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Hardly a Christmas passes when I don’t think about the strange tradition of the Victorian workhouse Christmas, where the smug and wealthy provided the poor with a magnificent Christmas dinner and then for the next 364 days, starved and punished them for being poor.
The details of these workhouse Christmas celebrations are quite well documented in records and newspapers. Lambeth Workhouse provided roast beef, plum pudding, vegetables, potatoes, porter, tobacco, oranges & nuts. They even put on entertainments provided by professional actors.
One workhouse inserted sixpence pieces into the plum puddings. You can imagine what a stir this must have caused amongst people who had literally nothing.
For the most part, workhouse inmates were usually served skilly (or a watered porridge), bread, very poor cuts of meat and some veg (if they were lucky). Then having such rich food on Christmas - how they were able to digest this, I can't guess.
Victorians were extremely proud of the workhouse Christmases they provided and boasted of it in the newspapers, but then seemed perfectly content that these destitute souls would return to breaking rocks and picking oakum and living in the most vile and unhealthy conditions.
One annual day of charity did not make up for a lifetime of social neglect. If anything, it demonstrated to me how invested Victorian society was in the notion that idleness and bad character lie at the root of poverty. The workhouse Christmas was for the rich not for the poor.
