Poverty and the Poor Law

The London poor are a vast, teeming throng: according to Booth’s census, 30.7% of Londoners lived in poverty in 1891, which comes to about 1,336,000 of the estimated 4,351,738 Londoners. Since the area of London is relatively small, and the population density much lower in wealthy areas, a little thought will already give some impression of the incredible conditions prevailing in the poorest areas of London. By another estimate, there are 900,000 souls in the East End, 80,000 in Whitechapel in particular (where the Ripper committed his crimes), and 11,000 of those unemployed and homeless, entirely destitute. As our focus is at least partially on JackTheRipper’s London, we provide considerable detail here.

Utilitarianism

A very common middle-class perspective on the ills of the poor derives from the philosophy of JeremyBentham^? and James Mill, and is called Utilitarianism. Both this and the later "humanized" version of this, from JohnStuartMill, is reasonably complex, but the version of Utilitarianism which guides much policy-making (including the 1834 revised Poor Law) is actually fairly simple.

The basic principle has it that economic status depends on work and talent. People who work hard do better than those who remain idle, and people with talent do better than those with none. If you have ever read Horatio Alger, you can imagine the positive side of this theory: poverty should not result direction from one’s socio-economic status at birth, and the system should enable one to work one’s way out of the gutter and into considerable financial success. The belief that someone remains a “guttersnipe” despite his success is simple bigotry. From this perspective, Utilitarianism also aligns well with Max Weber’s The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, in that this system places moral value on hard work.

On the down-side of this theory, many use it to interpret conditions as they exist currently. If someone cannot get out of the gutter, then it follows that this person is lazy, untalented, or both; furthermore, very likely this reflects a moral failure on this person’s part: very commonly, the middle classes ascribe poverty to an unwillingness to work and to the vices of alcohol, the latter idea prompting the formation of the SalvationArmy. Similarly, the fact that a person born to riches remains wealthy demonstrates his thrift, talent, and morality. If you have money and education, and someone else has neither, then you must be a better person.

An important result of this theory is the formalization of the idea of pauperism. A pauper cannot get out of poverty because of bad work habits. If you give this person money, you encourage him to think that money comes from charity, not work, and thus prevent him ever making the connection between hard work and a viable economic future. By this theory, the appropriate, moral thing to do, when confronted by a beggar, is to say, “Get a job.” If you give him money, you are implicated in his pauperism, morally responsible for the fact that he is a beggar, because you have contributed to his belief in begging as a viable economic option. Thus a central tenet of utilitarianism is that poor relief simply cannot amount to charity: charity creates pauperism.

Workhouses and the Poor Law

A direct upshot of Utilitarianism is the (considerably revised) concept of the Workhouse. We know that paupers do not understand the virtues of hard work, because if they did, they would not be poor. We also know that the very poor, if simply given money, will waste it on alcohol, vice, or simple bad investment — this is the definition of a pauper, in effect. So if we are to help the poor, we must provide a situation in which hard work has demonstrable value, and vice is prohibited. This situation is called the Workhouse. Those with no money and no place to sleep may be forced into the local workhouse, or may voluntarily enter the Casual Wards. They receive simple food and a place to sleep, as well as some medical attention if required. By making use of these things, the person accrues a debt, which is carefully standardized. He or she must now perform labor, for which payment is remitted. As a rule, more or less able-bodied men crack rocks, and women pick oakum; the elderly or infirm are given lighter work, and in some rare cases may actually have part of their debt waived in light of their infirmity.

Although workhouses had existed in the eighteenth century, a commission formed in 1832 formulated a massive revision, passed into law as the 1834 Poor Law. This commission produced a Majority Report, upon which the Poor Law rests, but also a Minority Report, which advocated an almost complete elimination of the workhouse system. It was the gross abuse of the old outdoor relief system which prompted the 1834 reforms. Previously, casual labor could be hired from local outdoor relief at the Poor Rate, which was deliberately set below the ordinary rate. The inevitable result was that farmers dismissed regular laborers and replaced them daily with outdoor relief labor, since this labor was cheaper per head. This of course threw more people onto outdoor relief, and ensured that once on relief, one could never get off, because there would never be available positions in the labor for which one was trained. The radical reforms did prevent this sort of abuse, but indoor relief really did not improve materially until its long-awaited elimination under the Attlee government.

