Mr. Punch's History of Modern England. Volume 2 of 4.—1857-1874. Graves Charles Larcom
on the estate of a noble landlord in Essex – an estate which of recent years has been noted for its humane and liberal management.
Prison v. Workhouse
Far more space, however, is devoted to the administration of the Poor Law, the economics and evils of Industrialism in the manufacturing centres, and the efforts of practical philanthropy. Throughout the 'sixties and right on into the early 'seventies Punch never wearies of insisting on the folly of making life in prison more comfortable than that in the workhouse. His campaign begins with an onslaught on the guardians of the Durham Union, who appeared to think that there "ought to be a correspondence between the spiritual nutriment of paupers and their material diet": —
Under this impression it evidently was that they advertised the other day for a chaplain, offering the salary of £20 a year. Their advertisement was answered by a tender from one John Smart, who turned out to have been a clergyman's footman, and conceived that he had learned to exercise the functions of a parson from his master. He had, he said, "had a good deal of private practice, but not public."
It is painful to find a respectable man-servant reduced to apply for employment in the capacity of a Workhouse chaplain. Cannot an inferior class of clergyman be ordained on purpose to administer to paupers a coarser kind of spiritual food? Deep indeed must be the humiliation experienced by a footman in exchanging plush and gold lace for the canonicals of a chaplain whose salary is £20 a year.
It was the time of the garrotting scare. Hence the point of Punch's comment: —
The frying pan as compared with the fire is much less comfortable than the Model Prison in proportion to the Union-Workhouse.
The former of those two establishments relatively to the latter is considerably milder than Purgatory may be imagined to be, in contrast with the other place which the prisoners mentioned. Quod, in comparison with the Abode of Want, is quite a tolerable sort of Limbo. What is the moral of this arrangement, in the apprehension of the classes who have to live by their own exertions? Whatever you do, keep out of the Workhouse. Garrotte anybody rather than apply to the Union.
Punch still disapproved of the gallows; the strongest argument in its favour was the manifest truth that the cheapest thing you could do with a worthless rascal was to hang him. But he saw a better way in rendering penal servitude exemplary: —
At any rate, for the prevention of garrotte robberies and all other crimes, one step might be taken somewhat analogous to the treatment proverbially recommended for that other complaint, the influenza, which is just now likewise so prevalent. "Stuff a cold," says the popular adage, "and starve a cough." At present the moral reverse of this rule is observed in penal economy. You stuff a convict and starve a pauper. Wouldn't it probably answer better to allow paupers sufficient food and put criminals on low diet? Thus you may be enabled to get on without the gallows.
It was stated, and accepted by Punch in 1860, that since 1856 there had been a decrease in crime of 25 per cent. owing to the establishment of Reformatories. But the series of papers in the Morning Post in 1863 on the Middlesex Industrial School at Feltham – where the boys were subjected to a devotional drill, made to lift and lower their hands in prayer and sing grace "to the sharp order of a master," and mercilessly caned and birched by a tall, muscular drill master for acts of insubordination – gave Punch furiously to think: —
The Middlesex Model School at Feltham is an institution for the reformation of young thieves, but its arrangements for developing the religious sentiment in the youthful mind appear to be such as may be conceived to have been devised for mutual edification by the inmates of an asylum for idiots.
Flogging is a fine thing; but how strange that its application is limited to boys and soldiers and sailors: to children of tender age and members of an honourable profession! Wouldn't it be at least as suitable to garrotters, and even to cruel swindlers, whose exemplary torture, in comparison with the misery caused by their crimes, would be the lesser evil of the two?
The painful disclosures resulting from inquiries into workhouse conditions are repeatedly referred to and make strange reading in a comic journal. At a meeting held in Willis's Rooms by the Earl of Carnarvon and the Archbishop of York early in 1866, the brutalities to which the sick poor were subject in the infirmaries of most of the London workhouses were illustrated in such hideous detail, that Punch declared "it would be cheaper to put paupers out of their misery than it was to let them die in misery, and it would at least be just as moral."
The parsimony, the self-indulgence and the barbarous procrastination of the guardians of St. Pancras are castigated a few months later, when a motion to postpone the consideration of the appointment of an extra paid nurse for three months was carried by six votes to five. There were forty guardians; but most of them were absent at the quarterly dinner of the Burial Board. Punch, therefore, had good excuse for saying that "these nine-and-twenty parochial humbugs, instead of minding their business, were engaged in stuffing their most ungodly digestive organs with funeral baked meats."
Ignorant Guardians
The Derby-Disraeli administration had come into power in the previous month. So when Mr. Gathorne Hardy had succeeded Mr. C. P. Villiers as President of the Poor Law Board, the alteration in the methods of procedure in regard to investigating workhouse abuses provoked a well-timed and damaging attack on the attempt to whitewash Bumbledom. It is a dreary subject, but the principles which ought to govern a Departmental inquiry could not be better expressed. And Punch was happily able to fortify his humanitarian zeal with ridicule when, in quoting from the description of the horrors of Walsall Workhouse given by the Lancet, he gives two stories showing that workhouse mismanagement in those days, at any rate, was largely the result of crass ignorance: —
It was suggested in one workhouse board-room that a bath ought unquestionably to be supplied, when a guardian got up and stated "he were agin it." He never had one in his house in his life, and he didn't see why a pauper should enjoy what he didn't want. On another occasion the absence of a proper light at the entrance door was dwelt upon, and a gas-lamp was proposed. This was seconded by another worthy, who, approving of the gas-lamp, said, "and I'd have it lighted with ile."
Now the first of these gentlemen may be a regular saint. He never bathed, and he regarded his neighbour as himself. To be sure, if he was a saint he was also a pig; but swinishness has not seldom been combined with sanctity. The other guardian, who didn't know better than that a gas-lamp could be lighted with "ile," was himself so destitute of all enlightenment that he may be excused as a simply irresponsible clown.
The euphemisms of Poor Law inspectors, who used colourless words such as "inadequate" and "insufficient" when "barbarous," "brutal" and "horrible" would have been nearer the mark, had been exposed by the British Medical Journal in 1868. If destitution was not a crime, why, asked Punch, was the pauper treated worse than the criminal? These abuses, in the exposure of which he joined hands with serious medical journals, explain and justify the intense and even passionate desire of self-respecting poor people to avoid the Union.
Though no lover of Jews, Punch in 1869 contrasts Jewish guardians favourably with their so-called Christian brother officials. Dickens's picture of old Betty in Our Mutual Friend is hardly overdrawn, and a year after Dickens's death Punch was still contrasting the comforts of prison life with the usual conditions of life amongst the submerged poor.
The State had not yet awakened to a sense of its responsibilities to the "legal poor." Much was being done by practical philanthropy, and it may be fairly said that no appeal to Punch for assistance or encouragement was left unanswered. Wholehearted in his support of Ragged Schools, he comes forward in 1858 to plead the cause of their logical corollary – Ragged Playgrounds: —
Deprive a boy of healthy, fair and open games, and you drive him to resort to unwholesome, foul and sneaking ones. Deny him any playground but a hole-and-corner court, and you'll find that he'll betake himself to hole-and-corner games in it. In default of wholesome cricket, he'll become a dab at chuck-farthing; and will get from pitch and toss to still worse kinds of time-slaughter.
If we mean then to teach the ragged young idea, we