother, and twelve children. His two eldest brothers are almost always in prison “for doing handkerchiefs." His eldest sister is now fifteen years of age, and in a Reformatory. She was a - thief in her infancy, and at 11 years of age a prostitute. This family, collectively, appear in the long nights to have entered upon a very peculiar class of business. At 2am they would issue out from the cellar in which they lived, and work away till daylight at pulling down the posters and bills from the walls. The whole family in this way, by strenuous exertion, might succeed in tearing down half-a- hundredweight of paper, for which they could get 7d.
As usual, The Times’s readers rallied in support, to the tune of more than £15,000, and a year later the Earl of Shaftesbury oversaw a meeting to inaugurate the opening of new schools and refuges – the “Ragged Schools” – and was able to report that for the first time the Field Lane Refuge, as one of the best managed charities of its kind, had been placed in “a position of comparative affluence”.
Charity did have its perils. One news report, from 1858, records the death of a workhouse resident, "Frederick Harding, late an inmate of St Pancras workhouse", from eating too much plum pudding (you'll have to scroll down below the story of the industrial accident to read this on the page).
On Saturday the deceased was devouring a large quantity of cold plum-pudding, and after he had eaten some pounds of the pudding and was in the act of swallowing another large piece he fell suddenly forward in an insensible state to the ground. Mr William Coster, the senior medical officer,was sent for, but before he came the man expired. Mr Coster, upon making a post-mortem examination, observed some three or four pounds of plum-pudding in the deceased's stomach, as also a quantity in his respiratory organs; and, from the condition of the brain it would seem that the wretched man had been seized with a sudden fit of apoplexy. On the day before (Christmas day) the inmates of the workhouse were well regaled with good fare, in the shape of roast beef and plum pudding, and the deceased must have managed to receive more thans his own share
So take care, and a happy Christmas to one and all.
timesonline.co.uk
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