The Poor Law Amendment Act of 1834 guaranteed that no able-bodied person could receive assistance to the poor unless they lived in special workhouses. The idea was that the poor would be helped to take care of themselves. They had to work for their food and shelter. When the poor laws were passed, some parishes sometimes imposed terrible family situations, for example by requiring a husband to sell his wife to prevent them from becoming a costly burden on local authorities. The laws introduced during the century would only contribute to further anchoring the workhouse system in society. A more difficult question was whether a man could continue to receive help in the working house if his wife insisted on leaving. These workhouses were built and operated primarily for the purpose of profiting from prisoners` labor, not as the surest way to provide aid, while testing the reality of their plight. The workshop was then in fact a kind of factory, exploited at the risk and expense of the poor, using the worst description of the people and contributing to the impoverishment of the best. [16] The new Poor Law guaranteed that the poor were housed, clothed, and fed in workhouses. Children who entered the working house received some education.
In exchange for this care, all the poor in the working home would have to work several hours a day. The Relief for the Poor Act of 1601 made parishes legally responsible for caring for those within their borders who were unable to work due to age or infirmity. The law essentially classified the poor into one of three groups. She proposed that able-bodied people be offered work in a better house (the forerunner of the working house), where the “stubborn lazy” would be punished. [5] It also proposed the construction of housing for the powerless poor, the elderly, and the infirm, although most of the aid was provided through a form of aid to the poor known as outside aid—money, food, or other necessities given to those living in their own homes, funded by a local tax on the property of the wealthiest in the community. [2] The government, fearful of encouraging the “lazy,” made sure that people feared the working home and would do anything to get away from it. Historian Simon Fowler has argued that workhouses were “largely designed for a pool of sloths and pushers without disabilities.” This group, however, hardly existed beyond the imagination of a generation of political economists. [104] Working life should be difficult, deter the able-bodied poor, and ensure that only the poorest apply, a principle known as less eligibility. [105] Friedrich Engels, however, described what he imagined under the motives of the authors of the New Poor Law of 1834, “to force the poor into the Procrustean bed of their preconceptions. To do this, they treated the poor with incredible cruelty.
[106] If you have no prospect of earning a living wage – if illness, disability or market forces prevent you from working – what should you do? During this period, workhouses housed those who could not afford to support themselves. Workhouse inmates were often forced into forced labor and had to follow strict rules of conduct. This government document of 1852 lists the work done by prisoners in workhouses across the country. The working house is an uncomfortable building with small windows, low rooms and dark stairs. It is surrounded by a high wall, which gives it the appearance of a prison and prevents the free flow of air. There are 8 or 10 beds in each room, mainly herds, and therefore retentive for all smells and very productive of insects. The passages are sorely lacking in whitewashing. There is no regular registration of births and deaths, but if smallpox, measles or malignant fever occur in the house, mortality is very high.
Of the 131 inmates in the house, 60 are children. [15] In the following years, further laws were introduced to help formalize the structure and practice of the workshop. In 1776, a government survey of workhouses was conducted, which revealed that in about 1800 institutions, the total capacity was about 90,000 places. A source of insight into life in the work home can be found in the lists of rules under which the working house functioned. These were often printed and prominently displayed in the working house, and also read aloud weekly, so that illiterates could have no excuse to disobey them. The rules of the Aylesbury Parish Workhouse of 1831 describe the daily regime: the available data on mortality rates within the Workhouse System are minimal; However, in the wall-to-wall documentary Secrets from the Workhouse, it is estimated that 10% of those admitted to the working house under the Poor Law Amendment Act of 1834 died in the system. [53] The poor were forced to wear uniforms. This meant that everyone looked the same and everyone outside knew they were poor and lived in the working house.