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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 15 June 2021
The workhouse remains a totemic institution for social historians, yet we still know very little about the day-to-day experiences of the indoor poor. Nowhere is this clearer than in discussions about workhouse clothing, which remain overwhelmingly negative in the literature and consistent with the predominant view of the workhouse as a place of suffering and humiliation. Yet more often than not, this view is based on relatively shallow empirical foundations and tends to rely on anecdotal evidence or on the uncritical use of subjective sources such as photographs, newspaper editorials and other cultural products. This article takes a different approach by looking again at the whole range of meanings that workhouse clothing held for paupers and those who oversaw its allocation, and at the practical and symbolic usages to which it was put by them. On the basis of this evidence the authors argue that, contrary to the orthodox view, workhouse clothing was rarely intended to be degrading or stigmatising; that it would have held very different meanings for different classes of paupers; and that, far from being a source of unbridled misery, paupers often found it to be a source of great strategic and practical value.
1 C. Rose, Making, Selling and Wearing Boys’ Clothes in Late-Victorian England (Farnham, 2010), pp. 33–4. See also A. Toplis, The Clothing Trade in Provincial England, 1800–1850 (Abingdon, 2011), p. 106; P. Wood, Poverty and the Workhouse in Victorian Britain (Stroud, 1991), p. 101; V. Richmond, Clothing the Poor in Nineteenth-Century England (Cambridge, 2013), p. 274. Mostly, however, clothing is considered very superficially in surveys of the New Poor Law workhouse, if it is mentioned at all.
2 Douglas Brown found that, in London at least, a few large suppliers dominated the market for workhouse clothing. D. Brown, ‘Supplying London’s workhouses in the mid-nineteenth century’, The London Journal, 41:1 (2016), 39. For the disciplinary aspect of workhouse dress, see also N. Longmate, The Workhouse (1974, London, 2003), pp. 93, 138–9; M. Ward, Female Occupations: Women’s Employment, 1850–1950 (Newbury, 2008), p. 158; S. Williams, Unmarried Motherhood in the Metropolis, 1700–1850 (Basingstoke, 2018), pp. 143, 149. On its humiliations, see M. Doolittle, ‘Fatherhood and Family Shame: Masculinity, Welfare and the Workhouse in Late Nineteenth-Century England’, in L. Delap, B. Griffin and A. Wills, eds, The Politics of Domestic Authority in Britain since 1800 (Basingstoke, 2009), p. 96; D. Fraser, The Evolution of the Welfare State (London, 1984), p. 54; J. Maynard, ‘Respectability in dress in the novels of Hesba Stretton’, Costume, 32:1 (1998), 67; F. M. L. Thompson, The Rise of Respectable Society: A Social History of Victorian Britain, 1830–1900 (Cambridge, MA, 1988), p. 350.
3 Rose, Making, Selling and Wearing, p. 33. See also Toplis, The Clothing Trade, p. 106; Richmond, Clothing the Poor, p. 274.
4 M. A. Crowther, The Workhouse System, 1834–1929: The History of an English Social Institution (London, 1981), p. 195.
5 J. Humphries, Childhood and Child Labour in the Industrial Revolution (Cambridge, 2010), pp. 295–305; J. Humphries, ‘Memories of Pauperism’, in S. A. King and A. Winter, Migration, Settlement and Belonging in Europe: Comparative Perspectives (Oxford, 2013), pp. 102–06.
6 H. Mayhew, London Labour and the London Poor, Vol. 1 (London, 1851), p. 344, cited in Richmond, Clothing the Poor, p. 274.
7 C. Chaplain, My Autobiography (London, Penguin Classics ed., 2003), p. 26.
8 Rose, Making, Selling and Wearing, pp. 33-4.
9 Toplis, Clothing Trade, pp. 105–06; Richmond, Clothing the Poor, p. 276.
10 The one exception is Anne Brogden’s brief descriptive inventory of workhouse clothing in Liverpool under both the Old and New Poor Laws. A. Brogden, ‘Clothing provision by the Liverpool Workhouse’, Costume, 36:1 (2002), 50–5.
