After Dark: Myths, Misdeeds & the Paranormal - Could You Survive The Victorian Workhouse?

Episode Date: July 31, 2025

Today we’re going behind the foreboding doors of the Victorian workhouse to ask - ‘Could we survive it?’. From Oliver Twist's gruel to songs about flogging, from lice-ridden clothing to soul destroying isolation. Our guest is Oskar Jensen, author of "Vagabonds: Life on the Streets of Nineteenth Century London".Edited by Tim Arstall. Produced by Freddy Chick, Senior Producer is Charlotte Long.Please vote for us for Listeners' Choice at the British Podcast Awards! Follow this link, and don’t forget to confirm the email. Thank you!You can now watch After Dark on Youtube! www.youtube.com/@afterdarkhistoryhitSign up to History Hit for hundreds of hours of original documentaries, with a new release every week and ad-free podcasts. Sign up at https://www.historyhit.com/subscribe.  You can take part in our listener survey here.

Hello everyone, it's us, your hosts Maddie Pelling and Anthony Delaney. But before we begin the show, we want to ask for a few seconds of your time. If you're enjoying After Dark and we love you if you are, we would love you just a little bit more if you could vote for us in the Listener's Choice category at the British Podcast Awards. So go to the show notes now, click the link and just then search for After Dark. Fill in your name and your email and don't forget to confirm. They will send you an email. You need to confirm. The whole process probably takes about 30 seconds. If you've already voted, we are so, so grateful. If you haven't, stop what you are doing

right now. Vote for us before you enjoy this show. Hello and welcome to After Dark, the podcast where we explore the darker side of history. I'm Maddie. And I'm Anthony. Today we're going behind the foreboding doors of the Victorian Workhouse to ask, could we survive it? Let's begin by setting the scene. You're lying in a narrow bed in the Workhouse ward. You haven't slept, no one has. Around you grown men twitch and scratch in the dark, maddened by the crawl of lice through their hair, the bugs nesting in the straw. The heat is suffocating, the air dead. They gave you a calico shirt when you came in. The doorman, the only one with a trace of pity warned you not to wear it. Don't! he whispered. It's crawling.

Even the bread he handed you was alive with insects. The men say this is the foulest workhouse in all of London. They say you'll be eaten alive before dawn. That night you watched the moonlit walls, the wooden floorboards that seemed to pulse with movement from underneath, lice pour from every crack like bees about to hive, a churning mass of legs and wings, all racing to your beds. Some of the others have started groaning now, the nightly vomiting has set in, the smell thickens.

And when the sun rises? Well, more rants of food, endless toil, a sort of quiet punishment for the crime of being poor in the richest city on earth. Welcome to the Victorian Workhouse. Could you survive the night? to the Victorian work beyond. Could you survive the workhouse? That's the question that we're asking today. In this episode, we'll be walking in the footsteps of those who entered this infamous

institution and trying to get a sense of what it might have been like inside on its heyday, which was the 19th century. Here to hold our hands and to take us on this journey is Dr Oscar Jensen, writer and historian and author of the award-winning and totally brilliant book, Vagabonds, which chronicles the lives of London's poorest and most resilient inhabitants. Oscar, welcome to After Dark. Hello, it is lovely to be here. I'm not sure I should hold your hands actually. Definitely the lice will. Might pass down the sleeve between us. Yeah, it might be a bit contagious. Before we get into this, Oscar, I have a bone to

pick with you because I bought Vagabonds in Waterloo station a long time ago when I'd had a fantastic day out in London I'd have been to a very fancy part of the city. I'd had a day that was completely outside of my normal routine. I'd been to this very fancy place, it was sunny, I was a little bit tipsy and I was getting the train back, bought the book, sat down to read it and this different version of the city rushed up to meet me from the pages. It's quite relentlessly bleak, let's say. What's it like in your line of work spending time in this particular part of history? The strangest thing I did after writing this book was there's a nameless, it shall remain nameless, events company that caters for the lifestyle pursuits of very, very rich people.

And they wanted a session being told about how terrible life is for the very poor and it paid very well. And it just seemed the strangest thing in the world, but maybe it made some people give some money to charity afterwards. I don't know. Those contrasts are strange. But that seems in and of itself very Victorian, doesn't it? Deeply Victorian. Yeah, that's sort of the invention of a strange form of altruism in which someone is always making a profit, which probably isn't the person at the bottom. It's quite something to work in this area. I must admit, I felt slightly traumatised reading certain accounts when you get into descriptions of childhoods that end up in a casual beheading occasionally. It can be horrific, so you have

to draw your boundaries somewhere. I think the way through is to never lose sight of the humanity in everything, and in researching the late Georgian and the Victorian street, which I came to through cultural and political history and song in particular, looking to see how people actually really lived and function on this level. The thing that most surprised me was that humanity. It was the amount of love that I encountered on the street. It was the extent to which in a society when those at the top are codifying things on racial and national boundaries and putting in place all of these forms of prejudice, you actually have a whole class of people who are incredibly, not necessarily open on racial and national boundaries and putting in place all of these forms of prejudice. You

actually have a whole class of people who are incredibly, not necessarily open-minded, but open-armed. They welcome people because of difference, and there are networks even for the very poorest. Even if you are completely alone on the London street, you are never quite alone because you will find others like you. They may be your competitors, but they may also become your friends. So however dark things get, however terrible your situation, and especially if you go through this with first-hand accounts, you get into some pretty bleak territory. There is always a shot at something slightly brighter through the smog. There's always something there. I have to cling onto that because also you then think have things really changed that much? And some things have and some things haven't, but there is always hope.

