Bentham, Dickens, and the Uses of the Workhouse

Abstract

The Victorian workhouse has come to symbolize on one hand systematic, institutional cruelty informed by abstract economic principles, and on the other hand the moral heroism of social critics who saw through and indignantly protested this inhumane dogma. This is another way of saying that the workhouse is strongly associated with Jeremy Bentham and Charles Dickens. ' To maintain this polarity between villainous theorist and heroic novelist, however, is to be ungenerous to both parties. Both authors make available criticisms of the position of outraged selfrighteousness. Each may serve to question the distinction between the humane and the institutional, and even between free and incarcerated individual subjects.2 The Poor Law Amendment Act of 1834, the first Act preceded by the large-scale investigations of a Royal Commission, established a central authority supervising the poor laws. By attempting to make relief dependent on residence in the workhouse, the Act also aimed to reinforce the distinction between the deserving poor who were willing to work and the undeserving, work-shy poor. The Act was and is seen as more or less Benthamite.3 Bentham had published his own outline of a plan for workhouses entitled Pauper Management Improved in 1798; it was reprinted in 1802 and 1812, and there were plans to republish it in the years preceding the New Poor Laws, but Bentham died in 1832.4 By way of protest against the Act, Dickens published Oliver Twist (1 837-39); he continued his critique in Our Mutual Friend (186465). That the New Poor Laws materially changed anything very