11 U. Henriques, Before the Welfare State: Social Administration in Early Industrial Britain (Harlow, 1979), p. 50.
12 S. A. King, Women, Welfare and Local Politics, 1880–1920: ‘We Might be Trusted’ (Brighton, 2010), pp. 76–93.
13 Ibid., pp. 186–204.
14 Paupers were, in theory at least, separated when they entered the workhouse into different categories, such as the able-bodied, the sick, the elderly and children. For a fuller explanation, see D. Englander, Poverty and Poor Law Reform in Britain: From Chadwick to Booth, 1834–1914 (London, 1998), p. 32.
15 For a useful discussion of the ‘agency’ of the poor in history, see especially M. C. Webber, ‘Troubling agency: agency and charity in early nineteenth-century London’, Historical Research, 91:251 (2018), 116–36.
16 That is, between the foundation of the New Poor Law end of the Liberal Welfare Reforms, which coincided with the beginning of the First World War and fundamentally changed the meaning and symbolism of poor relief and of course warrants a study in its own right.
17 The Poor Law Commissioners constituted a central body that had three distinct incarnations under the New Poor Law: it was known as the Poor Law Commission between 1834 and 1847, the Poor Law Board between 1847 and 1871, and it was subsumed within the Local Government Board from 1871 onwards. For a good introduction to the organisation of relief after 1834, see Englander, Poverty and Poor Law Reform.
18 L. Hollen Lees, The Solidarities of Strangers: The English Poor Laws and the People, 1700–1948 (Cambridge, 1998), p. 147; F. Driver, Power and Pauperism: The Workhouse System, 1834–1884 (Cambridge, 1993), p. 3.
19 Richmond, Clothing the Poor, p. 274.
20 R. Talbot, ‘North-South Divide: The New Poor Law in Stoke-on-Trent 1871–1929’ (unpublished PhD thesis, University of Leicester, 2017), pp. 278–91.
21 ‘The New Starvation Law’, by Reuben Holder, c. 1837, reprinted in Wood, Poverty and the Workhouse (no page or plate number).
22 W. Besant, ‘In Luck at Last’, printed in All the Year Round, a journal ‘conducted by Charles Dickens’, December 1884, p. 64.
23 London Evening Standard, 19th January 1858.
24 The British Newspaper Archive <https://www.britishnewspaperarchive.co.uk/> [7th August 2019]. The search was restricted to the time period covered in this article, 1834–1914.
25 Bristol Mercury, 18th April 1892. Many other examples of this kind of rhetoric attached to discussions of the ‘workhouse uniform’ can be found: for example, in the Hampstead and Highgate Express, 17th February 1877; Norfolk News, 25th December 1880; the Liverpool Mercury, 24th March 1883; the Derbyshire Courier, 29th December 1883; the London Evening Standard, 25th December 1884; and the Cumberland Pacquet, 9th June 1892.
26 The nine newspapers referred to are: the Bristol Mercury, the Cambridge Independent Press, the Coventry Herald, the Exeter and Plymouth Gazette, the Morning Post, the Norfolk News, the Sheffield Independent and the West London Observer. These titles were selected because they contain enough of the search terms to make the investigation meaningful, but also for their broad geographical coverage and because each of them covers most or all of the period between 1834 and 1914. However, it should be noted that this is not intended to be a comprehensive or statistically complete survey of nineteenth-century English newspapers, and any conclusions are therefore only intended to be indicative.
27 K. Jones, The Making of Social Policy in Britain: From the Poor Law to New Labour, 3rd edn (London, 2005), pp. 56–67; K. Price, Medical Negligence in Victorian Britain: The Crisis of Care under the English Poor Law, c. 1834–1900 (London, 2015), pp. 103–22.