We will absolutely buy into relentless optimism on After Dark, despite the fact that we spend an awful lot of time in these kind of darker archives as well. One thing which I want to hone in on, you said about love, Oscar, and one of the places, I'm wondering if this is uniquely Irish, and actually feel free to speak on that that but one of the places that is not very closely associated with love I suppose is the workhouse and we grow up with this very bizarrely present idea of the workhouse in. Certainly 20th and possibly still 21st century Ireland I don't overstate the point but this kind of intergenerational trauma from famine and the associations with famine in ireland and the work house are so very obvious and present you know you pass by the site of work house and you're told that's where the work house was what's like you're warned away from it in local legend even in the twentieth century when they're no longer working i wanna kind of drill down into that a little bit more in a general sense and ask what exactly was a workhouse and am I right in thinking that it's during this kind of famine period in Ireland and just before that they really start to reach their heyday, I suppose, when

they're at their most used. It feels odd to call something a heyday, doesn't it? Well there are a lot of questions there and that's this podcast and ten others just answering some of those questions. And first of all, I think there is something unique about the Irish situation, right? Because there's that peculiar combination of these things being more in small communities quite often about being associated with the church more than with the state. There's the hangover of workhouses in general, but then also institutions like the Madeleine Laundries, especially punitive things targeted specifically at women. We think that these things occupy a huge cultural

space today that feels so much closer to our lives, maybe than an English workhouse system that officially ends in the early 20th century can do. We're now some generations away from that, though about 10% of people apparently can trace a really close connection to a recent ancestor who went through the workhouse system. So they are very tangible and very close to us. But as to this question, what is a workhouse? Well, I'm sure no one has ever said on this podcast before that it's complicated. Something is quite complicated. It's an old English word, and then you trace it through the centuries and workhouse first becomes a sort of medieval punitive thing, but it's a place you are put to work as a punishment, then you get the idea of workhouses being like a poorhouse or an

almshouse, something that's a bit more proto-welfare state, you might say. And then we're coming into the 19th century under the old poor law. So we have this system until 1834 that has all of this sort of palimpsest of these old forms of different kinds of 1834 that has all of this sort of palimpsest of these old forms of different kinds of poor relief or punishment or just places where you put people and just as the Victorian period starts in the 1830s people try and get on top of it because it has all got completely out of hand. Spoiler, they don't. It stays completely out of hand.

A workhouse. What is it? It's a system, it's an ideology, but it is a building. It's one of these things where actually you reify something into one thing, a thing of bricks and mortar and stone. That is it. And you have one in every community and there's the shadow of the workhouse and you see it. That's really important. The fact that it's a place you can go, you can be put, you have to come out of. It really makes that system that confronts rich and poor, that makes you feel you're in an oppressed place in society.

It makes it present, it makes it visible, it looms over you like a castle does or a prison does. And it's very much on a continuum with those things as well. That's really, really helpful as a way in, I think. And as Anthony was saying, these physical presences, whether it's smaller communities or in big cities, still have legacies. I mean, in the town that I grew up in, in Staffordshire, the workhouse still stands and it's now the local hospital. And it's been repurposed in that way. You know, every time I would, I don't know, break a finger or something as a child and be hauled up to the little laney there, even as a child, I think that's strange. You know, we'd learn about the workhouses in school. And I don't know

if this is an English thing rather than an Irish thing, Anthony, but we would do dressing up days where we would dress up as Victorian orphans and get to go to the workhouse and be shouted at by adults we didn't know. And it was, you know, this was a moment of great excitement in school, in your school life. And, you know, even knowing that kind of context for it, going up to the little hospital, you'd think, huh, weird. This is strange that we're still in this building and occupying it. Let's talk about the tiny little elephant in the room, huh, weird. This is strange that we're still in this building and occupying it. Let's talk about the tiny little elephant in the room Oscar, which is of course Oliver Twist. And this is maybe most people's impression of life

in the workhouse. You know, we can all think of the line, please sir. Can I have some more? We can picture it from the classic film. How useful and how accurate is Dickens and Oliver Twist in particular in taking us inside this world of the Victorian workhouse when I suppose, as you mentioned the change in the Poor Law in 1834, there's a kind of, by the time you get into the 19th century,

workhouses are sort of on steroids compared to how they were, right? They've gone from like the small parish arms house type adjacent situation to something like so institutional and vast architecturally, socially, economically. So is Oliver Twist a useful way to begin a way in? It's incredibly useful because I love what you said there about dressing up as a child and for me that's what history is all about. That's so much better as history when you're sort of eight or nine and you're an evacuee or you're a workhouse child, so much better than in secondary school when you're doing basic things about is this source biased? Yes, it is.

