![Sample our Humanities journals, sign in here to start your FREE access for 14 days]({"type":"image" , "src" : "/sda/5939/TOC-Subject-Sample-2021-Humanities.jpg"})
Abstract
This article provides an overview of the representation of workhouse philanthropy in the nineteenth-century periodical. In the 1830s and 40s, the popular representation of the workhouse was of a cruel institution in which paupers were systematically beaten and starved. However, the ideological significance of the workhouse shifts in the depictions of privately funded philanthropy that proliferated in magazines and newspapers during the Christmas publishing season. In representations of the workhouse at Christmas, paupers are shown receiving gifts and enjoying entertainments against a festively decorated backdrop. Middle-class benevolence is at the heart of these Christmas performances: these treats are not funded by the poor rates, but by individuals, who are frequently depicted in attendance at the workhouse Christmas. The institution, now redolent with ideas of care, charity and goodwill, functions in these texts as a stage for the projection of a bourgeois philanthropic self; the reader, the audience of this ideological performance, is encouraged to self-identify with the middle-class values that overlay these workhouse scenes. Entwined with these depictions of private philanthropy are underlying ideas of discipline and control. Just as the middle-class guests enact an idealized identity, so too do the paupers enact the role of the indebted and grateful poor. This article examines how the nineteenth-century periodical constructs the workhouse as a performance space for the middle classes; it explores the various agendas of these constructions and analyses the ideological messages they convey.
Notes
1. ‘Christmas in the Workhouse’, Punch, 3 January 1857, p. 1.
2. ‘Christmas in the Workhouse’, p. 1.
3. ‘Christmas in the Workhouse’, p. 1.
4. J. A. R. Pimlott, The Englishman’s Christmas: A Social History (Hassocks: Harvester Press, 1978), p. 85. As Nadja Durbach points out, ‘Christmas was a time [for Victorians] to practice what they viewed as the quintessentially British values of domesticity, benevolence, and hospitality through extending the comforts of the home to those less fortunate’. See Nadja Durbach, ‘Roast Beef, the New Poor Law, and the British Nation, 1834–63’, Journal of British Studies, 52.4 (October 2013), 963–89 (p. 967).
5. Neil Armstrong notes that ‘[b]y the early nineteenth century, England had a long tradition of providing for and treating the poor during the festive season. […] The first recorded evidence of Christmas Charity in England dates from the medieval period’. Neil Armstrong, Christmas in Nineteenth-Century England (Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press, 2010), p. 99. For a history of Christmas, see Pimlott, The Englishman’s Christmas.
6. Tara Moore suggests that ‘Punch’s Christmas satire frequently attacked the uncharitable middle class by showcasing the voice of a misanthropist and allowing the reader to judge the unattractive result for herself’. Tara Moore, Victorian Christmas in Print (New York: Palgrave, 2009), p. 71.
7. Durbach, ‘Roast Beef’, p. 970.
8. Durbach, ‘Roast Beef’, p. 971. The decision to cancel Christmas was an unpopular one; as Norman Longmate suggests, ‘[n]othing did more to harm the public image of the workhouse than the way in which the Poor Law Commissioners treated Christmas’. Norman Longmate, The Workhouse (London: Temple Smith, 1974), p. 221.
9. Durbach, ‘Roast Beef’, p. 967. M. A. Crowther notes that, ‘[c]harity was not permitted to enter the workhouse without a struggle. The Royal Commission of 1832 had not objected to charitable effort on behalf of the helpless inmates, but the Poor Law Commissioners disliked all public intrusion into the workhouses because of the possible disruption of “discipline”’. M. A. Crowther, The Workhouse System 1834–1929 (London: Methuen, 1983), p. 68.
10. ‘Domestic’, Lancaster Gazette and General Advertiser, for Lancashire, Westmorland, &c, 31 December 1836, p. 1.
11. An illustration published in the Odd Fellow depicts a commissioner extinguishing the paupers’ dream of Christmas food. ‘The Pauper’s Vision’, Odd Fellow, 9 January 1841, p. 5.
12. Durbach notes that ‘many boards of guardians ignored these directives and did provide special treats to workhouse inmates without asking permission’. Durbach, ‘Roast Beef’, p. 972.
13. Tara Moore, ‘Starvation in Victorian Christmas Fiction’, Victorian Literature and Culture, 36.2 (September 2008), 489–505 (p. 498). See also Pimlott, The Englishman’s Christmas, p. 90.
14. Charles Dickens, Oliver Twist, ed. by Kathleen Tillotson (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2008), p. 11.
