[The following is a contemporary description of English workhouses in the mid-19th century.]
As Charles Dickens wrote in an article for the magazine Household Words around 1850:
In one place, the Newgate of the Workhouse, a company of boys and youths were locked up in a yard alone; their dayroom being a kind of kennel where the casual poor used formerly to be littered down at night. Divers of them had been there for some time. ‘Are they never going away?’ was the natural inquiry. ‘Most of them are crippled, in some form or other,’ said the Wardsman, ‘and not fit for anything.’ They slunk about, like dispirited wolves or hyenas; and made a pounce at their food when it was served out, much as those animals do. The big-headed idiot shuffling his feet along the pavement, in the sunlight outside, was a more agreeable object everyway.
Groves of babies in arms; groves of mothers and other sick women in bed; groves of lunatics; jungles of men in stone-paved down-stairs day-rooms, waiting for their dinners; longer and longer groves of old people, in up-stairs Infirmary wards, wearing out life, God knows how – this was the scenery though which the walk lay, for two hours.
Source:
Klein, Shelley. “Mary Ann Cotton.” The Most Evil Women in History. Barnes & Noble Books, 2003. 105. Print.
Further Reading:
I know who you are on Voat now.