So imagination is absolutely crucial and imagination is absolutely central to the experience of the workhouse. So it's a great way in. I was going to quote someone called John James Beasor, who is a small boy in the 1830s. And he in his memoir refers to the workhouse, worst of all prisons so dreaded by the poor. And Beezer is a really interesting case because he is a child before Oliver Twist comes out, but he is writing his memoir of his childhood after Oliver Twist comes out, and he has this account of him rebelling against a master because the master is mean about his mother that is absolutely like that scene near the start of Oliver Twist. And you think, wow, this is this amazing precedent. And then you think, wow, this is this amazing precedent.

And then you think, wait, but was there another influence that came in here? And you have all of these people in the 19th century, people like Dickens who are writing these romanticized or heightened versions of reality with a purpose in mind, whether that's reform or sensationalism or so on. And Dickens is the one where people do say, yes, but he did kind of know what this was like.

Because when he's 12, he goes into a blacking factory. He's in a sort of workhouse adjacent situation for a while, and it really sticks with him. So I think absolutely, yes. And that wonderful black and white film in particular, More Than the Musical, is such a good film. Controversial. You mean they weren't doing routines in workhouses in the 19th century? Well, I have been misled, Oscar. No, because silence is a really important coercive tool of control, isn't it? Yeah,

you're not allowed to do quite so much singing. But no, that black and white film, it brings something of that deeply evocative shadow to that experience. Shadow is, I think, important. And architecture is important. You said architecture. And in the 1830s, when they say it's not fit for purpose, we need new things, they start building all these new workhouses. And they're on the idea of Jeremy Bentham's panopticon, which many listeners will know is this whole thing about surveillance where you have a central thing that looks out. So wherever you are, you think someone's watching you, even if they're not. And in later decades, they say this is very unsanitary, we need more light and air in these places, we need to reform this. But that initial thing, it's so much about controlling the space as

well as in the systems as well as in what's going on. And of course some of them are now hospitals because hospitals were originally these institutions first and then it all goes around, they're all connected, they're like prisons, they're like hospitals. Yeah, I think that's a really interesting point about surveillance and particularly about punishment and certainly from the 18th to 19th century we see the function of a prison changes from being a holding pen for people going off for execution or until they can pay their debts and suddenly the being in prison itself becomes the punishment. That's very much, I suppose, what you see in the adjacent world of the

workhouse. But Oscar, let's talk first of all about if we were to enter the workhouse, what would be the reason for doing so? What's happening to people's lives that makes them desperate enough to enter? Because presumably things have to be really bad already before you're willing to go through that door. Yeah, there's not a safety net that will take care of you in other ways, but there are groups. It has to be really, really bad. The thing about life on the outside is it's unreliable if you're very poor, if you're in the street. You can normally get a roof over your head for a night because it's actually a lot cheaper to rent a room then than it is now. A load of you can pitch in, share beds together, you can have a penny gaff. The things that are really blighting

your life outside are uncertainty, are cold, are hunger. If we think about a city like London or Edinburgh or anywhere in the Northern Hemisphere really, it's the winters that really get to you. It's not being able to get enough food because places aren't doling it out, or if they are, there are strings attached, and medical necessity. So in the 1860s, Barnardo, he of the children's charity, is interviewing a woman, he doesn't name her, but she has three children, and gives this picture of her life which is she's homeless her whole life, she's a sort of vagabond, she's roaming, she spends her whole life in hedges and on the road, but she's gone into a workhouse three times and she says, I used to go into the workers on these three very particular occasions and come

out again with the baby in a fortnight or three weeks. You might go in to give birth because it's a place where you can do that and be looked after. You might go in when you're very ill and no one else can support you. You're in a really dire state where stuff on the outside can't fix it. There's a case of a boy called Josiah Bassett. He is sort of a runaway. He and his brother, they're in a terrible situation at home. They go out on the streets, they fend for themselves, they're living off scraps, they're really on the line. They get put in a workhouse and they're relieved. A few days later there's this great monotony to it, they escape, they break out, they go on the streets and then they're oscillating back and forth. They run away, they go on the streets, things get too bad, they go back in, always pivoting between this sense of utter desperation, the

need for that security, for that sense of continuity, for support and then that feeling of total oppression where you can't bear it anymore. So if you're like on the outside, you're physically in a worse state, but mentally there's generally something to support you and then you're trading that off when you go inside. You have to be in a position to really feel I am relinquishing my freedom. And that's worse for a a child because once you go in you can't discharge yourself in the same way that an adult can. To what extent Oscar psychologically then do we have an insight into the people that were coming through those doors in the 19th century because we have this idea of an association with shame but I'm really interested in this idea of oscillation that you're talking about, about going in when needs be and coming back out. So it does feel like it's not necessarily a one size fits all when it comes to this. And some people are using it as a means to survive or a means to help their newborn baby survive or whatever it might be.

In which case there's not necessarily an element of shame involved there because you know, you're doing what you're supposed to be doing as a parent. But I have this impression of shame when it comes to the workhouse and shame associated with having to go there. Again, I will use the example of Ireland because it's the one I'm most familiar with, but we have the example of people being so ashamed to even contemplate going to the workhouse that they would prefer to die on the roadside and decompose there rather than be taken to the workhouse.

