The workhouses

During the 19^th century, there was a lot of poverty and unemployment in Britain as a result of the Industrial revolution. To try to stabilize the situation, the House of Common, approved the creation of workhouses in the early 30s. A workhouse is a place where the poor can eat and sleep as long as they worked there. I don't know the translation to Spanish but I think it's something like “taller” or something like that. It's idea was to stop the beggars and they cut any help except the one that was given at the workhouse. The idea was to stop anyone who wasn't really poor and didn't have any other option to go there or receive any help from the government forcing the poors to search, as the conditions there were really bad into there. Charles Dickens wrote a lot about the workhouses and theirs conditions.

But those conditions made reactions against them, specially when the press began to publish stores about the terrible incidents that happened inside. That made that by the 60s the only people who were inside were children who couldn't work, senile elders who couldn't take care of themselves and sicks. Any other person wouldn't go there for more than a few days.

But despite all of this, the workhouses made a great work as hospitals, providing free treatment to any who was sick, schools, as they teached arithmetic, writing and reading and as a asylum for the elderly.