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History's most notorious crime scenes: from Lizzie Borden's lair to HH Holmes's 'murder castle'
What is it about places marked by murder and violence that continue to pique our interest, long after the crimes have been committed? Caitlin Blackwell Baines uncovers the history behind some of the world's most morbid locations – from a crumbling Slovakian castle to Jack the Ripper’s Whitechapel
1. Canterbury Cathedral, Kent, United Kingdom Founded in AD 597, Canterbury Cathedral is Britain’s oldest and most important religious complex: the ‘mother church’ of the Anglican faith and seat of the Archbishop of Canterbury. With its soaring 250-foot central tower and 13,000 square feet of stained-glass windows, the cathedral draws more than a million visitors each year – some who come to worship, others simply to marvel at its serene majesty. Such a setting would seem an unlikely place for a murder, but, ironically, that murder has been a big part of the pull for the past 850 or so years. The victim was Thomas Becket, Archbishop of Canterbury, who, on the night of 29 December 1170, was hacked to death in the cathedral’s northwest transept. Once a royal favourite – Henry II’s chancellor and closest confidant – Becket ran afoul of the monarch soon after being ordained in 1162. By refusing to uphold the king’s authority over that of the church in the following years, the archbishop effectively sealed his fate. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2026/03/1-GettyImages-2188130261-ad7bb3e-e1773932992660.jpg" width="1500" height="1000" alt="A medieval illuminated manuscript shows three armored knights striking a kneeling, haloed cleric at an altar. The cleric prays as blood streams from his head. A chalice and open book sit on the altar, and the background is filled with ornate red and gold patterns" title="A medieval manuscript illumination depicts Thomas Becket’s gruesome demise. The archbishop was brutally killed in Canterbury Cathedral, turning a place of worship into a crime scene" /> “Will no one rid me of this turbulent priest?” Henry is reported to have ranted to his courtiers. Interpreting this as a kind of kingly hit order, four of his knights stole away under the cover of night, travelling in secret from Normandy to Canterbury, where they accosted Becket as he entered the cathedral. At first, the knights attempted to arrest the cleric, but when he refused to accompany them, a violent scuffle broke out. As Becket desperately clung to a column, the knights slashed at him with their swords, eventually striking a fatal blow to the top of his head, spraying blood and gore across the cathedral floor. The gruesome crime shocked the whole of Christendom, quickly transforming victim into martyr, and crime scene into pilgrimage site. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2026/03/2-GettyImages-999672134-08df4e0-e1773934721665.jpg" width="1500" height="1000" alt="A ruined stone castle stands on a rocky hilltop above a dense green forest, lit by warm sunrise or sunset light. Rolling hills fade into the distance under a soft pastel sky" title="A panoramic shot of Čachtice Castle, western Slovakia. Now a crumbling ruin, the castle was supposedly the site of dozens of murders perpetrated by Countess Elizabeth Báthory (Image by Getty Images)" /> 2. Čachtice Castle, Slovakia You’ve probably heard of Castle Dracula, the seat of the titular character in Bram Stoker’s classic horror novel. But have you heard of Čachtice Castle? It is the setting for a real-life horror story far more frightening than anything dreamed up in Gothic fiction. Now a crumbling ruin, teetering on a rocky outcrop in the Trenchin region of western Slovakia, the castle was once home to Countess Elizabeth Báthory – purportedly the most prolific female serial killer in history. Čachtice Castle began its existence as a 13th-century fortress built to defend the western border of the Kingdom of Hungary. Over the centuries, it was expanded and transformed into a stately home. Passing through several hands, it eventually came into the possession of nobleman Francis Nádasdy II, who, in 1575, gifted it to his 14-year-old bride, Elizabeth Báthory, as a wedding present. By all accounts, the marriage of Francis and Elizabeth was a happy one. Home life at Čachtice Castle, on the other hand, was not exactly the picture of domestic bliss. With Francis frequently away on military campaigns against the Ottoman Turks, Elizabeth was left behind to manage the family’s household and vast estates, and in her husband’s absence, the countess seems to have taken up an unusual hobby: the torture and murder of her servants. Her many victims – a revolving door of peasant girls recruited from nearby villages – were variously cut, burnt, bitten, beaten, starved and even frozen to death. Posthumous rumours that Báthory bathed in the blood of her prey to preserve her youth have never been proven, but the available evidence suggests that her actions