At Home - Bill Bryson [225]
To make sure that the poor were never rewarded for their idleness, the new workhouses were made as strict and joyless as possible. Husbands were separated from wives, children from their parents. At some workhouses inmates were required to wear prison-style uniforms. Food was calculatedly grim. (“On no account must the diet be superior or equal to the ordinary mode of subsistence of the labouring classes of the neighbourhood,” decreed the commissioners.) Conversation in dining halls and during hours of work was forbidden. All hope of happiness was ruthlessly banished.
Inmates had to perform hours of daily work to earn their meals and shelter. One common task was picking oakum. Oakum was old rope that had been heavily coated in tar to make it usable for ships’ caulking. To pick it was simply to disentangle strands so that they could be reused. It was hard and unpleasant work—the stiff fibers could inflict painful cuts—and agonizingly slow. At Poplar Workhouse in East London male inmates were required to pick five and a half pounds of oakum per day—a quota nearly twice that imposed on prison convicts. Those who failed to achieve their targets were put on a reduced diet of bread and water. By 1873, two-thirds of the inmates at Poplar were on short rations. At Andover Workhouse in Hampshire, where inmates were made to crush bones for fertilizer, they were said to be so permanently famished that they sucked the bones to get at the marrow.
Medical care almost everywhere was scant and reluctantly granted. Twenty years after the invention of anesthetics, workhouse patients commonly underwent surgery without them, to keep down costs. Disease was endemic. Tuberculosis—both phthisis, or consumption (which affected the lungs), and scrofula (which affected bones, muscle, and skin)—was notoriously rife, and typhus was a constant fear. Because children were so weakened generally, diseases that are now minor inconveniences were then devastating. Measles killed more children in the nineteenth century than any other illness. Whooping cough and croup killed tens of thousands more, and no place was more conducive to their spread than a stale and crowded workhouse.
Some workhouses were so bad that they generated their own diseases. One vague and chronic malady—now thought to have been a combination of skin infections—was simply called “the itch.” It was almost certainly due to lack of hygiene, though poor diet would have contributed, too. Dietary insufficiencies and poor hygiene made threadworms, tapeworms, and other sinuous invaders more or less universal. A patent medicine company in Manchester produced a purgative that was guaranteed to expel, faithfully and perhaps just a touch explosively, every last unwelcome parasite in the intestinal tract. One user proudly testified that he had brought forth three hundred worms, “some of them of Uncommon Thickness.” People in workhouses could only dream of such salvation, however.
Ringworm and other fungoid infections were endemic, too. Lice were a constant problem. One treatment was to soak bed linen in a solution of mercuric chloride and chloride of lime, which made the sheets poisonous not only to the lice but also to the unfortunates who slept on them. Inmates were also often roughly sanitized upon arrival. At one workhouse in the Midlands, a boy named Henry Cartwright was deemed so malodorous that the matron ordered him thrust into a solution of sulphuret of potash in an attempt to eliminate his body odor. Instead she eliminated the poor boy: by the time he was hauled out, he had suffocated. Authorities weren’t entirely indifferent to such abuses. At Brentwood, Essex, when a nurse named Elizabeth Gillespie threw a girl down a flight of stairs to her death, she was brought to trial and sentenced to five years in prison. Even so, physical and sexual abuse,