So what is the psychological effect of entering in here and then, you know, potentially being separated from your family, et cetera? You're completely right. I could give you dozens of examples of people who would choose to die outside in the cold rather than go in. That shame is there. That shame is among communities outside the workhouse looking at them, but it's not there by accident or in spite of anything that is the system, that is the

design because this society in the 19. That is the design. Because this society in the 19th century is so tangled up in its ideas of the deserving and the undeserving poor trying to work out that idea of altruism of a welfare state, that idea of charity is really being thrashed out in the 19th into the 20th century. But at this moment, they're still really wrangling. So if you're going to go somewhere where you're given food essentially and lodging for free, there needs to be a cost that goes with it. And endless little balancing acts are done to try and make sure that things are no better than they are outside and that it is seen as something that is shameful. That kind of real sense of you've been in

the workhouse, you are in the workhouse, oh, it's the last place I would go, it really matters. Separation is very important because when you go in, you're sorted, you're sorted into categories. And that means that if you're, if you have children under two, you can keep them with you. But in any other circumstance, you're divided. So any normal family grouping in particular, will be divided along age and along gender. If you're under 14, boys here, girls here, 14 to 60 able-bodied men here, women here, over 60. So imagine a whole family over three generations going into the workhouse, they might be split up

into as many as six different groups. So it's not a place where you can have love, as we said earlier, it's not a place where you can continue to exist as a unit, as a group of people. So you are giving away so much of your identity. You're giving away any possessions you have because you have to formally be sort of bankrupt and destitute and have no belongings. So you lose your clothing, sometimes you're shaved, you're cleansed. For hygienic reasons you can see why you might be sort of purged and bathed and given new things to wear when you go in. That's a very sensible medical thing thing but it's also kind of almost a spiritual transition into another space. It's like you're going into a monastery but not of your own free will. You're giving

up what's in the world outside and you'll become a completely other sort of person. You don a uniform the same as other people. Unless in the early years you're a woman who is seen to be a prostitute or fallen or coming in with an illegitimate baby in which case you might be put in a yellow gown. That's meant to be stamped out as time goes on because that's a very deliberate shaming practice that is seen as too far even for the Victorians. But all these things are put in place to really divide you from your sense of self and what makes you you. This stripping back of identity in every possible way, whether that's your physicality, the

removal of hair, of clothing, the removal of those family dynamics and who you are in relation to your children, the partner that you might have come in with, your grandfather, whoever you are there with. There's also a sort of institutional ownership of the body, isn't there, Oscar, in terms of people go into the workhouse and they are made to work. So what kind of things are they expected to do if they are physically able? And that's a really good point. And that's tricky, because you're kind of self selecting going into the workhouse, and you have to be admitted. But increasingly, if you're going into the workhouse, you're sick, you're infirm, you've got a disability, you're very old, you're frail in one way or another, or you're a small child, so you're not very good at working. So in the first place, you have to consider that a lot of the people in there who are working are not exactly your ideal candidates. And in another, the old form of workhouse has come into

a lot of flak because people are running it on profit lines. Before the 1830s, they're seen as factories in which you're essentially getting incredibly cheap labor, right? While abolitionist arguments are continuing to run on about what we're doing in the British colonies or so on, you've also got people kind of indenturing the poor in cities like London to run incredibly cheap labour. So after 1834, that's got to go away. So it's almost by design, you've got to work, but you're not allowed to work so well that you're in direct competition with like private companies outside, they lobby parliament against this idea. It's sort of anti-capitalist for these state parish institutions to be actually good at

their work. So that work is almost designed to be a bit rubbish. It really is those kind of things you imagine it being. So stone breaking, right? You're breaking up stones. If you're an able-bodied man outside maybe in a yard, you're smashing a big bit of rock with a hammer, with a pickaxe. Not great. For most people, oakum picking. We have this idea of people picking hemp little things. You get old ropes, old tarry ropes, and you tear them into lots of tiny little pieces. And that will become wadding, essentially, to sort of make things waterproof.

Normally ships, also in other places. Grinding up bones. These are remarkable tasks because they're incredibly menial, they will take an incredible toll on your eyesight, on your fingers, repetitive strain injuries are very common, they leave absolutely no space for any kind of mental engagement, you're doing them in very poor conditions. And you know all along that these are not meant to actually achieve anything in particular, so you don't even have that sort of great Victorian Protestant work ethic ideal of getting a sort of value through your work is stripped away from you too. On the other hand, there's a lot of recycling going on there. Actually, a lot of this system is built around the sense of keeping these things going in the virtuous circle of reuse, of taking incredibly, you know, of old materials and making them useful again. That is part

of the ethic as well. There's something in there that's almost positive. Almost positive. And you know what? Yeah. I'm going to use recycling as a theoretical stretch to find the light in these workhouses. But you know what? Listen, we'll find the light wherever we can. I think it's useful. The other thing then, Oscar, that's really iconic in many ways, and again, that's a strange word to use, I suppose, about workhouses. And we have songs about the gruel is the food that is being served in here. And it does it. It really lingers in the imagination, as I say, this song has stuck with us over generations from Oliver Twist's The Musical. But what is the food actually like historically?

