The Victorian Workhouse and the Victorian Asylum

Thank you all for your kind response to my post last week.  Here are two more titles of interest.  Please visit our webpage, as there are many other Victorian interest titles I have yet to preview!

                        

(to purchase http://crimsonbooksinc.storesecured.com/items/Victorian/list.htm )

THE VICTORIAN WORKHOUSE and THE VICTORIAN ASYLUM

The Victorian Workhouse by Trevor May and The Victorian Asylum by Sarah Rutherford

 

 

“The Victorians loved a biblical text but they did not always seem too concerned about using it in context.” The Victorian Workhouse – Trevor May

 

 

In the popular imagination two of the most defining institutions of the Victorian era are the workhouse, filled with the undeserving poor, and the asylum, filled with the mad, bad and dangerous to know. By 1900 there were over 120 asylums in England, and workhouses numbered over 400 at the height of their popularity in the 1860s. Many of the inmates of both were children, or had a physical disorder, such as epilepsy, that made society uncomfortable. 

 

But what, apart from some Dickensian scenes and a few black and white photographs, do we really know about either of these institutions?

 

Two books, both concise, well-written and lavishly illustrated, cast light on these dark corners of the Victorian experience. Moreover, if Trevor May and Sarah Rutherfords’ books are to be believed, we can say with some conviction that during Victoria’s reign it was far better to be insane than to be poor. 

 

May’s work (one of his many books on this time) moves easily between exhaustively informed and wryly cynical. He carefully brings the reader through the stages that lead to how the poor were viewed by the British, and why the reformers of the time chose to deal with them in a way that, to modern eyes, seems plainly cruel.

 

The Victorians loved distinctions, and new Poor Laws were meant to help the indigent (those who had nothing), while doing nothing those that we would now call the working poor. The indigent were looked upon as having failed personally, either because of a lack of character, or pure laziness. In order to claim to be helping them (and their families, who were required to enter the workhouse as well), and to encourage them to chose honest labor, which they were thought to be shirking, the workhouses of the era were designed. 

 

While poor houses had existed before this time they tended to be small, parish run homes, much like any other village cottage or farmhouse. The modern workhouses, informed by Jeremy Bentham’s philosophy of Utilitarianism, were modeled after American prisons of the era. Within their walls families were broken up, and the men in charge were expected to treat those living their much like prisoners. What care the sick received was from young doctors just beginning their careers and female inmates who were often rewarded with gin, and needed only to know how to read to qualify for the work.

 

Basic schooling was sometime provided for the very young, but most often time was spent performing numbing, repetitive tasks in the hopes that it would become so unbearable that, apparently, the inmates would suddenly decide not to be poor any longer.

 

While the workhouse was a prison that the prisoners could choose to leave, the Victorian asylum was a hospital modeled on the country estates of the aristocracy.

 

“The asylum was essentially a holding ground for difficult patients.” The Victorian Asylum – Sarah Rutherford

 

In Sarah Rutherford’s illuminating history we learn that, up until the Victorian age, most asylums (with the great exception of Bethel hospital) were privately run, with little regulation. The inmates were often put on display for the amusement and enlightenment of the masses, and treatments were little more than tortures designed to drive the person sane.

 

During the later eighteenth century a movement called “moral treatment,” was spearheaded by the Quakers, who believed that inmates could be cured by learning self-restraint and discipline, and that physical treatments could not work on what was seen as mental weakness. They also refused to take part in the site-seeing aspect of asylum life.

 

This approach that found favor with Victorian reformers. The 1845 Lunatics Act (what a wonderful name) regulated, for the first time, how patients were to be admitted and released, as well as standardizing food, clothing and shelter requirements.

 

One way, as we learn, in which the workhouses and asylums were most alike, is that the great architects of the era vied to build them. In the case of the asylum using them as a sort of advertisement for the work they might do on great estates and townhouses. There were certain requirements that they all had to meet: elaborate gardens and sporting fields, airing courts with shelters to allow the patients to spend time outside all year round, and a warm, homelike atmosphere to encourage healing. Architects also found ways to use modern technologies, including running water, electricity, and gas heat.

 

The inmates here were also expected to work, but unlike their counterparts in the workhouse, it was meant to help them learn discipline and a useful skill for when they were discharged. Patients were also allowed to mingle with the opposite sex at dances, and were encouraged to engage in artistic pursuits, such as painting and theatrics. The staffs were often made up of families,  and they formed societies with the society of the asylums, creating sporting teams and musical bands to entertain each other and the inmates.

 

Over time new theories on poverty and mental illness emerged that made these two institutions obsolete, the last workhouse closing in 1948, the last asylum repurposed in the 1990s. As depressing as these subjects may be these two works will leave anyone with an interest in this era with a fuller, richer and more complete view of who the Victorians were, and why, in many ways, they are still with us.