28 F. Greenwood, ‘Workhouse Humiliations’, The Illustrated London News, 20th February 1892.
29 The Pall Mall Gazette, 16th November 1865.
30 Anon. [James Greenwood], ‘A Night in the Workhouse’, Pall Mall Gazette, 12th, 13th and 15th January 1866. The article was subsequently reprinted many times elsewhere, including The Times, the Birmingham Daily Post and the Belfast News-Letter, as well as in pamphlet form. S. Koven, Slumming: Sexual and Social Politics in Victorian London (Princeton, NJ, 2004), pp. 25–87; L. Seaber, Incognito: Social Investigation in British Literature (Cham, CH, 2017), pp. 17–58.
31 For an excellent, and largely neglected, discussion of changing attitudes towards sections of the workhouse poor and the battle to reform the late nineteenth-century workhouse, see M. A. Crowther, ‘The workhouse’, Proceedings of the British Academy, 78 (1992), 183–94.
32 King, Women, Welfare, p. 91.
33 Article 20 of the General Workhouse Rules, 1842, and a note on Article 20, reproduced in a ‘Letter Accompanying General Workhouse Rules’ sent by the Commissioners to all poor law unions in England and Wales, and reprinted in the Eighth Annual Report of the Poor Law Commissioners (London, 1842), p. 66, emphasis added. Later reprinted in The General Orders and Instructional Letters of the Poor Law Commissioners (London, 1845), and The General Consolidated Order Issued by the Poor law Commissioners (London, 1847).
34 W. Golden Lumley, Manuals of the Duties of Poor Law Officers: Master and Matron of the Workhouse, 2nd edn (London, 1869), p. 60; The Western Gazette, 1st February 1895.
35 Rose, Making, Selling and Wearing, p. 33; W. Golden Lumley, The General Orders of the Poor law Commissioners Now in Force (London, 1847), Article 210, No. 8, p. 258, emphasis in original. The stricture against a visible stamp on workhouse clothing dated back to poor law legislation under the old regime (55 Geo. iii. c. 137), but it is clear that it was considered very much in operation throughout the New Poor Law period as well.
36 Golden Lumley, Manuals of the Duties of Poor Law Officers (1869), pp. 30–1, emphasis added.
37 M. G. Jones, The Charity School Movement: A Study of Eighteenth Century Puritanism in Action (Cambridge, 1938), p. 75; S. Firth, ‘Socialization and Rational Schooling: Elementary Education in Leeds Before 1870’, in W. P. McCann, ed., Popular Education and Socialization in the Nineteenth Century (London, 1977), p. 69; Richmond, Clothing the Poor, pp. 242–7.
38 Golden Lumley, General Orders (1842), General Order No. 4, Article 7, pp. 103–04. This directive was, once again, reprinted in the General Consolidated Order (1847), and in Golden Lumley’s, Manuals of the Duties of Poor Law Officers (1869).
39 Reported in The Bath Chronicle, 28th June 1849. This concern with the containment of contagion (of disease and vermin) in the workhouse can be seen elsewhere, as well. See, for example, a letter of the Poor Law Commissioners to the Guardians of the Bromsgrove Union in 1840, where they again emphasise that pauper clothing should be washed and ‘purified’ in order to prevent infection and disease. The National Archives (hereafter TNA) MH 12/13904/138, Poor Law Board to Bromsgrove Board of Guardians, 3rd March 1840.
40 For example, Florence Nightingale was absolutely clear on the need to avoid the spread of disease by boiling the clothes of infected patients, and by the thorough sterilisation of all contaminated bedding, dressings, etc. L. McDonald, ed., Florence Nightingale: The Nightingale School. Collected Works of Florence Nightingale (Waterloo, ON, 2009), pp. 13–21, 438.
41 Twenty-Third Annual Report of the Poor Law Board, 1870–71 (London, 1871), p. 197.
42 G. Mooney, Intrusive Interventions: Public Health, Domestic Space, and Infectious Disease Surveillance in England, 1840–1914 (Woodbridge, 2015), pp. 126, 127–9. See also P. Baldwin, Contagion and the State in Europe, 1830–1930 (Cambridge, 1999), pp. 101–02, 320–2.
