Fragments of Fury? Lunacy, Agency, and Contestation in the Great Yarmouth Workhouse, 1890s–1900s

Abstract

A methodological and philosophical focus on scandals has turned the workhouse that stands at the heart of popular and historiographical understandings of the English and Welsh New Poor Law (1834–1929) into a dark place of confinement and harsh treatment that the poor were largely powerless to resist. Yet viewed through the lens of interdisciplinary methods not often applied to the history of welfare—in particular, historical sociolinguistics and material-culture analysis—the pauper letters and “stitched” texts that have emerged from large-scale research projects reveal that inmates’ experience in the workhouse were not as dire, and their voices not as suppressed, as once supposed.

Clothing the New Poor Law workhouse in the nineteenth century

“…Other work by the authors has focused on the inmate experiences of an out-of-work solicitor's clerk, a printer and publisher of radical newspapers and pamphlets, the author of a number of popular books, a wealthy draper's lunatic sister, a down-at-heel member of a prosperous Irish-Huguenot merchant family, and an elderly resident who had previously served as a parish officer for thirty-five years and who was, at one time, a workhouse master himself. 55 It could be argued that these individualsthose we might describe as the 'shamefaced poor' 56 are hardly representative of the workhouse population overall. But given how little we actually know of the make-up of workhouse populations under the New Poor Law, they might equally give us pause to consider what we mean by 'representative' in this context.…”

Introduction: Celebrating the Centenary of the Howard League for Penal Reform and theHoward Journal

“…Above all, it would not have been lost on these early writers that prison was only intelligible in the context of a collection of other institutional features of the Victorian, Edwardian, and post-1918 socio-cultural landscape. Workhouses, asylums, prisons, training facilities for those with learning difficulties and variously constituted disabled and children's homes were intricately connected, with each providing a significant part of the institutional populations of the rest (Hulonce 2016;Jarrett 2020;Jones and King 2020). The magistrates who decided on some prison sentences also decided on the removal of children from families to institutions, questions of coerced confinement in asylums and on whether infractions of workhouse rules should result in prison terms.…”

“…Forced labour in prisons merely built on existing models (and sometimes even the technologies) from workhouses and homes for those with learning difficulties (Jarrett 2020). The populations of workhouses were much like those of prisons in terms of the prevalence of mental illnesses and illiteracy, and of course most institutions required the wearing of some sort of uniform (King and Jones 2020). By the early 20th Century relatively few of those in workhouses had not also had some contact with prisons, while asylums had a long history of diverting people from the prison system to a different form of confinement.…”