workhouse of 1851

workhouse of 1851

Workhouse life:

Britain: I wanted to make a report on the workhouse and how life was feeling like for the people there.


The workhouse was huge, I went to look at it at day and it was boiling. I walked in and could see different sections all divided into men, women and children. There was also a schoolroom with many children; most of them were getting beaten with the scale. The work that men and women had to do was stone breaking, picking apart old rope. Wood chopping, washing and cleaning. The other left parts of the workhouse were the infirmary with lots of sick people; the chapel for encouraging paupers (poor people who received help in the workhouse) to be religious and a small stuffed sleeping area again divided into sections. I took an interview of Thomas Carlyle. He was nine years old, he was an orphan. How do you like this place? I said. Since I had no option I came here, but it is terrible though, the food is awful, there is no use of the schoolroom, we all get beaten up most of the time and most of my friends die at infirmary, its mostly because of starvation. How do you have friends? It is because the rooms are smelly and it’s squashed up, uncomfortable and we can’t sleep. So we talk about the workhouse and how we are having a terrible time here. Is there anything else you hate about the workhouse? Yes, the uniform. Uniforms were usually made from coarse materials with emphasis being in hardwearing on comfort and fitting. Can u give a summary of the workhouse? Yes, Women, children and men had different living and working areas in the workhouse, so families were split up. To make things even worse they could be punished if they even tried to speak to one another! The education, we the children received did not include the two most important skills of all, reading and writing, which were needed to get a good job, and so it was useless. We the poor were made to wear a uniform. This meant that everyone looked the same and everyone outside knew...

Similar Essays