15. ‘Christmas-Day in the Workhouses’, The Times, 25 December 1841, p. 6. The Times inaugurated an annual tradition of detailing the food given in each of the London workhouses on 25 December. Not all workhouses were forthcoming with the details of their Christmas fare. Responding to a request for information from The Times, the response from the Bethnal Green workhouse was, ‘Don’t you wish you may get it? You have not got such information from other workhouses, and I should like to know what newspapers have to do with it at all’. ‘Christmas-Day in the Workhouses’.
16. ‘Christmas-Day in the Workhouses’, The Times, 26 December 1842, p. 6.
17. ‘Christmas-Day in the Workhouses’, 1842, p. 6. This argument against the workhouse Christmas reiterates the Poor Law Commissioners’ insistence that the workhouse must be less attractive than the lot of an independent labourer.
18. Durbach, ‘Roast Beef’, p. 983.
19. Durbach, ‘Roast Beef’, p. 979. Despite this amendment, many guardians maintained that the dinners should rightly be paid from the poor rates. For a discussion, see Durbach, ‘Roast Beef’, pp. 981–85.
20. William Golden Lumley, The General Orders of the Poor Law Commissioners (London: Charles Knight, 1847), p. 174. Durbach, ‘Roast Beef’, p. 985.
21. Lumley, The General Orders of the Poor Law Commissioners, p. 174.
22. Moore, ‘Starvation in Victorian Christmas Fiction’, p. 489.
23. Durbach, ‘Roast Beef’, p. 988.
24. Longmate points out that ‘Christmas by mid century was being celebrated at many workhouses as an Open Day on which leading local residents paid a formal visit to the paupers in their care’. Longmate, The Workhouse, p. 222.
25. Moore, Victorian Christmas, p. 72.
26. Armstrong discusses the history of workhouse Christmas charity and draws attention to the Birmingham workhouse as an example of a ‘civic spectacle’. Armstrong, Christmas in Nineteenth-Century England, p. 111.
27. ‘Christmas in Birmingham’, Birmingham Daily Post, 27 December 1880, p. 5.
28. ‘Christmas in Birmingham’, p. 5.
29. Moore, Victorian Christmas, p. 1.
30. In a discussion of the upper-class household, Armstrong points out that ‘gift rituals could often reinforce the strict hierarchy of the household structure’. Armstrong, Christmas in Nineteenth-Century England, p. 83.
31. Marcel Mauss quoted in Howard Newby, ‘The Deferential Dialectic’, Comparative Studies in Society and History, 17.2 (April 1975), 139–64 (p. 161).
32. ‘Notes of a Union Chaplain. Chapter X. Christmas Day in the Workhouse’, Sunday at Home, 22 December 1859, pp. 801–804 (p. 803).
33. ‘Christmas Day in the Workhouse’, p. 803.
34. On the subject of the workhouse Christmas dinner, the chaplain-narrator remarks, ‘[w]here is the uncharitable rate-payer who will grudge a fraction more in his poor-rate to provide the poor in his parish workhouse with a substantial Christmas dinner?’. ‘Christmas Day in the Workhouse’, pp. 801–802. Durbach points out that rate-funded Christmas dinners enabled ‘communities to participate in these customs of benevolence’. Durbach, ‘Roast Beef’, p. 983.
35. ‘Christmas Day in the Workhouse’, p. 803.
36. ‘Christmas Day in the Workhouse’, p. 803.
37. Moore uses the term ‘identity-building’ in her discussion of the Christmas narrative in Victorian Christmas.
38. Armstrong notes that nineteenth-century charity ‘encouraged the middle-class child to become a donor’. Armstrong, Christmas in Nineteenth-Century England, p. 107.
39. ‘Christmas Week’, Children’s Friend, 1 December 1869, p. 183, ll. 1–4.
40. ‘Christmas Week’, p. 183, ll. 1, 22, 74.
41. ‘Christmas Week’, p. 183, ll. 50, 58, 14, 15.
42. ‘Christmas Week’, p. 183, ll. 27, 35–36.
43. ‘Christmas Week’, p. 183, ll. 59–60.
44. Armstrong, Christmas in Nineteenth-Century England, p. 107.
45. Armstrong, Christmas in Nineteenth-Century England, p. 110.
46. ‘Christmas Entertainment at the Greenwich Union’, Illustrated London News, 16 January 1864, pp. 65–66 (p. 66).
47. ‘Christmas Entertainment at the Greenwich Union’, p. 66.
48. Norman McCord, ‘The Poor Law and Philanthropy’, in The New Poor Law in the Nineteenth Century, ed. by Derek Fraser (London and Basingstoke: Macmillan Press, 1976), pp. 87–110 (pp. 105–106).
