This post is contributed by Dr Charlotte May who is a Heritage Learning Officer and Knowledge Exchange Fellow at the University of Nottingham. She specializes in eighteenth and nineteenth-century correspondence and is currently transcribing the letters of the subject of her PhD thesis, Samuel Rogers. Charlotte has also worked and volunteered at the National Trust site, The Workhouse, and is a Trustee of Keswick Museum, with a particular interest in preserving their literary collections relating to Robert Southey. She can be found on Twitter @CharlotteFMay

Nearly 40,000 people visit the National Trust property The Workhouse in Southwell, Nottinghamshire, making it one of the most important workhouse heritage sites open to the public. Some visitors arrive with expectations shaped by their understanding of workhouses in the works and adaptations of Dickens. From “please sir, can I have some more” re-enacted by visitors in the kitchen area to the experiences of child inmates being likened to Oliver Twist, the dominant image of the workhouse is one from books, films, and television series based on representations of the workhouse through a Dickensian lens. This poses an important question: how have knowledge and expectations of Dickens’s life and works shaped experiences of workhouse heritage sites? 

The year 2022 marked the twentieth year that The Workhouse had been open to the public. As a heritage site and museum, it offers visitors the opportunity to walk from room to room in the original 1824 workhouse building, the associated out-buildings (such as the laundry and mortuary), and the latter addition of the infirmary. This small rural workhouse in Nottinghamshire has brought to light the conflict between what visitors expect of a workhouse, and the history of this particular rural and relatively small workhouse.

The first page of the guidebook of The Workhouse includes thirteen dates relevant to the property’s history, from the passing of the 1601 Old Poor Law to the 2002 opening to the public. However, one of these dates stands out: for the time period 1837-8, the guidebook lists “Charles Dickens’s Oliver Twist published” under these “key dates.” Consequently, the purchaser of the guidebook is immediately confronted with the inclusion of this publication as important to the site’s history. I have been a guide at The Workhouse for nearly ten years, and the inclusion of Oliver Twist as a key date for the rural Nottinghamshire workhouse is not unsurprising. Ruth Richardson, in her 2012 text Dickens and the Workhouse: Oliver Twist and the London Poor, explains that “For many people it is impossible to think of the workhouse regime of the Poor Law without thinking also of Dickens’s novel Oliver Twist, and it is probably true to say that modern-day conceptions of the workhouse as an institution have been fundamentally influenced by the novel” (13). This has certainly been proven to be true at The Workhouse, but it is also important to note that it is probably not the novel, but rather media adaptations and cultural references to it, that has resulted in this influence.

To understand how Dickens has shaped the cultural understanding of workhouses, I asked the site’s staff and room stewards about their own experiences. Some had been asked if Dickens had been born in, or had experienced life in, a workhouse. This misunderstanding is a culmination of a few narrative strands: the financial instability of Dickens’s family in his youth  (particularly his father and the family’s subsequent stay in Marshalsea debtors’ prison), Dickens’s experience of employment in Warren’s Blacking Factory in London, and conflation of Dickens with the character of Oliver in Oliver Twist. With an understanding of workhouses as a place for the financially destitute where individuals were governed by strict rules and undertook tasks within dedicated spaces, it is understandable how these factors have led to the belief that Dickens himself was in a workhouse. In Dickens and the Workhouse (2012), Richardson opens the book with the line that “everyone knows the gist of Oliver’s story” (1), and this could also contribute to misunderstandings where the particulars are overlooked for the sentiment. Oliver Twist provides a fantastic talking point with visitors: although technically published three years after the passing of the Poor Law Amendment Act which mandated workhouses as the main provision of poor relief, many parishes and unions had not yet transitioned to the infrastructure outlined by the legislation. Consequently, Dickens’s portrayal of a workhouse is actually more representative of the pre-1834 system, and The Workhouse at Southwell presents a post-1834 view.  

I also asked volunteers whether their understanding of workhouses had changed since volunteering, or if their experiences and learning at the site had supported what they already knew. The most common response was that perceptions of the workhouse changed when volunteers commenced their roles. For example, one commented “I believe life for the paupers became more austere albeit not perhaps as hard as in urban workhouses which Dickens used as his examples,” and another that “the ways the Workhouse operated became very clear and not as portrayed by Dickens.” Some responses evidence that visitors expected a dirty, cramped environment with little food available to inmates, and were surprised by the cleanliness and space offered, as well as the consistent diet of meat, vegetables, and dairy. It is not the case, however, that Dickens was simply wrong. The reality is that workhouses each had unique identities, shaped by their governance and their populations. As the introduction to one of the most comprehensive websites on workhouses by Peter Higginbotham emphasizes, workhouses were designed to deter individuals and families from seeking help. The lack of freedom, restriction of individual identity, regimented routine, and separation from others and the outside world, was a dehumanizing system. Furthermore, the starvation, unsanitary conditions, and staff cruelty of many led to publicized scandals, such as at the Andover Union Workhouse in the mid-1840s, when inmates were forced to eat from the crushed bones intended to fertilize the gardens. Concerns about the Poor Law and the need for reform were the continual public, legal, and literary causes of the nineteenth century.

Individual workhouse museums are challenged to succinctly narrate this complex history of the Poor Law, whilst also telling the unique story of their own site. These are often two contradictory narratives. In many cases, it is necessary to talk about the legislative and administrative infrastructure, whilst acknowledging how this was either not implemented or (mis)managed in different regions. This is particularly pertinent considering the ubiquitous portrayal of Oliver Twist’s urban workhouse in books and on TV screens. The identity and operation of workhouses varied throughout the United Kingdom even within the constraints of the New Poor Law of 1834, and rural workhouses occupied different socio-economic as well as geographic spaces to those in the urban location of London. As explored by Ruth Richardson, Dickens’s first-hand experience of workhouses included the Cleveland Street Workhouse, with Dickens’s disgust at the conditions of the inmates a pivotal concern. The generalization of workhouse identities does a great disservice to the people who both inhabited and governed them.

Dickens has provided workhouse sites with a unique engagement opportunity. By forging the cultural memory and understanding of what a workhouse is, workhouse sites and museums can use this as a starting point to tell their own stories.

Works cited:

Bloy, Marjie. The Andover Workhouse Scandal, 1845-6, The Victorian Web, https://victorianweb.org/history/poorlaw/andover.html. Accessed 20 March 2023.

Higginbotham, Peter. Workhouses.org.uk. https://www.workhouses.org.uk/intro/. Accessed 20 March 2023.

Richardson, Ruth. Dickens and the Workhouse: Oliver Twist and the London Poor. Oxford University Press, 2012.

All images were taken by the author.