went far beyond that of a harsh mistress. Read more | Elizabeth Báthory: a 17th-century 'serial killer' She was a sadistic killer whose position of power and relative isolation at Čachtice Castle allowed her to operate unchecked for over two decades. During this time, she is estimated to have killed as many as 600 young women and girls. Had the cruel countess stuck to her original victim pool of poor servants, she may have escaped capture. Indeed, it was only when several young noblewomen invited to the castle to attend a gynaeceum (finishing school) went missing that the authorities finally took notice. In December 1610, Čachtice Castle was raided on the orders of King Matthias II. Báthory was seized during a post-Christmas feast – and not, as it was later claimed, in the middle of a murder. Owing to her high station, however, she managed to avoid trial (and inevitable execution) and was instead placed on house arrest in her castle. She died there four years later. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2026/03/3-GettyImages-167652325-3e2d3aa-e1773934794798.jpg" width="1500" height="1000" alt="Historic three‑storey corner building with wrought‑iron balconies and arched windows in a busy street scene" title="The present-day LaLaurie Mansion in New Orleans. The original building burned down in 1834, revealing evidence of Delphine LaLaurie’s horrific torture of enslaved people (Image by Getty Images)" /> 3. LaLaurie Mansion, New Orleans, United States Sadistic slave-owning socialite Delphine LaLaurie might just be New Orleans’ answer to Countess Báthory. If ever you travel to the city, you will inevitably hear of the notorious madame and her house of horrors. It is a stately three-storey French empire-style townhouse located on Royal Street in the heart of the historic French Quarter, the city’s main tourist district. On 10 April 1834, the mansion caught fire, attracting a large crowd of curious onlookers. At the time, the LaLaurie Mansion was renowned for its lavish interiors and decadent soirees – as well as for something more sinister. Rumour had it that the mistress of the manor treated her slaves exceptionally cruelly – which spoke volumes, given that most slave-owners thought nothing of whipping their workers at the time. These rumours would soon prove to be true. When concerned members of the community entered the house to help extinguish the flames, they made a horrific discovery. According to reports, behind the padlocked door of the attic, they found “seven slaves more or less horribly mutilated… suspended by the neck, with their limbs apparently stretched and torn from one extremity to another”. So shocking was the scene that the once-respected society hostess was run out of town by an angry mob. Nearly 200 years later, the legend of Madame LaLaurie lives on as one of the darkest chapters in the city’s pre-Civil War history. Though privately owned and publicly inaccessible, the present-day LaLaurie Mansion (rebuilt three years after the fire) still manages to draw hordes of tourists, who come to gawk at its paradoxically elegant exterior. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2026/03/4-GettyImages-117081718-8c2be8c-e1773938765180.jpg" width="1500" height="1002" alt="Black‑and‑white photo of a worn brick building with an arched passageway and a sign reading ‘Millers Court." title="The exterior of 13 Miller’s Court, Whitechapel, c1900. In 1888, the body of Mary Jane Kelly – the last of Jack the Ripper’s ‘canonical five’ victims – was discovered inside (Image by Getty Images)" /> 4. 13 Miller's Court, London, United Kingdom No list of historical true crime would be complete without an entry on Jack the Ripper, the pseudonymous serial killer responsible for the brutal slayings of at least five women in London's Whitechapel district between August and November 1888. Easily the most infamous unsolved murders in global history, there’s no shortage of Ripper-related content out there: books, films, TV shows, websites – and even historical walking tours offering the opportunity to follow in the mysterious murderer’s footsteps. Of course, there’s not much for the modern Ripper tourist to see. The gritty East End streets that comprised the killer’s hunting grounds were long ago transformed as part of a series of early 20th-century improvement projects designed to eradicate the scourge that was the Whitechapel slums. But before this modern uplift, at least a few intrepid explorers were able to visit the crime scenes and view them much as the killer would have done. Read more | He's the Victorian serial killer you've never heard of – and we may now know who he was On 20 December 1890, The Birmingham Mail published the account of one journalist’s journey through Jack the Ripper’s East London. The highlight of his adventures in so-called ‘Murderland’ was a trip to 13 Miller’s Court – the site of the last (and most ghastly) of the canonical Ripper murders. It was inside this squalid one room tenement that, just two years earlier, Mary