43 TNA MH 12/9229/112, Draft Letter from the Poor Law Commission to Robert Wright of Basford, 22nd November 1838.
44 Cornwall Record Office (hereafter CRO) PULAUS/12/119, Launceston Board of Guardians’ minutes, 22nd February 1872.
45 For instance, King, Women, Welfare, p. 59, notes that in the otherwise voluminous and comprehensive archive for Bolton Poor Law Union there is only a single set of accounts covering clothing given to workhouse inmates.
46 Knaresborough Post, 19th September 1874. We are grateful to Leah Mellors of Ripon Museums Trust for this reference.
47 Leeds Mercury, 10th July 1875.
48 P. Jones, ‘Clothing the poor in early-nineteenth-century England’, Textile History, 37:1 (2006), 17–37; S. A. King, ‘Reclothing the English poor’, Textile History, 33:1 (2002), 37–47.
49 The Salisbury and Winchester Journal, 7th December 1850. It is important to note that the majority of union tenders do not differentiate between clothing and textiles for the use of outdoor paupers, and those allocated to workhouse inmates. Although this example does not have many items listed and gives relatively little detail as to the nature of the textiles required, it is one of the few which makes that differentiation explicit, which it why it has been chosen for inclusion here. It should also be pointed out that this is a quarterly tender, and that much more extensive stores are likely to have been ordered over the entire year. This is borne out by the fact that nothing on this list relates to women and girls’ clothing except shoes and stockings.
50 Toplis, Clothing Trade, p. 105. In terms of the ubiquity of these kinds of hard-wearing textiles in the wardrobes of the nineteenth-century poor, see Jones, ‘Clothing the poor’, pp. 25–6; Richmond, Clothing the Poor, pp. 37, 67, 276.
51 Toplis, Clothing Trade, p. 106; Richmond, Clothing the Poor, p. 274. See also Rose, Making, Selling and Wearing, p. 33.
52 G. Gear, ed., The Diary of Benjamin Woodcock Master of the Barnet Union Workhouse, 1836–1838 (Hertford, 2010).
53 Although the exception to this rule is the work of Jane Humphries on pauper memoirs. See n. 5.
54 This rough estimate is based on an extrapolation from daily admissions data and the mean annual number of workhouse inmates between 1840 and 1900, which is presented in the Twelfth Annual Report of the Poor Law Board, 1859–60 (London, 1860), p. 14, and the Appendices to the Royal Commission of Inquiry on the Poor Laws and Relief of Distress (London, 1909), p. 117.
55 S. A. King and P. Jones, ‘Fragments of fury? Lunacy, agency and contestation in the Great Yarmouth Workhouse, 1890s–1900s’, Journal of Interdisciplinary History, LI:II (2020), 1–31; P. Jones and S. A. King, Pauper Voices, Public Opinion and Workhouse Reform in Mid-Victorian England: Bearing Witness (Basingstoke, 2020).
56 The phrase is most often used to describe respectable householders who fell on hard times in late medieval and early modern Europe. For the use of the term to describe decayed gentility in early modern England, see S. Hindle, ‘Dependency, shame and belonging: badging the deserving poor, c. 1550–1750’, Cultural and Social History, 1:1 (2004), 14–16. In the context of the present discussion, it is notable that the literature on the New Poor Law is all but silent on this class of paupers.
57 A few local studies of workhouse populations based on local records do exist, but they are few and far between. See especially N. Goose, ‘Workhouse populations in the mid-nineteenth century: the case of Hertfordshire’, Local Population Studies, 62 (1999), 52–69; A. Hinde and F. Turnbull, ‘The population of two Hampshire workhouses, 1851–1861’, Local Population Studies, 61 (1998), 38–53; D. Jackson, ‘The Medway Union Workhouse, 1876–1881: a study based on the admission and discharge registers and the census enumerators books’, Local Population Studies, 75 (2005), 11–32.