What do we know that was really happening at the time? It's very stodgy. People who actually go and count and work it all out will tell you that it's nutritionally not bad. Compared to what you would be trying to scrape through outside, it's sustaining you. And of course it's meant to sustain you. If these places are killing off their inmates through malnutrition, then that system really has completely failed.

So yes, gruel or to give it a slightly better name, sometimes porridge. I mean, we're not so down on porridge as an idea in the mornings, your bread and porridge or gruel to set you up. Or maybe sometimes like peas pudding, like that's incredibly nutritious. Your dinner, so your sort of midday or very early afternoon meal will be a lot more carbon, quite protein heavy potatoes, bread, rice, sometimes meat is bad cuts of meat or it's salted or it's bacon or it's in a barrel, but meat is a crucial part of the diet, vegetables, mostly root vegetables, you know,

pastips, turnips, swede, that kind of thing. You're getting most of your food groups in and then sort of bread and cheese before bed as well. Not alcohol, of course. It's not a terrible diet. On the other hand, food isn't all about just like what's in it, what the calories are, what it's made of, the irregularity of it, the monotony of it, the fact this is not being made with love by Mama in the kitchen, right? This is institutional food of that worst case sort that you imagine the smells of boiling cabbage from school. The sense that this is the same day after day after day is very important. And again, the psychology of it is fascinating. Firstly, there's this balancing act where people are meant notionally to keep an eye

on what's going on outside and what the poorest are eating outside the workhouse and make sure the food inside isn't nicer than it. Like you're literally meant by order to not offer like better meals than people are getting elsewhere, even if you often do. And then when the new poor law comes in in 1834 you're also banned from giving people Christmas dinners. So there's this great long tradition that the poorest in society will be given roast beef and plum pudding like on Christmas or the King's birthday or something like that and that is stamped out. And people say this is very un-British. The whole point about being a Briton is that we

get to eat a cow. The French can't eat a cow. But it comes back in over time in various places people say no no we need festive meals we must give our inmates a bit of beef now and then and that speaks I think to the idea that like the ideology that is this food it's going to sustain your body but not your soul. That's again the intention. I'll have to keep my voice down because right now I'm between the actual bedsheets of some of history's most famous figures. Want to know more about what Hitler might have been like in the sack or Julius Caesar Or our very own Billy Shakespeare? You wouldn't believe the details I'm able to uncover here on Betwixt the Sheets, a podcast by History Hit.

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Join me, Kate Lister, every Tuesday and Friday on Betwixt the Sheets to find out more. Listen wherever you get your podcasts. Right, time to slide out of here and avoid the bedpan. Right, time to slide out of here and avoid the bedpan! I think one of the enduring images as well of the workhouse is those sort of long tables and long benches and everyone sat eating together, which is interesting in and of itself when you've been processed into this space and separated from your family and categorised in different ways, and then you come to this sort of communal area. And I suppose, you know, thinking about

the 19th century, certainly in Britain's obsession with domesticity, with the family, whether it's the royal family right down to the middle classes and even the working classes, this idea of sitting round your table and performing your roles. There's the father who goes out to work, there's the mother who's the angel of the house, and you have the pretty little children running around who are seen and not heard and all of that. This is a sort of deconstruction of that. In a way, everyone's placed right on the bottom altogether, everyone's sort of levelled out. When you were speaking earlier, Oscar, I was thinking about the repetition of some of the work and some of the lifestyle within the workhouse, these routines, this physical repetition. I

suppose it's making me think of just how parallel that is in certain ways to the industry that's going on outside of the workhouse that, as you say, is more capitalistically driven and concerned with profit and not with punishment. But also thinking about those conditions inside factories at the time and thinking about the individual workers and how they were punished routinely, whether that's, I've read of children being sort of hung from the ceiling in baskets above machinery or little kids who've had their, you know, a nail put through their ear on a table or something when they've misbehaved in that space that's threatened the sort of capitalist revolution that's happening. What happens if you misbehave in the workhouse? Are there similar

punishments that you might find there as well? It's maybe not as grotesque and extreme because I think these things being run by parishes and being normally part of the state does secure a certain degree of restraint. You get many examples of people going overboard, individual masters or regimes being specifically sadistic, but also the scale of them, the number of staff you have in places, it's much harder for someone to be a total despot in the same way. And especially if you're a child, like you'll spend part of your time under the control of a schoolmaster who wants to educate you, very often these people are very driven by those goals, and part of your time being put to work, and so there'll be

multiple people trying to discipline you and look after you at the same time. Those two groups, you stop being a child at 14 in the workhouse. Boys and girls are subject to physical discipline. Obviously with the boys it's more spectacular and ferocious than with the girls. Though one thing that really sums up the sort of two-facedness of that, there's a scandal in 1856 in Marlbourne in which three workhouse offices are thrown out and there are songs written about this as well. I like one of the songs in Oliver if you like it's the women floggers lament of macklebone workhouse sam i'm going to since you're not going to stop me sing you the start of this song goes oh dear here's a shocking disaster my name it is ryan a poor workhouse master i've now got discharged and my sentence is past us because i went flogging the girls the two flogging porters and me are crushed

downcers. One porter is green and the other is brownsers. We would not have it happen for five hundred poundsers. Flogging the dear little girls." It goes on for a long time. The point is that you have this workhouse in which obviously like girls and women, it makes clear, and women are being subject to excessive sadistic physical chastisement. At the same time, it's a national disgrace and popular feeling and sentiment is so against this. There are lots of these songs printed. The people actually get their comeuppance. So it is a society that has red lines it will not cross.

