We civilised men... we institute poor-laws

Here is an excerpt from a short description of the New Poor Law, the "charity" which Darwin scientifically  determined was a social evil because it kept too many of the poor alive past childhood, allowing the "weak members of civilised societies propagate their kind." 

In Wales, particularly in the central and north-western regions, resistance to the building of workhouses was strong. By 1847, seventeen out of 47 unions had still not opened workhouses. One union, Rhayader, held out against erecting one until 1877. Attacks also took place on the workhouses at Llanfyllin where the Montgomeryshire Yeomanry prevented a mob from destroying the building, and at Narberth where special constables were employed to protect the site after a mob attempted to burn down the new workhouse.

However, at the heart of opposition to the new law was the hardship and brutality it engendered. In 1841, GR Wythen Baxter published his famous The Book of the Bastiles — a somewhat lurid compilation of newspaper reports, court proceedings, correspondence and so on, which graphically illustrated some of the horror stories relating to the New Poor Law. For example:

"An enquiry has taken place this week at Rochester, before the county magistrates, into several charges preferred against James Miles, the master of the Hoo Union-House, for cruelly beating several young pauper-children of both sexes. Elizabeth Danes stated that she was 13 years of age, and that the defendant, James Miles, had punished her three times while she was in the Union-House. The offence she had committed was leaving a little dirt in the corner of a room, and the defendant made her lie upon a table, and took her clothes off, and beat her with a birch-broom until blood came."

Two years later, in 1843 the satirical magazine Punch reported how in Bethnal Green "An infant, only five weeks old, had been separated from the mother, being occasionally brought to her for the breast."

In the Huddersfield Union, where five small old workhouses were still in use, there was public outcry in 1848 at conditions in the Huddersfield township workhouse. Conditions in the workhouse were appallingly cramped and unhygienic, with up to 10 children sharing a bed. The inmates' diet was miserable, even by workhouse standards. Conditions in the infirmary were even worse — a living patient occupied the same bed with a corpse for a considerable period after death, and the sick were left unwashed for days on end, in some cases besmeared in their own excrement.

The most notorious scandal was that at Andover Workhouse in 1845 where, it emerged, conditions were so harsh that inmates had resorted to scavenging for decaying meat from the bones that they had been set to crush. This case received enormous publicity and the fall-out from this was considerable.

Accounts of the horrors of the poor-law in its foremost presence, the workhouses, were continuous, though, for their entire existence.  As can be seen, those motivated everything from protests, political discourse and even popular insurrection.   Darwin could hardly have avoided reading about these, though I haven't looked to see if he ever talked about them in letters.  How he discussed them in his second most important scientific book, is undeniable. 

About the only thing in this account that is less than horrific about it is the resistance to the establishment of the New Poor Law noted at the beginning. But it did get established, pervaded the lives of the British poor in a way that, indeed, presages much of German law in the Nazi period, and only ended, even officially, in 1946, though it allegedly had ended a few years before that.  Some commentators still see remnants of it some of the welfare-state established after the Second World War.

The National Health Service Act of 1946 came into force on 5th July 1948. Even the sweeping changes that came with this had less impact than might be imagined. Institutions now came under the control of Hospital Management Committees under Regional hospital Boards but many still carried the stigma from their workhouse days. Many of these new "hospitals" also maintained "Reception Centres for Wayfarers", i.e. casual wards for vagrants, until the 1960s.

This legal system of enslavement and incarceration of the poor, from the age of birth on, notable for its horrific conditions, abuses, deaths (especially of young children) the destruction of families as brutally as chattel slavery... and as noted, starvation and the encouragement of brutal treatment, this was what Charles Darwin said was too much charity.  I would be interested to find if any of his many investments, those of his rich family, if any of the family enterprises made direct use of workhouse labor.  It would almost be impossible for anyone with wealth in Britain to escape having benefited at least indirectly from it. 

Update:  Upwards of half-a-dozen girls in the Hoo workhouse, some of them verging on womanhood, have at times had their persons exposed in the most brutal and indecent manner, by the Master, for the purpose of inflicting on them cruel floggings and the same girls, at other times, have, in a scarcely less indecent manner, been compelled by him to strip the upper parts of their persons naked, to allow him to scourge them with birch rods on their bare shoulders and waists, and which, from more than one of the statements from the lips of the sufferers, appears to have been inflicted without mercy. One girl says, 'My back was marked with blood.' Another, a witness, who had not herself been punished, says, 'We women were called to hold one of the girls while the Master flogged her; but we went down in the yard out of the way, because we could not bear the sight; afterwards we got ointment out of the sick ward to rub her back, for it was all cut to pieces.' Again, `One Sunday the Master flogged little Jemmy (a pauper's illegitimate child, then two years of age) with a birch rod, so that the child carried the marks a month, because it cried for its mother, who was gone to church, and for its little brother, who was that day put into breeches, and taken away from the children's ward.