Jane Kelly – a sex worker in her mid-20s – was found mutilated beyond all recognition. According to the journalist, “for a long time after the murder [the room] was vacant. Nobody would take it, owing to the rumour that it was haunted by Jack’s victim”. But, by the time of the journalist’s visit, it was occupied by “an old crone” and her “bedridden husband” who, for the “drop of half-a-crown” would show visitors the “ghastly relics of the crimes”. These included “a huge crimson stain” on the floor, “the fading imprints of a bloody hand on the wall”, and some pencil scratched graffiti purportedly left behind by the killer. Such “ghastly relics” were ultimately destroyed when, in 1928, the property was demolished to make way for the rebuilding of Spitalfields Market. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2026/03/5-GettyImages-145262286-5b9ade9-e1773938831936.jpg" width="1500" height="1000" alt="A black and white sketch depicting a tall, three-storey building with several windows. Telegraph poles and lines stand outside the building, and the street out front has lots of people walking around" title="HH Holmes’ infamous ‘Murder Castle’ in Chicago. The three-storey structure, long since demolished, was rumoured to contain a network of secret passageways (Image by Getty Images)" /> 5. 'Murder Castle', Chicago, United States At around the same time that Jack the Ripper was roving the streets of Victorian London, another pseudonymous serial killer was wreaking havoc across the pond in Chicago. Operating under the alias ‘HH Holmes’, Herman Webster Mudgett was a conman posing as a pharmacist, who, between the years of 1891 and 1894, lured as many as 200 men and women to their deaths. But where the Ripper seemingly killed for the sheer thrill of it, Holmes had ulterior motives – namely money. Most of his victims were the unwitting targets of insurance schemes and romance scams. And unlike his British counterpart, who committed all but one of his crimes outdoors, the nefarious ‘Dr Holmes’ preferred the privacy of his own home: 601–603 West 63rd Street, a sprawling three-storey structure, aptly dubbed the ‘Murder Castle’ by the Windy City press. Having been gutted by fire shortly after his arrest in the autumn of 1894, Holmes’s ‘Murder Castle’ is a bit of an enigma. According to contemporary reports, it possessed a labyrinthine layout, replete with secret passageways, soundproof rooms and a network of chutes and trapdoors purportedly designed for the fast disposal of dead bodies. But was it purpose-built for murder? The oft-repeated story that Holmes hired new building crews each week to ensure that no single person knew the property’s layout is likely apocryphal. Instead, he was probably attempting to cheat his contractors out of fair pay. Holmes’s astonishingly high body count may too have been exaggerated – he confessed to 27 murders, of which only nine have been confirmed. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2026/03/6-BordenHouse92SecondStFallRiverMassachusetts1892-24f9fc3-e1773938890143.jpg" width="620" height="413" alt="Black‑and‑white photo of a two‑storey wooden house with a gabled roof and a leafless tree in front" title="230 Second Street, Fall River – where 32-year-old Lizzie Borden allegedly murdered her father and stepmother – is one of America’s most notorious addresses" /> 6. The Lizzie Borden House, Fall River, Massachusetts, United States 230 Second Street, Fall River, Massachusetts. At first glance, this modest clapboard cottage hardly stands out in a city where the streets are lined with Victorian buildings – many of them far grander than this home. But this is actually Fall River’s most famous landmark: the Lizzie Borden House. Almost all Americans know of the alleged crimes of the accused axe-murderer Lizzie Borden. Outside of America, however, Lizzie is perhaps less well-known. And yet, most will be familiar with this little ditty: Lizzie Borden took an axe Gave her mother forty whacks. She gave her father forty-one. Andrew Borden now is dead, Lizzie hit him on the head. Up in heaven he will sing, On the gallows she will swing. But if all you know of Lizzie is the morbid nursery rhyme, you don’t know much. On the morning of 4 August 1892, Lizzie Borden, the 32-year-old daughter of Andrew Borden, a wealthy yet miserly property developer, allegedly killed her stepmother, Abby, using a hatchet. Lizzie struck 18 (not 40) blows to Abby’s head in an upstairs bedroom. When her father returned home from work for a mid-morning nap on the parlour sofa, Lizzie killed him with a more conservative 11 whacks as he slept. Read more | These are four of the most brutal Victorian murders. Were women really the perpetrators? The second verse gets it wrong too. Lizzie was acquitted of the murder charges in 1893, thus escaping the gallows. She then lived out the rest of her days in a larger, more luxurious home purchased with her father’s fortune – worth about $9.5 million (£7.5 million) in today’s money. And if we are to believe the reports of thrill-seeking tourists, Andrew is hardly singing up in heaven. He’s moaning right here on earth, forever stuck in his former home, now known as the Lizzie Borden House, a murder-themed bed and breakfast since 1996. Ghost-hunting guests claim to have encountered Andrew, Abby, their family maid Bridget – and even Lizzie herself – in the house. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2026/03/7-GettyImages-51096199-6211f5a-e1773938947804.jpg" width="1500" height="1000" alt="Black‑and‑white photo of a patterned wallpapered wall with dark stains and a closed double door." title="The basement room at the Ipatiev House, Yekaterinburg, where the Romanovs met their end. The wall has been torn apart by investigators looking for bullets and other evidence of the crimes committed there (Image by Getty Images)" /> 7. The Ipatiev House, Yekaterinburg, Russia The fall of the House of Romanov, the imperial family that ruled Russia from 1613 to 1917, irrevocably shaped the history of their country – and indeed, the world. As anyone with even the faintest recollection of their secondary school history lessons will recall, the abdication of Tsar Nicholas II and subsequent execution of his entire family laid the foundations for the first socialist state in history. What most of us will be less familiar with is the house that hosted that fall: the Ipatiev House, a fairly unassuming former merchant’s home in the city of Yekaterinburg. Built in the 1880s for mining industrialist Ivan Redikortsev, the two-storey neoclassical manor would have been perfectly in keeping for a man of Redikortsev’s station, just as it was for subsequent owners: gold-dealer IG Sharaviev and military engineer Nikolai Nikolayevich Ipatiev. But for a family who had once resided in some of the most resplendent residences in Russia – including the 2.5-million-square-foot Winter Palace in St Petersburg – it was something of a downgrade. In the spring of 1918, Tsar Nicholas, his wife Tsarina Alexandra, their five children and household staff were moved into the house, where they would spend 78 days confined to just four upper-storey rooms. Under the watchful eye of Bolshevik guards, the prisoners were occasionally permitted time outdoors – though the house’s modest grounds with their oppressively high fences would have paled in comparison to the Tsarina’s private garden at the Winter Palace. Finally, on 17 July, the family was ordered to the Ipatiev’s basement where they were executed by firing squad. Meanwhile, the house itself wouldn’t fall until 1977 when it was demolished under the orders of the Soviet government. Following the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991, the Church on the Blood was erected on its site, with a cross marking the exact location of the Romanov murders. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2026/03/8-JohnSowdenHouseLosAngeles-e1773939013743.jpg" width="1500" height="1000" alt="A geometric, reddish‑brown building partially hidden behind dense tropical plants, including palms and large-leafed greenery" title="Despite its impressive architecture, Sowden House is best known for being the former home of George Hodel – the prime suspect in the infamous ‘Black Dahlia’ murder" /> 8. Sowden House, Los Angeles, United States Like many old Hollywood mansions, Sowden House is steeped in a long and colourful history. Constructed in 1926 for its namesake, artist John Sowden, for nearly a century the property has played host to lavish parties, film crews and fashion shoots. It’s featured in Oscar-winning films like LA Confidential and The Aviator, and reality TV programmes like America’s Next Top Model. But did it also bear witness to one of the most notorious unsolved murders in American history? On the night of 14 January 1947, did the enigmatic ‘Black Dahlia’ take her final breath in the bowels of this 5,600-square-foot fortress of luxury? Maybe… Located in Los Feliz, a hillside community east of Hollywood, Sowden House is one of countless mansions in this upscale district. Yet, even in a sea of swanky properties, it sticks out – partly owing to its unusual appearance. Composed of giant concrete blocks configurated and carved in designs meant to mimic an ancient Maya step pyramid, the house is perhaps the most iconic example of the Mayan Revival Movement of the early 20th century. It is widely regarded as the pinnacle of achievement for architect Lloyd Wright (not to be confused with his more famous father, Frank Lloyd Wright). Surprisingly, however, none of these things are what Sowden is best known for. Its main claim to fame is for being the former home of one Dr George Hodel, a prominent LA physician and prime suspect in the 1947 slaying of Elizabeth Short – a 22-year-old budding starlet (christened the ‘Black Dahlia’ in the press on account of her raven hair), whose mutilated and dismembered body was found in a vacant lot, six and a half miles south of Sowden House. Aside from his surgical skill and supposed sadomasochistic interests, there’s actually very little to connect Hodel to the crime. Still, legions of armchair detectives are convinced of his guilt. His own son, Steve Hoddel – a 30-year veteran of the Los Angeles Police Department – is adamant that the Dahlia’s dismemberment took place in the basement of his childhood home. Caitlin Blackwell Baines is an art historian and author who specialises in Georgian art and architecture. She is the author of How to Build a Haunted House: The History of a Cultural Obsession (Profile Books, 2025)
