Workhouses have now disappeared, and in the twenty-first century the memory of them has all but faded. Indeed, many young people have not even heard of them, or of the people who lived in them. But social history is preserved in the accounts of those who lived at the time.
Charles Dickens, in his classic A CHRISTMAS CAROL, wrote, through the voice of a gentleman seeking to collect money for the poor from Scrooge, that many people would rather die than go to a workhouse. Dickens’s book was published in 1843, nine years after the creation of workhouses.
