SOUTHWELL WORKHOUSE

1840-1849

In the 1840s, the workhouse was the centre of Britain’s response to poverty. This book tells the story of one such institution — Southwell Workhouse — during a single Victorian decade, when the New Poor Law was working exactly as intended.

Based entirely on contemporary records, this is not a novel and not a work of fiction. It reconstructs daily life inside the workhouse through its own rules, registers, and reports: admission, classification, routine, labour, diet, punishment, illness, authority, and exit. Families were separated, work was enforced, hunger was regulated, and decline was recorded without comment.

Southwell was not exceptional. It was ordinary. That is what makes it significant.

This book shows how poverty was managed, not alleviated — through discipline, economy, and endurance — and how suffering could be produced without cruelty, simply by a system doing what it was designed to do.

A factual, unsparing account of Victorian poverty, told without invention, apology, or sentiment.