That is bleak. Yeah, yeah, yeah. It is bleak, but it's interesting. Like the feeling is so strongly against these men for what they're doing there. And because you can come out and go in like you're not free from some degree of oversight or consequence in this institution people do get out like there are consequences. Non-physical punishments are almost worse I think, the extent to which people are put in solitary confinement, having your food stopped for a while like these sorts of things that are deliberately confinement, having your food stopped for a while, these sorts of things that are deliberately bad for your health in ways that are worse than being hurt, I think. They just treat

you as subhuman to some degree. There's a guy called Thomas Gould who's in the popular Union Workhouse in 1853. He writes a complaint to the Board of Overseers. Within a few minutes of the time prescribed for quitting labour, and whilst reading a moral tract, I was told by the master that I should not read, and thereupon he ordered my books to be taken from me, threatening at the same time to lock me up, calling me an insolent. Like it's that idea that your mental life, your escapism, your self-improvement can be arbitrarily removed.

It's that kind of thing. It's that loss of liberty that seems to me, that's what's different from the outside. Like, if you're a child, you're going to get hit anywhere in life. In a public boarding school, on the streets, in a lovely domestic home with an angel of the house. But this sense that people can control you, that's what makes it like prison. That's where it's really harsh. Even up until the very last thing you will do in life which is of course die and it is in a book i read recently by mary shannon i think it was billy waters. Is one of those people who spends an awful long time trying to avoid getting into the workers and then really tragically ends up there. In the end and you know you do see this depicted fiction where it's don't let me in the workhouse, don't let me die in the workhouse. So was this somewhere

that people, maybe not themselves, but their communities strategically placed dying people if they needed to for whatever reason? And what does a death inside of workhouse look like? I mean, death looks kind of the same everywhere in a way, except here it's at least in a bed. The infirm and the elderly over 60 are already parceled off into their own private sections, partly that's for order and logic, partly it's again to make that death. The 19th century is starting to make death less visible, if you like. It's that idea of placing it somewhere slightly different. And you have medics in all your workhouses, you have attendants, people who

look after you. But yeah, the workhouse is also and increasingly a hospice. That is very much a thing. Maybe there's some palliative care but it's not really about making it as smooth and nice as possible. It's very much you're in here, if you're in here to die then that is what you will do and maybe we might have some sobering moral lessons read over and to you as it's happening as well. Billy Waters, I'm glad we have a shout out for Mary Shannon's excellent book on that subject. It's the great irony of his life that he's a sort of street busker, fiddler, this great eccentric character, but he's in trouble all the time. And you can get sent to the workhouse by a magistrate and he has been sent there several times over his career. And so for him, more than most people, the workhouse is this total anathema, because it functions as a prison, as well as the place he doesn't want to go. March 1823, his last days, he goes into St Charles's workhouse. It's like, they got him at last. It's finally, you've relinquished that last trace of your independence, that final thing that's taken from you. And what it looks like is lonely as well. You might be dying with other people, but precisely for the reasons we've described before, you're not dying with your family.

And I think that's maybe the hardest thing about that. Yes, it's very interesting to me that, you know, you say people went to the workhouse to give birth and to die often. And it just seems to me that even in modern society, we haven't quite, I don't know, built up the strategic infrastructure to deal with these things. We're still not quite there and that these were in the past certainly moments in life that people needed extra help and were, of course, extra vulnerable. Tell me about little Robert Blinko. He's a sort of Oliver Twist real life character, isn't he? So what do we know about him? So Robert Blinko is born in the 1790s. So when he's in the workhouse it's still under the old system. But he gives a

really vivid account because when he's grown up and he's also been through the horrors of a factory life and become a grocer, which is his version of Oliver Twist's Great Redemption arc, he narrates, because he's still illiterate, he narrates his memoir to a very mentally unstable journalist called Brown, who gives his report. But he's in St Pancras' workhouse in his report. But he's in St. Pancras Workhouse in his early years and he is an orphan. He's an orphan who hasn't been led into the