At the workhouse, no alcohol or sex is permitted on the premises. Men and women are strictly segregated, even if they are married couples, except that married couples over the age of 60, or where one partner is infirm, may share a room provided that the room is fully separated from the other paupers. Very small children need not work.

Payment for labor performed is determined by the Poor Rate, set by the local Union, which administers of poor relief. This Rate is set such that it is not (supposedly) excessively low, but is lower than the value of such labor when performed outside the workhouse. This prevents paupers from seeing the workhouse as an economically suitable alternative to ordinary labor.

When a person has paid off his debt and acquired a modest capital (perhaps a few shillings), he must leave the workhouse, at the door of which he is given the small capital he has accrued, along with stern injunctions not to fall right back into vice, and to remember the value of hard work.

The workhouses are deliberately unpleasant, but are not intended to be torture-chambers. The idea is that someone who sinks low enough to turn to the workhouse needs encouragement to leave it, since it provides all this luxury essentially for free. By making the work punishing, and the food and quarters moderately unpleasant, the workhouse avoids becoming mere charity, which would only encourage the poor to rely on handouts instead of their own labor, that is it would pauperize them.

The idea here is to get people to recognize that if they work hard, they get something for it. Further, they recognize that charity per se has negative moral value; that is, they see that by accepting the modest charity of the workhouse, they are admitting their own failures. This stigmatization of paupers, while explicitly decried in the various reforms (from 1834 onwards), is ultimately unavoidable.

The three fundamental forms of Poor Relief are in (or indoor) relief, outdoor relief, and as a subset of indoor relief the Casual Wards. Indoor relief primarily handles the elderly and infirm, and generally involves lengthy (or permanent) residence in the workhouse; under this system, well described by Charles Dickens in Oliver Twist, Little Dorritt, and Our Mutual Friend (see also the excerpt below), wandering paupers would be admitted by someone else (policeman, church warden, etc.), and quite commonly could never get out. Admission under indoor relief was by far the most stigmatized, marking workhouse residents as perpetual paupers. Outdoor relief involves distribution of food, clothing, and medical assistance on a non-residential basis, as payment for work performed. The Casual Wards are for self-admitted paupers, and are available on a nightly basis; as an example, here is part of the deposition by John Kelly, semi-husband of the Ripper’s victim Catherine Eddowes:

On Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday we were down at the hop-picking, and came back to London on Thursday. We had been unfortunate at the hop-picking, and had no money. On Thursday night we both slept in the casual ward. On the Friday I earned 6d at a job, and I said, "Here, Kate, you take 4d and go to the lodging-house and I will go to Mile-end," but she said, "No, you go and have a bed and I will go to the casual ward," and she went. I saw her again on Saturday morning early.

A variant of the same logic would have the husband enter the casual ward, since as an able-bodied man he would be able to leave early, while the wife would be able to pick up a few pence from alternative means (i.e. prostitution).

There are a number of serious problems with this system, some built-in, some not so. One point is that even within the reward-punishment sort of approach, the workhouse encourages people to make a distinction between idleness as pleasure and work as suffering. Not surprisingly, a great many people departed the Casual Wards and immediately spent their minuscule capital on drink and other luxuries, for which they had pined.

