George Gissing: A Fan's Commonplace Blog

Commonplace 152  George & The Spectre of the Workhouse.

The Workhouse. There are few words that personify the lives of the poor in Victorian times with more intensity. Or, more precisely, fear of the workhouse - for the threat to the poor of being incarcerated in one was enough to impel some to prefer to die of starvation or cold on the cruel cobbled streets, or out in the fields under a hedge. George often mentioned his 'fear' of falling so low in life that the workhouse was his only option. This was total tosh, of course, because he would never have allowed himself to do such a thing - and there would be no need as he could always ask for help from his family, or even go back home to Wakefield to live with them. George's sense of his own hard-done-to-ness in life always leaks out in his letters and writing and marks him as a self-pitying whinger. Perhaps he kept mentioning his fear to deter his brother Algernon from asking for a loan, as was his wont. If so, it didn't work. But as his own chances of ever being admitted to a workhouse were virtually nil, George proves his own lack of empathy for those who had no other choice, and who could not use allusions to it for their own ironic ends.

The Whitechapel Workhouse in the twentieth century -
 the Kray twins were born just round the corner.

In aesthetic terms, there is nothing romantic to be gleaned from a workhouse - unlike debtors' prison, which could be invoked as a sign of extended suffering - Dickens, for example, would never have been the writer he was if his father hadn't sentenced the family to a spell of confinement in the Marshalsea click. The workhouse was a kind of social bogeyman intended to motivate the poor to keep going on despite starvation and disease, because what it offered them there was even worse than what their poverty and disease doled out. Fear is what the rich use to control the poor - the poor can take deprivation and disease, but they can't take lack of any connection to their world or any form of autonomy. 'All hope abandon ye;' as Dante didn't write click. over the Gates of Hell, should have been inscribed above every workhouse door. What it did not offer, was any notion of comfort or a home from home; poverty was a sin and a crime; no-one was allowed to benefit from it. Keeping the perceived underclass in fear was a Victorian social norm.

The Marshalsea Prison complex. Paupers shared premises with traitors and similar felons.

Because of the concentration of paupers in urban areas, the role of the workhouse in rural life is often overlooked. Then, as now, the countryside harbours immense pockets of deprivation that can rival any to be found in cities; lives blighted by poverty, lack of employment opportunities, dependence on social welfare, lack of transport and high costs of housing, exacerbated by poor infrastructure and facilities and then made worse by social isolation and loneliness make living in the countryside deeply unpleasant unless you have the advantage of heaps of money. No amount of the 'sublime', in the Romantic sense, can fill up a soul that is living in want or enduring the kind of anomie that arises from the mismatch between the dream and the reality of life. If you disagree with this, you have never been truly poor. Which was George's situation.

To really understand how the threatening presence of the workhouse rose up to subdue and terrify the poor, you have to get a sense of how and why these correctives were instituted. The poor have always been dependent on and beholden to, those with money; after all, money has always equated with power. Following the Black Death (the plague that decimated much of the world in the fourteenth century) the subsequent drop in the numbers of agricultural workers became a serious threat to national survival, so pervasive that it required state intervention. That came in England with the Poor Law Act of 1388. It was required because the poor had, for once, the upper hand. They could ask for more pay if there were fewer of them to work the fields - and of they didn't get it, they could move on to an employer who could afford to pay what they asked for. The Poor Law Act did not set out to give the poor more rights - it set out to stop their movements so they couldn't up sticks and seek out better pay. What it offered as a palliative to this was some form of relief from want, in the form of a limited amount of support from the local state. It was upgraded when forced to do so by the mass unemployment of troops and sailors returning from the Napoleonic Wars. The New Poor Law of 1834, promoted by Earl Grey (he of the tea and a fondness for Georgiana, Duchess of Devonshire aka Keira Knightley) came into being and wreaked its own form of social havoc.

An alternative to the workhouse - but not an improvement. A Salvation Army women's shelter c1892 click

The New Poor Law did not offer much of an improvement on living conditions, though it was considered by some to be too generous to the poor. The crux of the matter was that the poor were considered to have brought about their own dire straits, and so helping them out was tantamount to encouraging them to fail in life and stop trying to better themselves and pay their own way in life. , To offer them welfare (as we know it) would rob them of the motivation to find work and fend for themselves. O, would that it were that easy to explain! You hear this as an argument still, but very few opt to or prefer to remain on the reliance of hand-outs from their state. It is often seen by the recipients as demeaning and insulting, which is why we can be fairly certain George would never have allowed himself to make use of that sort of support.

We can assume that his first wife, Marianne aka Nell did not have to use the services of the workhouse because she was legally entitled to maintenance payments from her husband. Victorians took a very dim view of a working class man who would not support his wife even if they were estranged; a middle class man doing so would be publicly outed and shunned. This was why many supporters of the anti-suffrage movement were opposed to female emancipation - they feared that feckless men of all classes would abandon their financial responsibilities and refuse to pay for their wives and children. It was not always female power they were wary of but men's feckless weakness and innate misogyny.

Opponents of the New Poor Law give some of their reasons. 1837

As alternatives to the workhouse morphed into a more humane service, many of the massive buildings were converted into hospitals. All workhouses had their own infirmaries, and these always had an infectious ward and one for sick children. Upgrading these buildings to hospitals was fairly straightforward in the days before advances in medical technology made purpose-built hospitals a necessity. Many retained the original features of over-large rooms that could be easily turned into wards. In that 1980s short-sighted drive that sought to make the NHS a corporate business, whilst making millions of £s for developers via the old boys' network of graft so beloved by the British middle classes, many of these older buildings were sold for development as private housing.

For a while, George had lived very close to the Marylebone workhouse. It was revamped twice as St Marylebone Institution and then Luxborough Lodge before being demolished in 1965 to make way for the Polytechnic of Central London. Now, it's the site for Westminster University. Progress, of a sort - the rich have colonised all those ghettos and slums once so feared by the bourgeoisie that created them; the rich have reclaimed their land and erected Babylon on the graves of the poor.

The rich have always liked the poor to be subservient, grateful and craven. 'To smile and be condescending..'

The above is a snippet from the poem of the same name. The urban poor have always poked fun at themselves, with the music halls helping out with comic songs and turns. This poem was often hijacked as a monologue performed on the stage to audiences who encouraged the turns to incorporate their own amusing, scatalogical verses to lighten the mood of the piece. Similarly, it became a sort of ongoing joke to lampoon meagre meals and living conditions by referring to the opening stanza when mocking suffering of a trivial kind - like not enough sugar in your tea. As used by, the Tommies at the Front 1914-1918 and any subsequent British armed service usually abroad on active service. Please watch this click for verification. Well said, my son. The poem was written by George R Sims and many of his MS are currently held at the John Rylands Library in Manchester University, the place that holds so many documents relating to George and the Gissings. Sims is described as an 'author, playwright, journalist, philanthropist'. A life lived to the full, eh?

George Robert Sims (1847-1922)