(British) a poorhouse where able-bodied poor are compelled to labor

Usage examples of workhouse.

Taunts the beadle in shrill youthful voices with having boiled a boy, choruses fragments of a popular song to that effect and importing that the boy was made into soup for the workhouse.

For myself--I was one of the tenants--I would far prefer living in a workhouse to inhabiting those low-pitched oak-panelled rooms, and I would sooner look from my garret windows on to the squalor and grime of Whitechapel than from the diamond-shaped and leaded panes of the Manor of Trevor Major on to the boskage of its cool thickets, and the glimmering of its clear chalk streams where the quick trout glance among the waving water-weeds and over the chalk and gravel of its sliding rapids.

Guild, so many whores, afraid of being caught and thrown into the workhouse for soliciting without a permit or Guild badge, bought busking permits.

A few decent men were trying to get an act through Parliament now to prevent a child under ten years old being sent up a chimney, so Parson Hedley said, and then at that age he must only be an apprentice, which meant a poor workhouse brat.

Meaning, Sharpe thought, that Hocking persecuted more than the workhouse inmates.

I believed I understood why she was so frightened of going to the workhouse or even, as Mr Advowson had told me, revealing her legal parish of settlement: this would enable her enemy to find her.

It is perfectly justifiable, artistically, to lay the scene of a novel in a workhouse or a gaol, but if the humanitarian impulse leads to any embroidery of or divergence from the truth, the novel is artistically injured, because the selection and grouping of facts should be guided by artistic and not by philanthropic motives.

Visions of a workhouse infirmary for her child had haunted the old woman in the basement breakfast-room of the decayed Belgravian house.

Mrs Harrowcot and Mrs Becket from Bacon Buildings went into the workhouse, and one young man from Dockhead took his two children along to the market in Southwark Park Road and offered them for sale.

Instead of building a Church House to add another thousand tons to the enormous weight of ecclesiastical bricks and mortar that cumbers the land, would it not be more human to signalise the time by the abolition of these cruel laws, and by the introduction of some system to gradually emancipate the poor from the workhouse, which is now their master?

December the situation might have been quite different, on such a balmy night in early June there were great throngs of London vagabonds, of both sexes and all ages, who preferred the risks of freedom to the gray walls of workhouse or charitable shelter.

There were workhouse girls, whores, urchins, street peddlers, and barmen.

Undoubtably, Leng selected victims that would not be missed: street urchins, workhouse boys and girls.

But he prided himself that he knew human nature and the baseness therein, and between Kate Hannigan and this doctor, whom he had grown to hate, having been forced to listen to his views across the table of the boardroom in the workhouse, he sensed baseness like a hungry dog.

And the results will be surprising, for prisons will be less numerous, workhouses, casual wards and asylums less necessary, lazar houses with their pestilential breath will pass away, and England will be happier, sweeter and more free!