58 See, for example, P. Bartlett, The Poor Law of Lunacy: The Administration of Pauper Lunatics in Mid-Nineteenth-Century England (London and Washington, 1999); G. R. Boyer and T. P. Shmidle, ‘Poverty among the elderly in late Victorian England, Economic History Review, 62:2 (2009), 249–78; N. Goose, ‘Poverty, old age and gender in nineteenth-century England: the case of Hertfordshire’, Continuity and Change, 20:3 (2005), 351–84; L. Hulonce, Pauper Children and Poor Law Childhoods in England and Wales, 1834–1910, ebook edn (Rounded Globe, 2017); J. Reinarz and L. Schwarz, eds, Medicine and the Workhouse (Rochester, NY, 2013).
59 E. P. Thompson, ‘The Moral Economy of the English Crowd in the Eighteenth Century’, in his Customs in Common (London 1991), p. 187.
60 P. Carter and S. King, ‘Keeping track: modern methods, administration and the Victorian Poor Law, 1834–1871’, Archives, 40 (2014), 31–52; P. Jones and N. Carter, ‘Writing for redress: redrawing the epistolary relationship under the New Poor Law’, Continuity and Change, 34 (2019), 375–99; Jones and King, Pauper Voices, Public Opinion.
61 The unions on which this study is based are: Axminster, Aysgarth, Bala, Basford, Bellingham, Berwick, Bethnal Green, Bradford on Avon, Bromsgrove, Chelmsford, Great Yarmouth, Keighley, Kidderminster, Llanfyllin, Merthyr Tydfil, Mitford and Launditch, Nantwich, Newcastle-under-Lyme, Pewsey, Poplar, Rye, Uppingham, Wolstanton, Wrexham.
62 TNA MH 12/13831, witness statements from paupers, taken down by the workhouse chaplain, 4th April 1840, emphasis in original. See also a brief report entitled ‘New Poor Law Cleanliness and Comfort’, The Times, 27th March 1840.
63 TNA MH 12/9234/41, letters from various signatories to the Poor Law Commission, 2nd January 1844.
64 TNA MH 12/9234/41, letters from various signatories to the Poor Law Commission, 15th January 1844.
65 TNA MH 12/6855, anonymous correspondent to the Poor Law Board, 9th January 1868; TNA MH 12/6853, Mungo Paumier to the Poor Law Board, 12th December 1866.
66 King, ‘Reclothing the English poor’; S. A. King, ‘The Clothing of the Poor: A Matter of Pride or Shame’, in A. Gestrich, S. A. King and L. Raphael, eds, Being Poor in Modern Europe: Historical Perspectives, 1800–1940 (Bern, 2006), pp. 365–88; Jones, ‘Clothing the poor’; S. A. King, ‘“I fear you will think me too presumptuous in my demands but necessity has no law”: clothing in English pauper letters, 1800–1834’, International Review of Social History, 54 (2009), 207–36; P. Jones, ‘“I cannot keep my place without being deascent”: pauper letters, parish clothing and pragmatism in the South of England, 1750–1830’, Rural History, 20:1 (2009), pp. 31–49.
67 CRO PUFAL/1/70, Falmouth Board of Guardian’s minutes, 1st December 1840.
68 TNA MH 12/9234, Report of Assistant Commissioner Weale, 29th February 1844.
69 See, for example, an investigation in response to another Times report in 1837 in a Report to the Poor Law Commissioners of an Inquiry into the Administration of the Board of Guardians of the Hartismere Union (London, 1837); report on the Nottingham workhouses in Appendices B. to F. of the Eighth Annual Report of the Poor Law Commissioners (London, 1842), pp. 120–1; Report of Doctor E. Smith, Medical Officer to Poor Law Board, on Sufficiency of Arrangements for Care and Treatment of Sick Poor in Forty-eight Provincial Workhouses in England and Wales (London, 1867), p. 121.
