For many, the workhouse, particularly the Victorian variety, still conjures up in the popular imagination an image of dread and fear. I remember being taught about them at school and shuddering at the evocation of the Dickensian horror of these institutions. Everyone remembers the vivid experiences of Oliver Twist from either the novel or the film. For my grandmother’s generation they were still the unmentionable places of shame, the frightening last resort that beckoned if all went wrong. The workhouse was bad enough for what were called the labouring classes, but too much to bear for the more aspiring lower middle classes who’d fallen on hard times, as indeed it was possible to do throughout the 19th and 20th centuries.
They were supposed to be abolished in 1930 but, as we heard in The Archive Hour: Enter the Workhouse on Radio Four (Saturday), they lingered on into the 1940s in a more benevolent form than their Victorian forerunners.
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