49. As Armstrong notes, ‘[t]hough the expansion of Christmas charity was part of the development of a national culture it also reinforced a local civic identity’. Armstrong, Christmas in Nineteenth-Century England, p. 105.
50. Peter W. Sinnema, Dynamics of the Pictured Page: Representing the Nation in the Illustrated London News (Aldershot and Brookfield, VT: Ashgate, 1998), p. 31.
51. In a discussion of images of poverty in the Illustrated London News, Andrea Korda notes the frequency with which the poor are depicted as indistinct figures. In such illustrations, she points out that ‘[t]he crowd is undifferentiated and distant, denying the possibility of a particular connection to any of the figures within the view. […] The potential for a subjective or affective response is thereby suppressed under the veneer of objectivity’. Andrea Korda, Printing and Painting the News in Victorian London: The Graphic and Social Realism, 1869–1891 (Farnham, Surrey: Ashgate, 2015), p. 62.
52. Moore points out that an illustration of the Christmas tree in the 1848 ILN Christmas supplement ‘helped codify the tradition [of the Christmas tree] into English Custom’. Moore, Victorian Christmas, p. 1.
53. In his analysis of the ILN, Sinnema explores how ‘forms such as the poem or the engraved picture are invariably redefined according to the way they are embedded in, or received as constituent parts of, the newspaper’. Sinnema, Dynamics of the Pictured Page, p. 34.
54. In the sensationally titled article ‘The Alleged Horrible Death from Union Treatment’, the Birmingham Daily Post provides details of the coroner’s inquest into the case, describing the dreadful condition of Daly’s bedsores. The article reports the jury’s conclusion that the ‘deceased died from exhaustion from bed-sores and rheumatic fever; and we find that whilst he was in the infirmary of the Holborn Union he did not receive sufficient care and attention from the medical officer’. ‘The Alleged Horrible Death from Union Treatment’, Birmingham Daily Post, 29 December 1864, p. 7.
55. In a report in the Bury and Norwich Post, and Suffolk Herald, the case of Daly and another impoverished woman are described as ‘especially shocking on account of their occurrence at a period when good cheer was being poured into the metropolis in the utmost abundance’. ‘Sad Stories for Christmas-Tide’, Bury and Norwich Post, and Suffolk Herald, 3 January 1865, p. 3.
56. In 1865, The Lancet announced its appointment of a Sanitary Commission to enquire into the state of workhouse infirmaries. The reports that followed revealed the full extent of the mismanagement that existed within workhouses and prompted the passing of the Metropolitan Poor Act in 1867. For more information on workhouse medicine, see Kim Price, Medical Negligence in Victorian Britain: The Crisis of Care under the
English Poor Law, c. 1834–1900 (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2015) or Crowther’s chapter on ‘The Medical Staff and the Infirmaries’ in The Workhouse System, pp. 156–90.
57. ‘Timothy Daly’, Saturday Review of Politics, Literature, Science and Art, 21 January 1865, pp. 70–71 (p. 71).
58. ‘Christmas Entertainment to the Poor of the City of London Union’, Illustrated London News, 21 January 1865, pp. 51–52 (p. 51).
59. ‘Christmas Entertainment’, p. 51. In 1880, Dr Buncombe was charged with manslaughter after a patient was murdered by a ‘lunatic pauper’. The coroner’s jury considered that Buncombe had not ‘shown proper care and attention in getting this person [the murderer] out of the workhouse’. The case was thrown out when it went before the grand jury. See ‘Poor-Law Medical Officers’ Association’, British Medical Journal, 27 August 1881, pp. 373–76 (p. 373).
60. ‘Christmas Entertainment’, p. 51.
61. ‘Christmas Entertainment’, p. 51.
62. ‘Christmas Entertainment’, p. 51.
63. ‘A Christmas Tree at a Workhouse’, Monthly Packet, 1 December 1881, pp. 609–12 (p. 611).
64. ‘A Christmas Tree’, p. 610.
65. ‘A Christmas Tree’, p. 611.
66. ‘A Christmas Tree’, p. 609.
67. ‘A Christmas Tree’, p. 609.
68. Crowther points out that charity often ‘tended to make even more arbitrary distinctions between the deserving and the undeserving poor than did the guardians’. Crowther, The Workhouse System, p. 71.
69. ‘A Christmas Tree’, p. 612.
70. ‘A Christmas Tree’, p. 612.
71. ‘A Christmas Tree’, p. 612.
72. ‘A Christmas Tree’, p. 612.
73. ‘A Workhouse Episode’, Quiver, January 1892, pp. 372–75 (p. 372).
74. ‘A Workhouse Episode’, p. 373.
75. ‘A Workhouse Episode’, p. 373.