More importantly, this system is predicated on the notion that people could work if they wished to do so. That is, it presumes that jobs are available, but nobody wants to take them. (This was Ronald Reagan’s theory in the mid-1980s. In response to high unemployment, he remarked that there were lots of jobs listed in the papers, so it must be that unemployed people simply didn’t want to work. Apparently the idea still dominates American governmental thinking, though it has mercifully died out in Britain.) In point of fact, however, most of the regular jobs for which the very poor and uneducated would be qualified are greatly oversubscribed already. Dockyard jobs, for example, draw a daily crush of hundreds of men seeking work, but only a very small number of positions are actually available, and the dock foreman can simply choose those men he knows or likes the look of, leaving the vast majority without work, most notably those who have just lost their employment and thus are neither known to the foreman nor obviously experienced with dock work. So having learned in the workhouse that hard work is valuable, the poor then see that they cannot get work, making the lesson one of hopelessness rather than virtue. It is true that some casual labor (firewood collection, tosh-hunting and other forms of trash collection, match-selling, seasonal work such as hopping) is available, but the total remuneration is rarely more than enough to keep someone from starvation, and sometimes not even that. Thus the notion that once one has learned the value of labor, one can then work one’s way out of poverty is practically speaking untenable.

Third, the assigned work in the workhouses is generally physically punishing, and often marks the person quite literally. Picking oakum all day damages a woman’s hands, and as a result if somewhat later she is looking for a servant position, for example, she may be turned away because her hands mark her as a workhouse sort of person, i.e. someone who has sunk so low as to require institutional charity. Since once again the servant market is a buyer’s market, people may be turned away on almost any grounds.

Not built into the system as such but a direct result of its structures is the common corruption and viciousness of the Masters. The workhouse immediately acquired, intentionally or otherwise, an association with moral failure. As a result, running a workhouse is hardly a desirable job, because it taints one by association. Thus the Masters are often people with precisely the opposite of the desired characteristics: far from wanting to uplift and instruct the poor, they simply want to make as much money out of the process as possible, and that is not much, making such people further embittered. To be sure, there are some deeply committed people running workhouses, but even they quickly see that the system is degrading, and furthermore that recidivism (coming back to the workhouse for a second round) is extremely common. Within a Utilitarian framework, this prompts many Masters to believe that the poor with whom they deal are simply hopeless cases, people by nature unfit for useful labor who can never get out of the gutter because they are simply lesser people. This can in extreme cases cause the workhouse system to slide into a pure punishment system.

As a final point, the horrors of the workhouse are such that many people will not make use of them unless they are genuinely without hope. Those who consider themselves reasonably able-bodied may prefer to starve on their own account rather than be branded as hopeless cases. This of course undermines the whole point of the system, and leads to the habit of hiding those in greatest need from the authorities. In addition, it means that the general perception of the workhouse prevents its teaching a utilitarian moral lesson, since those who enter it have already lost hope.

Charles Dickens on the Workhouse

In order to help the reader visualize the workhouse system, we provide the following excerpts from Dickens’s essays, “A Walk in the Workhouse” and “Wapping Workhouse.”

It is worth remembering here that conditions in the workhouse declined overall during the late Victorian era, and that Dickens was thus not visiting an area quite so sunk into poverty as the rookeries of the East End would become by JackTheRipper’s day. Note also that he is talking exclusively about indoor relief, not about the Casual Wards.

Dickens, from “A Walk in the Workhouse”

When the service was over, I walked with the humane and conscientious gentleman whose duty it was to take that walk, that Sunday morning, through the little world of poverty enclosed within the workhouse walls. It was inhabited by a population of some fifteen hundred or two thousand paupers, ranging from the infant newly born or not yet come into the pauper world, to the old man dying on his bed.

In a room opening from a squalid yard, where a number of listless women were lounging to and fro, trying to get warm in the ineffectual sunshine of the tardy May morning - in the 'Itch Ward,' not to compromise the truth - a woman such as HOGARTH has often drawn, was hurriedly getting on her gown before a dusty fire. She was the nurse, or wardswoman, of that insalubrious department - herself a pauper - flabby, raw-boned, untidy - unpromising and coarse of aspect as need be. But, on being spoken to about the patients whom she had in charge, she turned round, with her shabby gown half on, half off, and fell a crying with all her might. Not for show, not querulously, not in any mawkish sentiment, but in the deep grief and affliction of her heart; turning away her dishevelled head: sobbing most bitterly, wringing her hands, and letting fall abundance of great tears, that choked her utterance. What was the matter with the nurse of the itch-ward? Oh, 'the dropped child' was dead! Oh, the child that was found in the street, and she had brought up ever since, had died an hour ago, and see where the little creature lay, beneath this cloth! The dear, the pretty dear! . . . .