Life in the workhouse: everything you wanted to know
Everything you wanted to know about history (podcast series)
From daily routines to whether inmates really ate gruel, Peter Higginbotham responds to listener questions about the workhouse
What was the daily routine in a British workhouse? Who would end up there? How accurate was Charles Dickens’ depiction of workhouse life? And did the inmates really eat gruel? In the latest in our series exploring history’s biggest topics, Peter Higginbotham responds to listener questions and popular internet search queries about the workhouse. Peter Higginbotham is the author of Life in a Victorian Workhouse (Pitkin, 2014). Buy now on Amazon He is also the author of The Workhouse Cookbook (The History Press, 2008). Buy now on Amazon Buy now on Waterstones Buy now on Bookshop.org
Charlotte Hodgman talks to Peter Higginbotham about British workhouses, and visits ten locations linked with the provision of relief to Britain's poor...
For many, the word ‘workhouse’ conjures up the image of an orphaned Oliver Twist begging for food from a cruel master. The reality, however, was somewhat different, and Britain’s system of poor relief arguably saved thousands of people from starvation over the course of its 300-year history. The provision of state-provided poor relief was crystallised in the 1601 Poor Relief Act, which gave parish officials the legal ability to collect money from rate payers to spend on poor relief for the sick, elderly and infirm – the ‘deserving’ poor. Labelled ‘out relief’, handouts usually took the form of bread, clothing, fuel or money. Though they were termed ‘workhouses’ from the 1620s, the early institutions that provided poor relief were, more often than not, non-residential, offering handouts in return for work. Much like today’s taxpayers, those funding poor relief were anxious to see their money well spent, wishing to deter those capable of working from claiming assistance. By the end of the 17th century, providing care under one roof was widely regarded as the most effective way of saving money and, as a result, the early 1700s saw a flurry of workhouses opening. Yet workhouses only really became part of Britain’s social landscape after 1723, when Sir Edward Knatchbull’s Workhouse Test Act won parliamentary approval. The act embodied the principle that the prospect of the workhouse should act as a deterrent and that relief should only be available to those desperate enough to accept its regime. Its impact on the provision of poor relief was dramatic: by the 1770s the number of parish workhouses in England and Wales had soared to around 2,000. Conditions during the early 19th century, though, meant the government was forced to reassess the way it helped the most impoverished members of society. The return of unemployed or injured servicemen from the Napoleonic Wars saw the national poor relief bill quadruple between 1795 and 1815, rising from £2 million to £8 million. To make matters worse, new Corn Laws restricted grain imports and pushed up the cost of bread. The government’s response was to pass a Poor Law Amendment Act in 1834, based on the recommendation of a royal commission. The new system was still funded by rate payers, but was now administered by unions – groupings of parishes – presided over by a locally elected Board of Guardians. Each union was responsible for providing a central workhouse for its member parishes, and out relief was abolished except in special cases. For the able-bodied poor, it was the workhouse or nothing. “Entering the workhouse was not simply a matter of turning up at the gate,” says Peter Higginbotham, author of The Workhouse Cookbook. “The poor would first meet with a relieving officer who toured the union on a regular basis. In most cases they would be ‘offered the house’ and given a ticket of admission. The family would then make its way to the workhouse where their clothes were put into storage, and they would be issued with a uniform, given a bath and subjected to a medical examination.” Read more: Escaping the workhouse – the Victorian war on child poverty Men and women were separated, as were the able-bodied and infirm. Those who were able to work did so for their bed and board. Women took on domestic chores such as cooking, laundry and sewing, while men performed physical labour, usually stone breaking, oakum picking or bone crushing. Conditions were basic: parents and children were permitted to meet briefly on a daily