Patrick Marcoux

The central policy of the New Poor Law Commissioners became known as the harsh workhouse test. These commissioners, three in number and with extensive powers to form and supervise the newly created poor law unions, wished local parish guardians to give relief to able-bodied paupers only if they entered a workhouse. These workhouses became infamous for the conduct that went on within their walls. One source that helped exploit many of the ill-treatments within the workhouse was The Times, a conservative newspaper centered in London. The Times printed most stories of the New Poor Law's cruelties, which mainly took place at the workhouse. By viewing some of these cruelties one will be able to see how the opposition, in this case the New Poor Law Commissioners, defended themselves against the stories printed in The Times. Whether or not one sides with The Times's portrayal of the workhouse, or with the New Poor Law Commissioners' account of the workhouse, the principal cruelty of the New Poor Law was indeed the workhouse.

The Times never tired of telling of workhouse horrors. According to David Roberts, author of "How Cruel Was The Victorian Poor Law?," the paper "devoted more than two million words to the New Poor Law's administration and recounted some 290 particular instances of personal suffering" (98). The Times reported several cases of workhouse brutalities. For example, at Bradford workhouse a young woman was bared to her waist and whipped, and at Crediton workhouse two paupers were confined to an unheated, damp, windowless, floorless, and bedless outhouse and were, one winter day, taken to the courtyard, stripped naked and mopped with cold water. At Bridgwater a meager diet and congestion killed off 41% of the inmates. Also at Bridgwater, hunger killed two children and forced another to eat a mouse. Equally as shocking as these events were, the flogging on three successive days of a nine-year-old boy, the beating of an old woman for smuggling in one ounce of tea, and the crowding of eighty women in a small room exemplified how cruel the workhouses could be.

According to David Roberts, "The most prevalent evils in the workhouse were not floggings and confinements but insufficient diets, the separation of husband from wife and constant incarceration" (98). Some inmates, according to The Times, ate meals consisting of a pennyweight of cheese, a solitary mouthful of beef, and a potato pared down to an exact ounce. Evidently humanity was no great check to the New Poor Law Commissioners' passion for economy. By giving only small amounts of food to these workhouse inmates, administrative commissioners were under heavy pressure by humanitarians and philanthropists to better the conditions and diets of those living in the workhouse. Besides facing the dullness of institutional life, irritating regimentation, depressing incarceration, and humiliating submission to authority, workhouse inmates had very little energy to complete the tasks given to them by the New Poor Law Commissioners.

The New Poor Law Commissioners defended themselves against the accounts published by The Times. They said the New Poor Law was not cruel at all. According to the annual reports of the New Poor Law Commissioners, "the New Poor Law brought only improvement: less pauperism and higher wages, more industrious workers and better treatment of the aged, finer schooling of the young, ampler medical aid for the ill, nutritious and adequate diets, and comfortable living quarters" (Roberts 101). These were the proposed improvements that the commissioners boasted about in their annual reports.

Although The Times and the New Poor Law Commissioners were at conflict with one another as to who was right about the portrayal of workhouses, David Roberts states, "any final judgment of the cruelty of the New Poor Law must take into account the conditions of the time. It was after all an age full of harshness, drunkenness, vagrancy, cruelty, and suffering" (106). In conclusion, one could say that the New Poor Law and the workhouses were controversial in the 1830's and the 1840's.