And this conveys no special imputation on the workhouse of the parish of St. So-and-So, where, on the contrary, I saw many things to commend. It was very agreeable, recollecting that most infamous and atrocious enormity committed at Tooting - an enormity which, a hundred years hence, will still be vividly remembered in the bye- ways of English life, and which has done more to engender a gloomy discontent and suspicion among many thousands of the people than all the Chartist leaders could have done in all their lives - to find the pauper children in this workhouse looking robust and well, and apparently the objects of very great care. In the Infant School - a large, light, airy room at the top of the building - the little creatures, being at dinner, and eating their potatoes heartily, were not cowed by the presence of strange visitors, but stretched out their small hands to be shaken, with a very pleasant confidence. And it was comfortable to see two mangy pauper rocking-horses rampant in a corner. In the girls' school, where the dinner was also in progress, everything bore a cheerful and healthy aspect. The meal was over, in the boys' school, by the time of our arrival there, and the room was not yet quite rearranged; but the boys were roaming unrestrained about a large and airy yard, as any other schoolboys might have done. Some of them had been drawing large ships upon the schoolroom wall; and if they had a mast with shrouds and stays set up for practice (as they have in the Middlesex House of Correction), it would be so much the better. At present, if a boy should feel a strong impulse upon him to learn the art of going aloft, he could only gratify it, I presume, as the men and women paupers gratify their aspirations after better board and lodging, by smashing as many workhouse windows as possible, and being promoted to prison.

In one place, the Newgate [Prison] of the Workhouse, a company of boys and youths were locked up in a yard alone; their day-room being a kind of kennel where the casual poor used formerly to be littered down at night. Divers of them had been there some long time. 'Are they never going away?' was the natural inquiry. 'Most of them are crippled, in some form or other,' said the Wardsman, 'and not fit for anything.' They slunk about, like dispirited wolves or hyaenas; and made a pounce at their food when it was served out, much as those animals do. The big-headed idiot shuffling his feet along the pavement, in the sunlight outside, was a more agreeable object everyway.

Groves of babies in arms; groves of mothers and other sick women in bed; groves of lunatics; jungles of men in stone-paved down-stairs day-rooms, waiting for their dinners; longer and longer groves of old people, in up-stairs Infirmary wards, wearing out life, God knows how - this was the scenery through which the walk lay, for two hours. In some of these latter chambers, there were pictures stuck against the wall, and a neat display of crockery and pewter on a kind of sideboard; now and then it was a treat to see a plant or two; in almost every ward there was a cat.

In all of these Long Walks of aged and infirm, some old people were bedridden, and had been for a long time; some were sitting on their beds half-naked; some dying in their beds; some out of bed, and sitting at a table near the fire. A sullen or lethargic indifference to what was asked, a blunted sensibility to everything but warmth and food, a moody absence of complaint as being of no use, a dogged silence and resentful desire to be left alone again, I thought were generally apparent. . . .

Dickens, from “Wapping Workhouse”

The Traveller (the matron intimated) should see the worst first. He was welcome to see everything. Such as it was, there it all was.

This was the only preparation for our entering 'the Foul wards.' They were in an old building squeezed away in a corner of a paved yard, quite detached from the more modern and spacious main body of the workhouse. They were in a building most monstrously behind the time - a mere series of garrets or lofts, with every inconvenient and objectionable circumstance in their construction, and only accessible by steep and narrow staircases, infamously ill-adapted for the passage up-stairs of the sick or down-stairs of the dead.