basis, or on Sundays. Inmates ate simple fare in a large communal dining hall, and were compelled to take regular, supervised baths. Until 1860, medical provision in the workhouses was often dire, with nursing duties generally performed by elderly female inmates, many of whom could not read, were hard of hearing, visually impaired, and fond of a drink. Medical wards were frequently cramped and poorly ventilated but, following a sustained campaign led by the medical profession during the 1860s, the government passed the Metropolitan Poor Act, forcing London’s workhouses to run separate infirmaries, preferably on separate sites. Meanwhile, the Metropolitan Asylums Board (established in 1867) provided care for fever cases that would ordinarily have ended up in the infirmaries. By the 1880s, the unions widely employed trained nurses, and the poor could increasingly visit workhouse infirmaries for treatment without having to formally enter the institution. Another problem faced by unions was the homeless poor. The 1834 act made no provision for vagrants, and workhouses were only allowed to serve people residing permanently in the area of the union. The authorities’ solution to this problem was, during the 1840s, to introduce casual blocks, where the homeless could stay for one night per 30-day period. In the 1880s these rules changed, and vagrants could stay two nights, perform one day’s work and be released at dawn on the third day. Treatment of vagrants varied, but generally they were deemed lower class citizens and subjected to harsher treatment than the ‘deserving’ poor. The mid-19th century saw many so-called ‘social explorers’ and journalists disguise themselves as vagrants and admit themselves to casual wards to experience this treatment for themselves. One of the best-known of these was James Greenwood, who published A Night in a Workhouse in the Pall Mall Gazette, a piece that generated a huge amount of public interest. Historians are still debating when exactly the workhouse system came to an end. Some date its demise to 1930 when the Board of Guardians system was abolished and many workhouses were redesignated as Public Assistance Institutions, becoming the responsibility of local councils. Others date it to 1948 and the introduction of the National Health Service, when many former workhouse buildings were turned into public hospitals, many of which still survive today. Where history happened: 10 locations to visit Newbury workhouse, Berkshire Where the unemployed could find work The building of this former workhouse was funded by a legacy of £4,800 from a wealthy merchant draper in 1624 and opened as a parish workhouse in 1627, providing poor relief in the form of work for unemployed clothiers and training for pauper children. Most likely a non-residential institution, Newbury’s workhouse provided textile labour for up to 80 workers each year but floundered when it was unable to sell the cloth that it produced and subsequently lost money. The building processed wool through its various stages and even had its own weaving shop with both broad and narrow looms. Newbury workhouse continued to operate as a pauper school and workhouse during the Civil War but had been partly demolished by 1689. The surviving section now houses the West Berkshire Museum, though this is currently closed for refurbishment until 2014. Southwell workhouse, Notts An example of a ‘model’ workhouse Built to accommodate around 158 inmates, the operation of Southwell workhouse was widely viewed as a model example of what the 1834 Poor Law Amendment Act had set out to achieve in terms of frugality. Designed by the Reverend John T Becher, Southwell was built in 1824 and run by the Thurgarton Incorporation. A strict regime worked as a successful deterrent to potential ‘scroungers’ – and beer, snuff and tobacco were all banned. As was customary at the time, men and women were segregated, but Southwell also divided the two groups further into the ‘deserving’ and ‘undeserving’ poor – the four units never met and even used separate internal staircases. The master’s quarters were located in the central hub of the building and were designed to allow him a view of the partitioned yards where inmates exercised. Now preserved by the National Trust, Southwell looks almost exactly the same as it did in the 19th century. 