100 Years on since the demolition of the grand Victorian mansion that was the Mildenhall Union Workhouse, this book tells the story of the "Paupers" unfortunate enough to have found themselves confined within it's walls. The book takes you on a time travelling experience to meet former residents of this market town in rural Suffolk. Discovering grave robbery, disease, suicide, violence and misunderstood mental illness along the way. Discover their story. Many individuals heartbreakingly fell into the poverty trap, created by the new poor law of 1834, desperate individuals who would never live outside the workhouse again. Any "Paupers" unfortunate enough to die within the workhouse, could find themselves sold to Cambridge University, their bodies used to train Medical students. Even in death the Paupers were owned by the workhouse. Read their story. However there were inmates who walked proudly away from the institution and these stories can also be found in this book too. Such as the young Mildenhall lad, who had just a few years earlier walked the streets with his mum and sisters, dressed in rags without any food, toes poking out of his worn down shoes. This family tramped the streets looking for shelter on a freezing cold November evening. The same young man a decade later created a new life for himself, literally chasing away the Workhouse shadows in Sunny California, a real life Suffolk cowboy! Read his story. Who ran the workhouse? Who were the Master and Matron of the Mildenhall Union? Who and what were the Board of Guardians? As well as the stories of the poor, this book reveals the lives of those tasked with caring for the poor. You will discover that the Master has some skeletons in his closet! Discover his story. If you were to take a short stroll through Mildenhall you would soon discover many of the street names and buildings named after former wealthy residents. Names such as Hanmer, Bunbury, North, Aldrich, famous names not just in Mildenhall but throughout Britain. The poor walked the very same streets as theses famous families, leaving behind little evidence that they were ever here. These lives now carefully pieced back together through years of research using historical records and newspaper archives. The poor were here too, read their story

The stories of those who lived in the shadow of the workhouse'??During the nineteenth century the workhouse cast a shadow over the lives of the poor. The destitute and the desperate sought refuge within its forbidding walls. And it was an ever-present threat if poor families failed to look after themselves properly. As a result a grim mythology has grown up about the horrors of the 'house' and the mistreatment meted out to the innocent pauper. ??In this fully-updated and revised edition of his bestselling book, Simon Fowler takes a fresh look at the workhouse and the people who sought help from it. He looks at how the system of the Poor Law _ of which the workhouse was a key part _ was organised and the men and women who ran the workhouses or were employed to care for the inmates.??But above all this is the moving story of the tens of thousands of children, men, women and the elderly who were forced to endure grim conditions to survive in an unfeeling world.??'A poignant account ... draws powerfully on letters from The National Archives ... [Simon Fowler] brings out the horror, but it is fair-minded to those struggling to be humane within an inhumane system,' The Independent??'A good introduction,' The Guardian.??The history of workhouses and poverty ('misery history') has recently been prominently covered on TV shows like WDYTYA? and ITV's Secrets from the Workhouse, and referenced in historical dramas like The Village and Ripper Street.

An “utterly brilliant” and deeply researched guide to the sights, smells, endless wonders, and profound changes of nineteenth century British history (Books Monthly, UK). Step into the past and experience the world of Victorian England, from clothing to cuisine, toilet arrangements to transport—and everything in between. A Visitor’s Guide to Victorian England is “a brilliant guided tour of Charles Dickens’s and other eminent Victorian Englishmen’s England, with insights into where and where not to go, what type of people you’re likely to meet, and what sights and sounds to watch out for . . . Utterly brilliant!” (Books Monthly, UK). Like going back in time, Higgs’s book shows armchair travelers how to find the best seat on an omnibus, fasten a corset, deal with unwanted insects and vermin, get in and out of a vehicle while wearing a crinoline, and avoid catching an infectious disease. Drawing on a wide range of sources, this book blends accurate historical details with compelling stories to bring alive the fascinating details of Victorian daily life. It is a must-read for seasoned social history fans, costume drama lovers, history students, and anyone with an interest in the nineteenth century.

What was it like in a Victorian Workhouse? Was the food really as bad as we imagine? Take a step back in time with Alan Gallop and ask yourself if you could have survived in such harsh conditions.

This book represents the first attempt to identify and describe a workhouse reform ‘movement’ in mid- to late-nineteenth-century England, beyond the obvious candidates of the Workhouse Visiting Society and the voices of popular critics such as Charles Dickens and Florence Nightingale. It is a subject on which the existing workhouse literature is largely silent, and this book therefore fills a considerable gap in our understanding of contemporary attitudes towards institutional welfare. Although many scholars have touched on the more obvious strands of workhouse criticism noted above, few have gone beyond these to explore the possibility that a concerted ‘movement’ existed that sought to place pressure on those with responsibility for workhouse administration, and to influence the trajectory of workhouse policy.

The consequences of extreme poverty were a grim reality for all too many people in Victorian England. The various poor laws implemented to try to deal with it contained a number of controversial measures, one of the most radical and unpopular being the crusade against outdoor relief, during which central government sought to halt all welfare payments at home. Via a close case study of Brixworth union in Northamptonshire, which offers an unusually rich corpus of primary material and evidence, the author looks at what happened to those impoverished men and women who struggled to live independently in a world-without-welfare outside the workhouse. She retraces the experiences of elderly paupers evicted from almshouses, of the children of the aged poor prosecuted for parental maintenance, of dying paupers who were refused medical care in their homes, and of women begging for funeral costs in as attempt to prevent the bodies of their loved ones being taken for dissection by anatomists. She then shows how increasing democratisation gave the labouring poor the means to win control of the poor law. ELIZABETH T. HURREN is Senior Lecturer in the History of Medicine, Oxford Brookes University, Centre for Health, Medicine and Society, Past and Present.

Life in a workhouse during the Victorian and Edwardian eras has been popularly characterised as a brutal existence. Charles Dickens famously portrayed workhouse inmates as being dirty, neglected, overworked adn at the mercy of exploitative masters. While there were undoubtedly establishments that conformed to this stereotype, there is also evidence of a more enlightened approach that has not yet come to public attention. This book establishes a true picture of what life was like in a workhouse, of why inmates entered them and of what they had to endure in their day-to-day routine. A comprehensive overview of the workshouse system gives a real and compelling insight into social and moral reasons behind their growth in the Victorian era, while the kind of distinctions that were drawn between inmates are looked into, which, along with the social stigma of having been a workhouse inmate, tell us much about class attitudes of the time. The book also looks at living conditions and duties of the staff who, in many ways, were prisoners of the workhouse. Michelle Higgs combines thorough research with a fresh outlook on a crucial period in British history, and in doing so paints a vivid portrait of an era and its social standards that continues to fascinate, and tells us much about the society we live in today.