70 Lincolnshire Archives (hereafter LA) PL1/1/102/1, Swineshead Workhouse minutes, 14th February 1837.
71 TNA MH 12/13669, witness statements to a board of guardians’ enquiry, 23rd November 1838.
72 Richmond, Clothing the Poor, p. 294.
73 TNA MH 12/13669, witness statements to a board of guardians’ enquiry, 23rd November 1838.
74 TNA MH 12/6855, Assistant Commissioner’s annotation to an anonymous letter to the Poor Law Board, 9th January 1868
75 TNA MH 12/16105, Clerk to the Guardians to the Poor Law Commission, 2nd October 1840.
76 S. A. King, ‘Poverty, Medicine and the Workhouse in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries: An Afterword’, in Reinarz and Schwarz (eds), Medicine and the Workhouse, pp. 228–52.
77 See, for example, CRO PUFAL/1, Falmouth Board of Guardians’ minutes, 24th August 1841, 16th November 1842, 29th March 1842, 10th May 1842, 7th June 1842.
78 TNA MH 12/1869, John Porter to the Poor Law Board, n.d. 1869.
79 TNA MH 12/9234/41, Deposition of Henry Butts, 14th February 1844.
80 TNA MH 12/9231/197, Clerk to the Guardians of Basford to the Poor Law Commission, 19th May 1841; TNA MH 12/10324/29, Clerk to the Guardians of Clutton to the Poor Law Board, 21st April 1851; Preston Herald, 7th August 1849; Manchester Courier, 2nd October 1868.
81 Gear, The Diary of Benjamin Woodcock.
82 For official references to the destruction of clothing see, for example, Eighth Annual Report of the Poor Law Commissioners (London, 1842), p. 126; Report of George Coode, Esq. to the Poor law Board on the Laws of Settlement and Removal of the Poor (London, 1851), p. 74; Reports by Poor Law Inspectors on Workhouses in their Districts in Pursuance of Instructions (London, 1867), p. 414. For references in the press, see section 2.
83 Judicial Statistics for England and Wales, with Appendices, printed in London by H. M. Stationary Office between 1857 and 1892.
84 D. Green, ‘Pauper protests: power and resistance in early nineteenth-century London workhouses’, Social History, 31:2 (2006), 148–9.
85 Crowther, The Workhouse System, pp. 150–1.
86 Green, ‘Pauper protests’, pp. 147–9.
87 Ibid. The reasons for the numerical fluctuations in this type of offence over time are interesting and important in themselves; but they require a much more thorough investigation than is possible here.
88 Crowther, The Workhouse System, pp. 196–201.
89 This is readily apparent in published tenders for clothing and textiles, such as that for the Manchester workhouse at the time the image of the boys in Figure 1 was taken, which records a six-monthly tender for 1,500 yards of Linsey, 1,000 yards of serge, 600 yards of corduroy, 200 yards of moleskin and 10,400 yards of calico, among many other textile items. Manchester Courier, 10th September 1892.
90 For example, LA PL1/102/1, Boston Union Workhouse minutes, 22nd August 1837, 23rd September 1837, 28th October 1837.
91 It is striking that many of the observations we have made in this article closely echo those made by Hamlett and Hoskins in relation to the very different setting of the 19th century English public asylum. It certainly strengthens our conclusion that attitudes towards institutional clothing were complex, and clearly invites further pan-institutional work in the future. See J. Hamlett and L. Hoskins, ‘Comfort in Small Things? Clothing, Control and Agency in County Lunatic Asylums in Nineteenth- and Early Twentieth-Century England’, Journal of Victorian Culture, 18 (2013), 93–114.
92 See, for example, K. Callanan Martin, Hard and Unreal Advice: Mothers, Social Science and the Victorian Poverty Experts (Basingstoke, 2008), pp. 20–39; M. Levine-Clark, Unemployment, Welfare and Masculine Citizenship: So Much Honest Poverty in Britain, 1870–1930 (Basingstoke, 2015); and L. Goldman, ‘Social reform and the pressures of “progress” on Parliament, 1660–1914’, Parliamentary History (2018), 72–88.