A-bed in these miserable rooms, here on bedsteads, there (for a change, as I understood it) on the floor, were women in every stage of distress and disease. None but those who have attentively observed such scenes, can conceive the extraordinary variety of expression still latent under the general monotony and uniformity of colour, attitude, and condition. The form a little coiled up and turned away, as though it had turned its back on this world for ever; the uninterested face at once lead-coloured and yellow, looking passively upward from the pillow; the haggard mouth a little dropped, the hand outside the coverlet, so dull and indifferent, so light, and yet so heavy; these were on every pallet; but when I stopped beside a bed, and said ever so slight a word to the figure lying there, the ghost of the old character came into the face, and made the Foul ward as various as the fair world. No one appeared to care to live, but no one complained; all who could speak, said that as much was done for them as could be done there, that the attendance was kind and patient, that their suffering was very heavy, but they had nothing to ask for. The wretched rooms were as clean and sweet as it is possible for such rooms to be; they would become a pest-house in a single week, if they were ill-kept. . . .

In ten minutes I had ceased to believe in such fables of a golden time as youth, the prime of life, or a hale old age. In ten minutes, all the lights of womankind seemed to have been blown out, and nothing in that way to be left this vault to brag of, but the flickering and expiring snuffs. . . .

Now, I reasoned with myself, as I made my journey home again, concerning those Foul wards. They ought not to exist; no person of common decency and humanity can see them and doubt it. But what is this Union to do? The necessary alteration would cost several thousands of pounds; it has already to support three workhouses; its inhabitants work hard for their bare lives, and are already rated for the relief of the Poor to the utmost extent of reasonable endurance. One poor parish in this very Union is rated to the amount of FIVE AND SIXPENCE in the pound, at the very same time when the rich parish of Saint George's, Hanover-square, is rated at about SEVENPENCE in the pound, Paddington at about FOURPENCE, Saint James's, Westminster, at about TENPENCE! It is only through the equalisation of Poor Rates that what is left undone in this wise, can be done. Much more is left undone, or is ill-done, than I have space to suggest in these notes of a single uncommercial journey; but, the wise men of the East, before they can reasonably hold forth about it, must look to the North and South and West; let them also, any morning before taking the seat of Solomon, look into the shops and dwellings all around the Temple, and first ask themselves 'how much more can these poor people - many of whom keep themselves with difficulty enough out of the workhouse - bear?'

Rookeries

The “rookeries” are parts of London which have sunk to the very bottom of the socio-economic scale. Poverty is extreme, crime common. Much of the populace has long since recognized that their situation is hopeless, and they seek brief happiness in the few luxuries available to them: gin and sex. Alcoholism is rampant, and in the case of women often paid for with prostitution. Violent crime is ordinary, and cannot be checked because the police often refuse to enter the worst parts of the rookeries, and when they do they are often perceived as the enemy because of their habits of imprisoning people for drunkenness and vagrancy.

The rookeries of Leather Hill, Elephant and Castle, and Rotherhithe are the only ones outside the East End; in the latter area, Whitechapel, Limehouse, Wapping, St. George’s in the East, and parts of Shadwell and the Isle of Dogs are littered with rookeries of various sizes. If you look at Booth’s Map of London Poverty, the black spots mark the worst areas, and the relatively large black spots mark true rookeries.

To imagine a rookery, it helps to look at some pictures, and we have included a few, as well as references for where to find more. Think also about the worst neighborhoods you have ever seen in American cities (of the 1980s especially), the ones that you simply do not ever enter. Now multiply the poverty by a considerable factor: there is no urban poverty in America to match the rookeries of London — not even close. For example, even in the worst parts of Chicago’s South Side around 1990, people were usually able to afford some sort of car, public transportation, junk food, and various currently desirable consumer goods (Air Jordan sneakers, for example). One of the big modern problems is an odd variant of the late nineteenth-century problem: how do you get the poor to prioritize those investments of capital and labor which will produce maximal long-term gains, rather than spending these quickly on immediate gratification? In late Victorian London, the problem is the same, but the sums are much, much smaller. On the up side, Victorian London does not generally have a problem with firearms, as they are far outside the means of the truly poor (who would sell them in a heartbeat if they had them to sell), and alcohol (or occasionally opium) is hardly in the same league as crack cocaine.

