2 Disorderly and Refractory

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Any pauper who shall neglect to observe such of the regulations herein contained as are applicable to and binding on him: Or who shall make any noise when silence is ordered to be kept;Or shah use obscene or profane language;Or shall by word or deed insult or revue any person;Or shall threaten to strike or to assault any person;Or shall not .duly cleanse his person;Or shall refuse or neglect to work, after having been required to do so;Or shall pretend sickness;Or shall play at cards or other games of chance;Or shall enter or attempt to enter, without permission, the ward or yard appropriated to any

class of paupers other than that to which he belongs;Or shall misbehave in going to, at, or returning from public worship out of the workhouse, or

at prayers in the workhouse;Or shall return after the appointed time of absence, when allowed to quit the workhouse

temporarily;Or shall wilfully disobey any lawful order of any officer of the workhouse;

Shall be deemed DISORDERLY.

Any pauper who shall, within seven days, repeat any one or commit more than one of the offences specified in Article 34;

Or who shall by word or deed insult or revue the master or matron, or any other officer of the workhouse, or any of the Guardians;

Or shall wilfully disobey any lawful order of the master or matron after such order shall have been repeated;

Or shall unlawfully strike or otherwise unlawfully assault any person;Or shall wilfully or mischievously damage or spoil any property whatsoever belonging to the

Guardians;Or shall wilfully waste or spoil any provisions, stock, tools, or materials for work, belonging

to the Guardians;Or shall be drunk;Or shall commit any act of indecency;Or shall wilfully disturb the other inmates during prayers or divine worship;

Shall be deemed REFRACTORY.

It shall be lawful for the master of the workhouse, with or without the direction of the Board of Guardians, to punish any disorderly pauper by substituting, during a time not greater than forty-eight hours, for his or her dinner, as prescribed by the dietary, a meal consisting of eight ounces of bread, or one pound of cooked potatoes, and also by withholding from him during the same period, all butter, cheese, tea, sugar, or broth, which such pauper would otherwise receive, at any meal during the time aforesaid.

And it shall be lawful for the Board of Guardians, by a special direction to be entered on their minutes, to order any refractory pauper to be punished by confinement in a separate room, with or without an alteration of diet, similar in kind and duration to that prescribed in Art. 36 for disorderly paupers.

Parliamentary Papers, 1842, vol XIX, p 42—3

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Lecture 5

The ideas in Victorian and Edwardian Britain

The 19th century as a period bubbling with new ideas.

JEREMY BENTHAM (1748-1832)

A pre-Victorian philosopher.Arithmetics of pains and pleasures. The "felicific calculus". Utilitarianism.Influence on James and John Stuart Mill.

SAMUEL SMILES (1812-1905)

Self-Help (1859), Character (1871), Thrift (1875), Duty (1887).

Mobile versus static society." God helps those who help themselves". Hard-work, temperance, thrift as key words. Working class independence. Competition, laissez-faire economics.

ROBERT OWEN (1771-1858)

Man the product of his circumstances. Institute for the Formation of Character, New Lanark. Co-operative villages. New Harmony, Indiana (1825). The Grand National (1834). Owenism, one of the roots of English socialism.

CHARLES DARWIN (1809-1882)

The Origin of Species, 1859.The Descent of Man, 1871. Social Darwinism.

THE PRE-RAPHAELITES

The Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood (1848-1853).Dante Gabriel Rossetti (1828, 1882), John Everett Millais (1829,1896), William Holman Hunt (1827, 1910).

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Religion and the working class in nineteenth century

BritainPerhaps the most famous comment on nineteenth-century working-class religion was that made by Horace Mann in his report on the religious census of 1851 in England and Wales [clviii]. Noting that ‘a sadly formidable proportion of the English people are habitual neglecters of the public ordinances of religion’, he took it as obvious that most of the absentees were drawn from the working class. There was nothing new about working-class non-church-going. But in the 1830s and 1840s acute social crisis, instilling the whole of the middle and upper classes with a fear of revolution, coincided with a time of renewed evangelistic concern on the part .of the clergy of the Established Churches, and these considerations combined to give fresh urgency to a very old problem.

Those immigrants to the cities and industrial villages who seldom went to church were often simply continuing customs that were well established in the countryside. Both in town and countryside members of the upper and middle classes were under much heavier social pressure than the poor to attend some kind of church; even those with little interest in religion had reasons for church-going that did not apply to their working-class counterparts. There also were good reasons why the poor were likely to be less interested in the services of the Established Churches or of many of the Dissenting denominations. The Reformation was a victory for the religion of the word, over the religion of ritual and symbol — for the literate minority, at the expense of the illiterate masses. In some areas, including north-western England and north Wales, the reformers were much more successful in suppressing Catholicism than in establishing Protestantism [cf. Haigh in Past & Present, n° 93, 1981]. In such areas something of a religious vacuum developed, which was only effectively filled by the popular evangelical movements of the later eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. More generally, the post-Reformation church seems to have lost much of the aura that surrounded the medieval church. Magic continued to play an essential part in the lives of the rural population, but gradually it came to be largely dissociated from the church [Obelkevich, 1976, Chapter 6]. There was also the question of whether the poor could ever be fully integrated into congregations where the whole tone was so clearly set by their social 4superiors’, where hierarchical seating arrangements emphasised their inferiority, where sermons and prayers spoke the language of the élite and echoed -their concerns, where the minister was himself a member of the élite, and on intimate terms with landlords and employers. The poor who did attend such churches . were likely to feel themselves marginal members of the congregation.

This was a formative period in the development of the identity and values both of the working class and of the middle class. The middle class were busily distancing themselves from everything that seemed rough, uncultured and vulgar. At the same time, members of the working class were becoming less ready to accept humiliating social distinctions.

Source : M. Mc Lean, Religion and the working class in nineteenth century England (1983)

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Answering the Emigrant's Letter (1850) by James Collinson. This scene in a poor household, on the topical issue of emigration which sent so many young Britons to start new lives in Australia, New Zealand and Canada marks the shift in Collinson's style from traditional to Pre-Raphaelite.

In; The Pre-Raphaelites, Their Lives in Letters and Diaries; Jan Marsh, 1996; Collins & Brown; pp.66-7

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56 WILLIAM HOLMAN HUNT The Awakening Conscience 1852

in; The pre-Raphaelites; Timothy Hilton; Thames and Hudson, 1970; p.91

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