The Lil' Dickens!
Dec. 4th, 2004 06:28 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
kyburg"And the workhouses? Are they still in operation?
After the passage of the Poor Law in 1834, local governments were required to combine their resources and build workhouses to employ and house the destitute.
Workhouses were no better than prisons. They separated families and crowded people together in institutionalized squalor.
Dickens believed the workhouse, or "the house," destroyed dignity and gave the poor a choice between two evils: "being starved by a gradual process in the house, or by a quick one out of it."
"If they would rather die, they had better do it, and decrease the surplus population"
The visual dichotomy is intentional; the text is from here, the actual link goes to a post from![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
being_homeless' journal - "If I had to relive my year of being homeless, I think the only thing I would have really done different was to skip the 11 shelters I stayed in and stayed on the streets from day one. I personally feel that mentally and emotionally it's so much easier being homeless on the streets than being in the shelter system."
I think what irritates me the most is that nothing has been learned in over 170 years.
After the passage of the Poor Law in 1834, local governments were required to combine their resources and build workhouses to employ and house the destitute.
Workhouses were no better than prisons. They separated families and crowded people together in institutionalized squalor.
Dickens believed the workhouse, or "the house," destroyed dignity and gave the poor a choice between two evils: "being starved by a gradual process in the house, or by a quick one out of it."
"If they would rather die, they had better do it, and decrease the surplus population"
The visual dichotomy is intentional; the text is from here, the actual link goes to a post from
being_homeless' journal - "If I had to relive my year of being homeless, I think the only thing I would have really done different was to skip the 11 shelters I stayed in and stayed on the streets from day one. I personally feel that mentally and emotionally it's so much easier being homeless on the streets than being in the shelter system."I think what irritates me the most is that nothing has been learned in over 170 years.
