By Fabia Buescher (fb586@cam.ac.uk)
In my previous two posts on Victorian Christmas traditions, I discussed Christmas puddings and Christmas trees, two integral customs of middle- and upper-class Christmas conviviality. Yet, while lavish Christmas dinners and beautiful Christmas decorations filled the middle- and upper-class homes, Christmas in the nineteenth-century workhouse looked very differently.
In 1834, the New Poor Law explicitly prohibited workhouses from serving plum pudding and roast beef – the core parts of an English festive meal.[i] According to the Poor Law Commission, such a dietary restriction reflects ‘the ordinary food of the working classes.’[ii] Yet, by 1834, the serving of roast beef at festive occasions like Christmas had become ‘an established prerogative of the poor’,[iii] which is why the decision to impose such dietary restrictions caused a public outrage. As an article in the Lancaster Gazette in 1836 states, ‘Shame! Shame! […] We positively dread the working of the new poor law.’[iv]
However, not all workhouses complied with these new rules, and some decided to continue serving Christmas roast beef and plum pudding.[v] As Foster notes, ‘the workhouse Christmas gradually became the cultural domain of the middle classes’.[vi] Indeed, Christmas was a time for the Victorian middle-class to express their compassion and charity, practicing the quintessentially British values of benevolence, hospitality and domesticity. Such workhouse philanthropy is also the focus of numerous narratives perpetuated in periodicals and novels alike. For example, in ‘Notes of a Union Chaplain’ in Sunday at Home, published in December 1859, the narrator depicts an idyllic picture of the Christmas dinner in the workhouse:
‘How welcome is Christmas; and how rich and poor rejoice together at its coming! The day of all the year when every one seems to prepare for and expect enjoyment, and when sorrow seems most out of place! […] the day on which the poorest contrive to find good cheer, and to spread a sumptuous table, happy for the time to forget the pinchings of poverty.’[vii]
Thus, while such texts do contribute to a public discourse about the New Poor Law, they primarily serve to construct an idealised middle-class identity characterised by philanthropy and generosity, marginalising the voices of the paupers themselves.
Illustration: ‘Christmas Day in the Workhouse’, postcard from around 1900, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Christmas_Day_in_the_Workhouse.png
[i] Nadja Durbach, ‘Roast Beef, the New Poor Law, and the British Nation, 1834-63, Journal of British Studies 52, 4, 2013, p. 964.
[ii] Eights Annual Report of the Poor Law Commission, Parliamentary Papers (PP), 1842 (389), p. 66, quoted in Durbach, p. 966.
[iii] Durbach, p. 970.
[iv] ‘Domestic’, Lancaster Gazette and General Advertiser, for Lancashire, Westmorland, 31 December 1836, p. 1.
[v] Laura Foster, ‘Christmas in the Workhouse: Staging Philanthropy in the Nineteenth-Century Periodical’, Journal of Victorian Culture22, 4, 2017, p. 554.
[vi] Ibid., p. 556.
[vii] ‘Notes of a Union Chaplain. Chapter X. Christmas Day in the Workhouse’, Sunday at Home, 22 December 1859, p. 801.
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