The system was designed to make poverty so unpleasant that only the truly destitute would ask for help.
The principle behind the Victorian workhouse was called "less eligibility." Conditions inside the institution had to be worse than the worst conditions available to a free laborer outside it.1 The logic was deterrence. If the workhouse was comfortable, policymakers reasoned, the poor would choose it over employment. Making it unpleasant would drive them back into the labor market.
The Poor Law Amendment Act of 1834, known as the New Poor Law, formalized this system across England and Wales. It grouped roughly 15,000 local parishes into 600 Poor Law Unions, each governed by an elected Board of Guardians and each required to maintain a workhouse.2 More than 500 workhouses were built during the following fifty years, two-thirds of them by 1840.3
Families entering the workhouse were separated. Husbands, wives, and children were housed in different wards and could not see each other during the day. Inmates wore uniforms, ate standardized meals designed to sustain life without offering comfort, and performed assigned labor: breaking stones, picking oakum, or crushing bones for fertilizer. Real payments per capita declined by nearly 40 percent between 1833 and 1838 as a result of the new system.4
The Andover workhouse scandal of 1845 exposed conditions that shocked even the system's supporters. Investigators found that starving inmates had been eating the rotting flesh from bones they were supposed to be crushing for fertilizer.5 The resulting parliamentary inquiry led to the replacement of the Poor Law Commission with a Poor Law Board under closer government oversight in 1847. The scandal changed the supervision, not the principle.
By the early twentieth century, workhouses increasingly housed only orphans, the elderly, the sick, and the mentally ill. The Liberal welfare reforms beginning in 1906 introduced old-age pensions and national insurance that bypassed the Poor Law system entirely. The National Assistance Act of 1948 formally abolished the workhouse, 114 years after its Victorian incarnation took shape.6