Crossword clues for workhouse
Longman Dictionary of Contemporary English
The Collaborative International Dictionary
Workhouse \Work"house`\, n.; pl. Workhouses. [AS. weorch[=u]s.]
A house where any manufacture is carried on; a workshop.
A house in which idle and vicious persons are confined to labor.
A house where the town poor are maintained at public expense, and provided with labor; a poorhouse.
Douglas Harper's Etymology Dictionary
Wiktionary
n. 1 (label en British) formerly, an institution for the poor homeless, funded by the local parish where the able-bodied were required to work. (w Workhouse Wp) 2 (label en US) A prison in which the sentence includes manual labour.
WordNet
n. a poorhouse where able-bodied poor are compelled to labor
a county jail that holds prisoners for periods up to 18 months
Wikipedia
In England and Wales a workhouse, colloquially known as a spike, was a place where those unable to support themselves were offered accommodation and employment. The earliest known use of the term dates from 1631, in an account by the mayor of Abingdon reporting that "wee haue erected wthn our borough a workehouse to sett poore people to worke".
The origins of the workhouse can be traced to the Poor Law Act of 1388, which attempted to address the labour shortages following the Black Death in England by restricting the movement of labourers, and ultimately led to the state becoming responsible for the support of the poor. But mass unemployment following the end of the Napoleonic Wars in 1815, the introduction of new technology to replace agricultural workers in particular, and a series of bad harvests, meant that by the early 1830s the established system of poor relief was proving to be unsustainable. The New Poor Law of 1834 attempted to reverse the economic trend by discouraging the provision of relief to anyone who refused to enter a workhouse. Some Poor Law authorities hoped to run workhouses at a profit by utilising the free labour of their inmates, who generally lacked the skills or motivation to compete in the open market. Most were employed on tasks such as breaking stones, crushing bones to produce fertiliser, or picking oakum using a large metal nail known as a spike, perhaps the origin of the workhouse's nickname.
Life in a workhouse was intended to be harsh, to deter the able-bodied poor and to ensure that only the truly destitute would apply. But in areas such as the provision of free medical care and education for children, neither of which was available to the poor in England living outside workhouses until the early 20th century, workhouse inmates were advantaged over the general population, a dilemma that the Poor Law authorities never managed to reconcile.
As the 19th century wore on, workhouses increasingly became refuges for the elderly, infirm and sick rather than the able-bodied poor, and in 1929 legislation was passed to allow local authorities to take over workhouse infirmaries as municipal hospitals. Although workhouses were formally abolished by the same legislation in 1930, many continued under their new appellation of Public Assistance Institutions under the control of local authorities. It was not until the National Assistance Act of 1948 that the last vestiges of the Poor Law disappeared, and with them the workhouses.
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!