Fragments of Fury? Lunacy, Agency, and Contestation in the Great Yarmouth Workhouse, 1890s–1900s

Steven A King,Peter Jones

doi:10.1162/jinh_a_01556

Abstract

A methodological and philosophical focus on scandals has turned the workhouse that stands at the heart of popular and historiographical understandings of the English and Welsh New Poor Law (1834–1929) into a dark place of confinement and harsh treatment that the poor were largely powerless to resist. Yet viewed through the lens of interdisciplinary methods not often applied to the history of welfare—in particular, historical sociolinguistics and material-culture analysis—the pauper letters and “stitched” texts that have emerged from large-scale research projects reveal that inmates’ experience in the workhouse were not as dire, and their voices not as suppressed, as once supposed.

Highlights

Against this backdrop we have, since the benchmark work of Anne Crowther in 1981, come to understand increasingly more about the workhouse and its people.[4]
The spectre of the workhouse fitted into life-cycles of relief, it is clear that once the ‘crusade’ against outdoor relief had failed by the 1880s, a tri-partite combination of influences began to change perceptions about the operation of workhouses and their place as a holding institution for children, the disabled, aged, and other “deserving” paupers: rising numbers of female poor law guardians who sought to soften institutional regimes; receding beliefs that the poor were largely responsible for their own poverty, of which the Liberal Welfare Reforms of the early twentieth-century were both an embodiment and confirmation; and the development of an international conversation about welfare benefits such as state pensions from the 1880s
A complex confluence of circumstances meant that as the nineteenth-century progressed a growing proportion of the “lunatic population” that can be traced through the census found themselves long-term inmates of workhouses: rising numbers of people defined as lunatic; the fact that it cost families and poor law unions much more to send lunatics to asylums rather than keep them in the workhouse; the rapid development of overcrowding as a core feature of later nineteenth-century asylums in particular; and the tendency for asylum inmates to be “circulated” when their conditions and family circumstances waxed and waned

Summary

Introduction

Against this backdrop we have, since the benchmark work of Anne Crowther in 1981, come to understand increasingly more about the workhouse and its people.[4].

Results

Conclusion