The Plight of Victorian England’s Poor
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“Are there no prisons? Are there no workhouses?”
–Ebenezer Scrooge
A workhouse was a building where the homeless, jobless and starving could go to live, work and eat. Homelessness was a very common problem in Victorian England, and many rich people (like Scrooge) believed that the poor were just too lazy to work and would take advantage of tax-funded shelter and food. To ensure that their tax money did not “go to waste,” the rich insisted that the government make the workhouses as miserable as possible. Families were separated into large groups of men, women and children. Family members could not even see each other at meals, and certainly could not sleep near each other at night. The work was mandatory and menial—a common workhouse task was to spend all day breaking larger stones into smaller pieces. The “free” food was no more than one meager portion of gruel per day.
Prison was not just a place for criminals- it was also for people who couldn’t pay their bills. The wardens treated debtors like common criminals. The government designed purposefully useless tasks for prisoners to perform so that debtors would realize the pointlessness of their crime. For example, prisoners had to walk the treadmill, a large metal cylinder with evenly spaced steps attached to it. The cylinder spun around and around while the prisoner walked for hours, struggling not to miss a step and to keep pace with the other prisoners suffering the same fate. The task was exhausting, and the government eventually banned the treadmill, but not before thousands of debtors had walked its steps.
“We had a great deal of work to finish up from last night and clear away this morning.”
–Martha Cratchit
Imagine spending your entire school day, plus all of your homework time, copying words from a textbook. Add a freezing room and one candle as your only source of light, and you have Bob Cratchit’s working conditions—and he had a good job by Victorian standards! Since there were no printers or copiers in the 1800s, businesses hired clerks to copy documents all day by hand. Scrooge expected Bob to do this arduous task 8 to 10 hours per day, six days a week. For this he paid Bob 15 shillings a week, just 5 shillings short of a pound, or 39 pounds a year. Experts disagree on today’s dollar equivalent of the Victorian pound, but they consistently place the value between $20 and $200. That means that in the best-case scenario, Bob brought home just under $200 a week, while in the worst-case scenario, Bob earned less than $20 a week. Rent on a decent house would have been about 9 shillings a week, leaving just 6 shillings to feed and clothe a family of six. A loaf of bread cost about a shilling.
This may have been why Martha and Peter, the two older Cratchit children, took jobs as well. Martha worked in the factory and Peter would also have had a job. Conditions for working children were brutal, and working meant that children were unable to continue their education. But with a family to feed, children of Martha and Peter’s ages would have had to help add to the family’s weekly income. In order to understand their characters better, the Young Ensemble in A Christmas Carol studies what working conditions were like for children their age during the 1800s—and what conditions are like for working children today.