76. Moore draws attention to the connection between appetite and hardship, noting that, in Braddon’s The Christmas Hirelings, ‘Laddie’s ostensible greediness is most likely the result of his family’s poverty’. Moore, ‘Starvation in Victorian Christmas Fiction’, p. 500.
77. ‘A Workhouse Episode’, p. 374.
78. ‘A Workhouse Episode’, p. 374.
79. ‘A Workhouse Episode’, p. 374.
80. Durbach, ‘Roast Beef’, p. 987.
81. ‘A Workhouse Episode’, p. 374.
82. ‘A Workhouse Episode’, p. 374.
83. ‘A Workhouse Episode’, p. 375.
84. ‘A Workhouse Episode’, p. 375.
85. For a discussion of Herkomer’s other workhouse illustration, Old Age – A Study at the Westminster Union (Graphic, 7 April 1877), see Korda, Printing and Painting the News, pp. 62–65.
86. Lee MacCormick Edwards, Herkomer: A Victorian Artist (Aldershot: Ashgate, 1999), p. 76.
87. In a discussion of Luke Fildes’s Houseless and Hungry in the Graphic, Korda points out that, in contrast to the Illustrated London News, the figures depicted are ‘much larger and bolder’. She notes that, in their illustrations of poverty, ‘The Graphic’s draughtsmen attempted to convey the embodied experience of their subjects, complete with the feelings evoked in the initial encounter’. Korda, Printing and Painting the News, pp. 60, 68.
88. Audrey Jaffe, Scenes of Sympathy: Identity and Representation in Victorian Fiction (Ithaca, NY and London: Cornell University Press, 2000), p. 9.
89. Jaffe, Scenes of Sympathy, p. 19.
90. Anon, ‘Christmas in a Workhouse’, Graphic Christmas Number, 25 December 1876, p. 30, ll. 1–4.
91. Anon, ‘Christmas in a Workhouse’, p. 30, ll. 13–16.
92. Anon, ‘Christmas in a Workhouse’, p. 30, ll. 17–24.
93. Christmas in a Workhouse was published opposite an image entitled Returning Home with the Spoils (p. 31). The picture depicts affluent little girls asleep within a carriage, surrounded by toys purchased on a Christmas shopping trip.
94. Moore, Victorian Christmas, p. 73.
95. ‘Some Stereoscopic Views of Christmas’, Funny Folks, 30 December 1882, p. 411.
96. ‘Some Stereoscopic Views of Christmas’, p. 411.
97. ‘Some Stereoscopic Views of Christmas’, p. 411.
98. ‘Some Stereoscopic Views of Christmas’, p. 411.
99. George R. Sims, ‘The “Dagonet Ballads”: How they Came to be Written’, NZ Truth, 5 January 1907, p. 8.
100. Armstrong, Christmas in Nineteenth-Century England, p. 111.
101. George R. Sims, ‘In the Workhouse: Christmas Day’, in The Dagonet and Other Poems, by George R. Sims (Toronto: The Mussen Book Co., 1903 [1879]), pp. 8–15, ll. 9–16.
102. Sims, ‘In the Workhouse’, p. 9, l. 18.
103. Sims, ‘In the Workhouse’, p. 9, ll. 25–32.
104. Sims, ‘In the Workhouse’, p. 11, ll. 58, 82.
105. Sims, ‘In the Workhouse’, p. 9, l. 40.
106. ‘Death from Starvation’, Huddersfield Chronicle and West Yorkshire Advertiser, 27 May 1876, pp. 4–5 (p. 4).
107. ‘Death from Starvation’, p. 4. In 1876, the Morning Post commented upon a recent return on the number of deaths in the metropolis attributed to want of sufficient nourishment during the year 1875. The article concludes: ‘[it] is certain that no one need starve in London at the present day; that they should prefer starvation to the union is very much to be regretted, and ought to stir us up to making some alterations in the régime of those establishments which, without making them attractive to the lazy and idle, would remove that dread of going into them that makes death in the street or a wretched garret less repugnant to the well-disposed poor’. ‘Deaths from Starvation’, Morning Post, 28 July 1876, p. 3.
108. ‘Death from Starvation’, p. 4.
109. ‘Death from Starvation’, p. 4.
110. ‘Death from Starvation’, p. 4.
111. Sims, ‘In the Workhouse’, p. 14, l. 153.
112. Sims, ‘In the Workhouse’, p. 11, l. 67.
113. Durbach, ‘Roast Beef’, p. 970.
114. Sims, ‘In the Workhouse’, p. 15, ll. 163–64.
115. Moore, ‘Starvation in Victorian Christmas Fiction’, p. 495.