Foundling Hospital which is nearby and he already feels very estranged from society because he has no name of his own. This is one that's given to him. He feels this very strongly. But he calls the limit between himself in the workhouse and the outer world a wall of brass. It doesn't make much literal sense but it's this workhouse and the outer world a wall of brass. It doesn't make much literal sense, but it's this very evocative phrase, a wall of brass, that cuts him off from the world. And he speaks of being four years old and at the window of a workhouse, looking outside on the streets of St Pancras in winter, and there are children his own age who are out

on the street selling matches door to door, which can get them locked up, which can get them only a pittance that might allow them a bed for the night. They are in far worse state than he is, terribly worse. And he looks at them with envy because he wants to be like them rather than where he is. It calls it a gloomy, though liberal sort of a prison house and he stops eating. He's very much as happens to certain animals in captivity. He doesn't go on hunger strike, he just literally loses the will to eat or to play and he's looking for escape constantly and he's almost the opposite of Oliver Twist because this is a workhouse where the chimney sweeps come looking for their new apprentices just as happens to Oliver and for Oliver it's this terrible moment where he gets

taken on as a sweep because that's an absolutely hideous, very dangerous occupation that will very likely kill you. But Robert Blinko hears about this and he sees it as his way out, he's so desperate. He's almost prepping for his audition as a sweep and he tells later of how he goes about on tiptoe all the time to sort of stretch his tendons and get better at that, more nimble. He suspends himself from rafters, he does all these stretching exercises, he tries to make himself as supple as possible and when the sweeps come around and they're there and in line he's sort of me sir, me sir, he's sort of bursting out desperate to be taken away to this thing where he'll be put up a chimney and suffocate and he doesn't get selected and it's the worst moment of his childhood

that he doesn't get taken away to be a chimney sweep. This is how incredibly depressed he is in this situation where he has no incentives to feel like he wants to go on living And that's an extreme situation, but it's not an uncommon one, I think And I think it's important that he doesn't have any family who might at some point take him away because We started this whole thing talking about hope on the street outside and that's the one thing he really has not got. I'll have to keep my voice down because right now I'm between the actual bedsheets of some of history's most famous figures. Want to know more about what Hitler might have been like in the sack, or Julius Caesar,

or our very own Billy Shakespeare? You wouldn't believe the details I'm able to uncover here on Betwixt the Sheets, a podcast by history hit, because sexuality explored through a historical lens can reveal a surprising amount about the human experience. What's and all, if you'll excuse the pun. And we don't just stop at sex, expect outrageous scandals throughout the centuries as well as probing into everyday issues, the nitty gritty of human life that really connects us to all people throughout history. Join me, Kate Lister, every Tuesday and Friday on Betwixt the Sheets to find out more. Listen wherever you get your podcasts. Right, time to slide out here

and avoid the bedpan. You talk about him losing that hope and him not wanting to go on and we started this episode by asking could you survive a Victorian workhouse but it's not just us that is asking that question because Victorians were interested to know if they might be able to survive the Victorian workhouse as well. And I have an excerpt here that kind of inspired the narrative at the beginning from Joshua Stallard's The Female Casual and Her Lodging, 1866. He's talking about the Whitechapel Workhouse here. And you'll recognise some of the descriptions from the narrative at the top, but I think it's worth giving the actual factual account as well. So it goes, it was utterly impossible to lie down. The beds were alive with the vermin

and the rugs with lice. The walls and woodwork were all spotted over with marks where they had been killed. There lay the women, naked and restless, tossing about in the dim gaslight and getting up from time to time

in order to shake off their disgusting tormentors, which speckled their naked limbs with huge black spots. About 12 o'clock, the closeness of the heat of the room became intolerable, and everyone began to feel ill and to suffer from diarrhea. Several were drawn double with cramp. The stench became dreadful. So, you know, we have this idea of, okay, that food's not too bad. It's not great, but it's not too bad. At least you're inside. At least you have something akin to a bed that maybe you're going to die on.

But you also have this, which, you know, sounds something that's quite similar to transatlantic travel almost in the 18th century, where it's unpleasant. It's cramped. It sounds quite deathly. And this is why the Victorians were asking, would they be able to survive? So Oscar, I'm just wondering, what do you think our chances would be? And you know, Maddy and I will give our take on this as well, but I'm just intrigued. Do we have stats as to what the survival rate was?

Firstly, I hope that wasn't exactly how Maddy experienced her time in the workhouse as a small child, because it is a grimist account. As to the stats of death, I will give the typical historian an answer where never trust statistics. I mean, you know, lies, damn lies and statistics, because of course they're massively skewed by the fact that so many people are going into the workhouse already ill or very aged. So it's a place where rates of death are likely to be much higher than anywhere else. Now, this particular account is about as grim as it gets, and that's because

it's from a casual ward which are parts of workhouses that are really there for overnight relief. So for people to go into for one night only and then come out again and they're meant to be worse than the workhouse proper but they are an essential part of the institution and for a lot of paupers they're their first experience of it before they come on to the rest of it and they're the most insanitary hellholes in the world. They are truly, truly despicable. And Joshua Stallard there is the publisher of that book, but he's not the one experiencing this. He gets an anonymous working class woman who is of good moral character, but nonetheless

not unused to hardship to go in for him. This is a new thing in 1866 because another reporter called James Greenwood has dressed up as a vagrant and gone into a casual ward and then it becomes all the rage. People have this obsession with impersonating tramps, vagrants going undercover, vicariously living for a very short period of time like other people. And this poor woman, she goes into four or five of these places, comes out with some of the most compelling accounts I've read in all of literature about how horrific these situations are. These terrible things where she's got a rug, it is so ridden with lice, the consequences

are going to be unimaginable, but she gets so cold with fever in the night, she finally says no, that's it, I've got to have this rug on or I will die. And after that point, that's it, like her body is gone, she is plagued to hell by these things, but it was that or literally like freeze to death. So it's just absolutely horrendous. And after that point, that's it, like her body is gone, she is plagued to hell by these things but it was that or literally like freeze to death. So it's just absolutely horrendous. And after the last one of these, which is a few nights after the White Shuffle one, she says, that's it, no more, I will never do this again. I just hope she got well paid, frankly, because those wards in particular, like the rates of death, not in them, but subsequently, the diseases people will have caught in them.

