Pauper Voices, Public Opinion and Workhouse Reform in Mid-Victorian England

Download or read book Pauper Voices, Public Opinion and Workhouse Reform in Mid-Victorian England written by Peter Jones and published by Springer Nature. This book was released on 2020-08-08 with total page 136 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book represents the first attempt to identify and describe a workhouse reform ‘movement’ in mid- to late-nineteenth-century England, beyond the obvious candidates of the Workhouse Visiting Society and the voices of popular critics such as Charles Dickens and Florence Nightingale. It is a subject on which the existing workhouse literature is largely silent, and this book therefore fills a considerable gap in our understanding of contemporary attitudes towards institutional welfare. Although many scholars have touched on the more obvious strands of workhouse criticism noted above, few have gone beyond these to explore the possibility that a concerted ‘movement’ existed that sought to place pressure on those with responsibility for workhouse administration, and to influence the trajectory of workhouse policy.