Workhouses and Poor

The working classes and the poor

• Article by: Liza Picard

Liza Picard examines the social and economic lives of the Victorian working classes and the poor.

The Victorians liked to have their social classes clearly defined. The working class was divided into three layers, the lowest being 'working men' or labourers, then the ‘intelligent artisan’, and above him the ‘educated working man’. In reality, things were not so tidily demarcated.

Earnings

A skilled London coach-maker could earn up to five guineas (£5, five shillings) a week - considerably more than most middle class clerks. This was the top of the working class pyramid. The railways generated employment for porters and cab-drivers. The London omnibuses needed 16,000 drivers and conductors, by 1861. Conductors were allowed to keep four shillings a day out of the fares they collected, and drivers could count on 34 shillings a week, for a working day beginning at 7.45 and ending often past midnight. A labourer’s average wage was between 20 and 30 shillings a week in London, probably less in the provinces. This would just cover his rent, and a very sparse diet for him and his family.

Costermongers

During the late 1800s there were probably about 30,000 street sellers (known as costermongers) in London, each selling his or her particular wares from a barrow or donkey-cart. The journalist Henry Mayhew recorded the array of goods for sale: oysters, hot-eels, pea soup, fried fish, pies and puddings, sheep’s trotters, pickled whelks, gingerbread, baked potatoes, crumpets, cough-drops, street-ices, ginger beer, cocoa and peppermint water as well as clothes, second-hand musical instruments, books, live birds and even birds nests. Some specialised in buying waste products such as broken metal, bottles, bones and ‘kitchen stuff’ such as dripping, broken candles and silver spoons. Most middle class and working class households depended on these street sellers, who had regular predictable beats, and made a fair living.

On the streets

Men could earn pennies as porters, as long as they stayed clear of the associations which had a monopoly of porterage in London. Boys could hold horses’ heads while the driver took a break, or sell newspapers or fast food in the streets. The ‘mudlarks’ of both sexes and all ages waded thigh‐deep in the filthy toxic Thames mud to retrieve anything they could sell. Dogs’ turds could be collected and sold to the tanneries. Discarded cigar butts could be recycled and marketed as new.

Sweeping a path across the filthy streets for a well‐dressed pedestrian could earn a few pennies, legally. Begging might make more illegally, especially if the beggar woman could use – even hire – a small child. Sometimes the children were blinded or maimed, to loosen the purse‐strings of passers‐by.

After work

If a man had enough initiative and energy after a long working day, he could attend evening courses on scientific subjects or Latin or shorthand at a Mechanics’ Institution, or at one of the Working Men’s Colleges founded in 1854. Newspapers such as The Penny Newsman were affordable, often shared between friends. Trade Unions needed intelligent self-educated men as Union officials. Massive civil engineering works such as railways and docks needed foremen, while factories needed overseers to keep the belts and wheels turning profitably. A working woman could learn French at a Working Women’s College. It might come in useful if she progressed up the ladder of domestic service to become a ladies’ maid.

Workhouses

When you have no prospect of a living wage, or sickness or disability or market forces prevent you from working, what are you to do?

The Poor Law Amendment Act of 1834 established ‘workhouses’ in place of the old poor houses. IThe Act was framed to deter undeserving applicants, and the criterion was sometimes inhumanly hard. The workhouse might deny the starving applicants even the bare shelter it provided. A 70-year-old seamstress with failing sight was told to go away and find herself some work because ‘she was young enough to work’. If a family was admitted, all its members would be separated, and might never see each other again. 

The workhouse itself would provide the work. The sentence of hard labour imposed on convicts was applied equally to male paupers in the ‘casual ward’, who were physically weak, and often unaccustomed to manual work. An experienced convict might earn 9 pence a day at stone-breaking. A clerk, reduced to the workhouse perhaps because of a gap between jobs, had to try to break granite rocks with a heavy hammer, in an open shed with no protection from frost or heat, when he had never held anything heavier than a pen. Another suitable occupation, in the eyes of the authorities, was oakum-picking: unravelling lengths of tarred rope, for use in calking the seams of battleships. A convict’s strong, thick-skinned hands could manage that; the clerk’s soft fingers failed to produce the required quantities. For all this, the pauper received only an allowance of coarse bread: £4 a week if he was married, plus £2 for each child.

Workhouse food was just enough to keep the inmates from starvation. They were clothed, and even, occasionally, washed. The children were entitled to some elementary education, but this was often ignored by the workhouse keeper. There was some rudimentary medical care – interesting mainly as the first example of medical care provided by a state-funded organisation, in which one may perhaps see the germs of the National Health Service a century later.