And just the sheer moral brutality done to people in those places. Are they survivable? I mean, I've been to a fair few music festivals, I'm not unused to pretty grim toilets and situations. But I think there's survival in a literal physical sense, and there's survival in a wider sense. And I think that's really testing anyone's capability to come through. LR – Have you ever come across anyone, Oscar, in your research who spent time in the workhouse and did survive it and did manage to pull themselves up in society? Are there stories of hope amongst all this horror? AC – Yes, it does happen. People who are gaming the system in a way or who genuinely take advantage of some of the benefits of the workhouses and if you go in as a child like the idea is you are meant to emerge into better

employment. Some of those accounts are very dubious because they get published in places like the journals of institutions for like the reform of women where it's like oh and now she's a model servant and she writes me a lovely letter every year about how grateful she was to be placed in this initially. One that I will trust more is quite early, it's under the old system, it's from David Love who is a Scot, he's a ballad singer, he has a remarkable life in which he varies three wives, through no fault of his own, I should add. He's in prison on many occasions, he travels all over Britain, he lives in Nottingham, and he goes into workhouses in need in the 1800s, the 1810s, and he not only comes out feeling positive about them, he lives in Nottingham, and he goes into workhouses in need in the 1800s,

the 1810s, and he not only comes out feeling positive about them, he writes poems in praise of them that he then goes on to sell. He compares these places very quickly to any other country, he says the English one's much better than his Scotland, look at what we provide for our poor, he talks about the medicine on offer, have all of these amazing drugs you can take in a in a workhouse by which he means drugs to become less ill rather than for for recreation. And yeah, he's a person I trust. He's a fairly radical political figure. He tells it like it is, but he had a good experience in the workhouse and cannot have been entirely alone. CB So Maddie, before we go, could you have survived a Victorian workhouse? No, I have a terrible immune system at the best of times. Like if I'm on a train and someone sneezes three carriages over, I will have that cold

and worse. Also, Anthony, as you well know, I'm always freezing cold. Always. Yes, that's what I thought about you. Every time we record in a studio, I'm complaining, Anthony's like taking his layers off, he's nice and warm. I'm always like, bring me a, I don't know, a rug or yeah, some kind of blanket. No, I would be instantly dead within like an hour of coming in. What about you? I, this is going to shock you. Because you know how I like my comforts quite a lot.

Can I just say there was a previous episode we did recently, where we talked about how in the Paris Catacombs, when people decomposed, that they created candles from the body wax, and you were like, lovely, love the luxury. That's the ultimate bougie candle. You literally love- No, I didn't say I loved it. I'm pretty sure. I just said I'd be intrigued, but I would want to. You said you would want to own one. That's the level of dark luxury that Anthony likes. I think if there's one thing I am more than I like comfort,

it's stubborn. And I think I wouldn't please the bastards to die. I'd be like, right, I will see this out to fruition. Thank you very much. And I will be leaving this place all in one piece. So I think I would ask her what about you? Do you think you could make it? I know you've painted, well, you've painted a grim and then a bit more of a positive example there at the end in the early, I mean, trust the Georgians that they were getting it right. Of course, the Victorians ruined the whole thing. They bugged it all up. But yeah, what do you think? Do you think, could you do it?

Well, I'm just disappointed when you said this is going to shock you that you didn't say I have survived a work. My worst stress dreams are always about being back at school and having a lack of agency. So I think no, I think being under the rule of someone else in that way would completely do for me. I'm gone. I'm out on day two. Do you mean like leaving or do you mean dead? I don't know. Something's going to go very bad. One way or the other. One way or the other. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Okay. Okay. I'll accept it. So interesting. And Oscar, thank you so much for chatting to us about this because we've been meaning

to talk to you for a long time because we both, as Maddie says at the beginning, we're so enamored by vagabonds and it's just such a great book. And if you haven't read Oscar's book, please do go out and get it because it's a real insight and it's an immersive history and you talked about music at the start. I was going to remember that was one of the things that stuck with me about reading it. There's this lingering memory in my mind of the music you talk about on the streets and how that kind of infiltrates the streets and I really, really enjoyed that. So go and get yourself a copy of Vagabond. You will absolutely devour it. If you've enjoyed this, then please do check out our brilliant colleague, Dr. Kate Lister,

is betwixt the sheets. There you'll find a lot more immersive personal histories to devour. If you have enjoyed this episode, which I'm sure you have, because Maddy and I definitely have, then leave us a five star review wherever you get your podcasts. It helps other people to discover us. And until next time, enjoy listening to our back catalogue.