The purposeful workhouse of England’s Old Poor Law

It has long been recognized that the English workhouses of the Old Poor Law era (1601-1834) were important precursors to institutions of the modern social services, but what kind of places were they? Characterized by eighteenth-century humanitarians as ‘pauper prisons’, and by early nineteenth-century political economists as ‘pauper palaces’, workhouses were undoubtedly varied institutions with hybrid regimes that included both care and work, nurture and discipline. Integrating recent work that has revealed much about material conditions and the agency of workhouse inmates, this article reassesses work in Old Poor Law workhouses, focusing especially on houses of industry in the county of Norfolk. We find a new perspective on these poor law institutions by recognizing their serious and sustained efforts to keep inmates working productively. Simply put, workhouses worked in the long eighteenth century. To house the infirm, embed work habits in the young, provide temporary shelter and confinement for the able-bodied or unsettled poor, parishes poured time and resources into their local and regional workhouses. In their multifaceted nature, workhouses most resembled not the prisons or hospitals to which they are sometimes compared, but rather the institution of the household-family that was the bedrock of society in the long eighteenth century.