If you imagine a relatively large neighborhood in which everyone is at the socio-economic level of the stereotypical homeless street person, the streets are littered with muck and raw sewage, and there is a general sense of absolute hopelessness, but on the other hand a few “slumming” gentlemen are unlikely simply to be shot on principle, you begin to have a conception of the rookeries. People are gaunt and dressed in rags, sometimes in layers because they are wearing everything they own. The accents are predominantly Irish. The response to obvious outsiders is generally fear tinged by hostility. And a very common concern, of an evening, is where to find two pence to get a place to sleep — a space on a narrow cot shared with one or two strangers. Sometimes women are wandering the streets at 2:00 in the morning looking for tuppence for a bed, and if they chance on a man, they suggest a quickie in the nearest alley — the price, tuppence. And if one is very unlucky indeed, the man chanced upon is Jack the Ripper.

A Note on Hypocrisy

The hypocrisies of the Poor Law seem obvious to us now. The idea that everyone who wants to work can work is dubious when unemployment is rampant, and the notion that one’s socio-economic status at birth does not significantly affect one’s later ability to earn is more than a little problematic. Perhaps most disturbing, however, is the fact that this approach to poverty was very often extremely well-intentioned. Canon Barnett, for example, would agonize about the fact that he could not give sixpence to a starving man on his doorstep, for fear of “pauperizing” him. However unpleasant the system most certainly was, one need not assume that everyone who stolidly defended it was an immoral hypocrite.

It is worth bearing in mind that many modern Americans still hold largely Utilitarian conceptions: all too many still think it appropriate to say, “Get a job!” to the homeless. Furthermore, the fact that some small fraction of our taxes go to such things as Medicaid allows us to believe that without doing anything ourselves, we contribute fully and appropriately to a complete system of poor relief. In addition, modern consumer capitalism has added new twists to the same old miseries. For example, in Victorian times, there were no McDonald’s or Kool cigarettes, industries aimed significantly at acquiring funds from the poor in return for essentially useless goods. Perhaps most extreme is the State Lottery system, which often amounts to a kind of tax on the poor: since it is the poor who have the fewest ordinary hopes of achieving wealth, it is they who in a sense have the best odds on the one-in-a-million gamble of the Lottery. The money from their tickets then passes into various goods and services, including lining the pockets of the Lottery industry and the state politicians, who can then turn around and tell everyone how much money the system is drawing in for the relief of the poor and other desirable services. A similar process may be observed in the offering of credit, at usurious rates, to people with bad credit histories. The Poor Law was certainly vicious and hypocritical, but at least the Victorians never claimed to take the moral high ground by encouraging the poor to buy SUV’s on credit.

Resources

The most valuable single source on poverty in late nineteenth-century London is Charles Booth’s Life and Labour, accompanied by his Descriptive Map of London Poverty (1889: http://booth.lse.ac.uk/); see PovertyAndSorrow.

For a contemporary reference on the Poor Law, see especially Sir G. Nicholls and T. Mackay, A History of the English Poor Law, 3 vols., rev. ed. (London, Frank Cass, 1967 and New York: A.M. Kelley, 1967 [1898-9]), as well as the entry in the 11th edition Encyclopedia Britannica, s.v. “Poor Law” (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1911), vol. 22, 74-80.

For a more polemical but more readable account, see for example George Robert Sims, How the poor live; and, Horrible London (London: Chatto and Windus, 1889; reprint New York: Garland, 1984).

For more modern accounts, see

• William J. Fishman, East End 1888: A Year in a London Borough Among the Labouring Poor (London: Duckworth, 1988), which is highly readable and has lots of references
• Gareth Stedman Jones, Outcast London: A Study in the Relationship Between Classes in Victorian Society (Harmondsworth, Baltimore, [etc.]: Penguin, 1976)
• Geoffrey Alderman and Colin Holmes, eds. Outsiders and Outcasts: Essays in Honour of William J. Fishman (London: Duckworth, 1993).

For excellent web-based sources, see The Victorian Poor Law and Life in the Workhouse at The Victorian Web.

A skim of the sources for these recent books will rapidly produce a very lengthy bibliography on poverty in late Victorian London.

-- ChrisLehrich^? - 19 Jan 2005