48 Doughty Street, London Where Charles Dickens wrote Oliver Twist The concept of the workhouse has inspired countless songs, works of art, and books – none more famous than Charles Dickens’s Oliver Twist, which first appeared in serial form in Bentley’s Miscellany in 1837. Written shortly after the introduction of the Poor Law Amendment Act, Oliver Twist presents a rather confused version of a workhouse regime that was still transitioning from the old parish-based system. Just one of its discrepancies lies in Oliver’s famous line: “Please, sir, I want some more”. Although there is evidence of some inmates being underfed, the diet, although plain, should have been sufficient for their needs. In fact, as a nine-year-old boy, Oliver would have received the same rations as an adult woman, which would have added at least a portion of bread to his meals. Christmas in the workhouse came under scrutiny from many contemporary writers, and the celebration certainly evolved over the years. The 1830s saw a clampdown on any extra costs for rate payers but a Christmas dinner was often provided by the Board of Guardians or local gentry, who would frequently oversee proceedings. By the 1880s, Christmas had become a focal point for workhouse inmates and contemporary newspaper accounts report gifts of tobacco or snuff for male inmates, while females were often treated to dried tea. Number 48 Doughty Street, once home to Charles Dickens, now houses the Dickens Museum. Read more: Did Charles Dickens invent Christmas as we know it today? Andover union workhouse, Hants Where starving inmates fought over rotten meat Despite a strict set of guidelines and rules, workhouses weren’t always run with the welfare of the inmates in mind and, as a result, a number of scandals hit the headlines during the 19th century. One such incident occurred in the Andover union workhouse in 1845 after it emerged that underfed male inmates had been fighting over the rotten shreds of meat and marrow left on the bones they had been told to crush for fertiliser. Andover had a reputation for strictness, run as it was by a former sergeant major, and expenditure was kept to a minimum. Inmates ate their meals using their fingers and were denied the extra food and drink at Christmas that was customary in most workhouses. Complaints about the lack of food were common among inmates, and vagrants in particular often claimed they did not receive the rations they were entitled to. Many tramps, in fact, deliberately tore up their workhouse uniforms and were only too happy to be sentenced to a spell in prison where they could expect better food, warmth, a bed, and a cell to themselves – all without having to perform a day’s work. Andover workhouse has now been converted to residential use, but its exterior remains relatively unchanged. Rhayader union workhouse, Powys Where a workhouse was opened after years of resistance Despite falling under the same laws as England, much of Wales proved particularly resistant to the changes enforced by the 1834 Poor Law Amendment Act, especially those related to the abolishment of outdoor relief. Although 47 new Welsh unions had come into force by 1838, Poor Law commissioners in 1845 recorded that 17 out of the 47 did not have “efficient workhouses in operation” – compared to just 19 out of the 544 unions in England. Resistance to the workhouse system was particularly prevalent in central and rural Wales, and the country witnessed a number of related riots between 1842 and 1843. By the 1860s, a handful of unions, including Rhayader, had held out against establishing a system of indoor relief. In fact, Rhayader’s guardians successfully resisted implementing a union workhouse for over 40 years but, under threat of dissolution by the central authorities, its workhouse opened in August 1879 – the last to open in England and Wales under the 1834 act. Today, the workhouse buildings form part of Rhayader’s country house hotel. Edinburgh’s charity poorhouse, Edinburgh Where the Scottish poor could seek help Scotland operated a separate poor law system to England and Wales, beginning in 1579 with an act issued by the Scottish parliament, which laid the foundations for the care of the country’s poor. In 1597, the responsibility of poor relief was shifted onto the church, and a further act in 1672 ordered the establishment of ‘correction houses’, where beggars could work in return for handouts. Although Scotland was not affected by England’s 1834 Poor Law Amendment Act, an inquiry into Scotland’s poor relief system was set up in 1843 and a number of proposals were put forward two years later, including the exemption of the able-bodied from receiving poor relief, the continuation of outdoor relief and the voluntary operation of poorhouses. Funded by taxes and charitable donations, the Edinburgh charity poorhouse, one of Scotland’s earliest, was established in Port Bristo in 1743, and by 1778 it could house up to 484 adults and 180 children. Part of the former east wing of the poorhouse, which originally included the men’s section, doctor’s surgery and children’s school, can still be seen at Forest Hill. Other parts of the former workhouse buildings have been incorporated into the nearby Hotel du Vin. Londonderry union workhouse, Londonderry/Derry Where many died during the Great Famine ‘Houses of Industry’ existed in Ireland prior to the union of Great Britain and Ireland in 1800, but it was the Irish Poor Law Act of 1838 that brought the English workhouse system to Ireland, creating an initial 130 unions, a figure that rose to 163, with a complete exclusion of outdoor relief. All Irish workhouses were built to the same model, designed by architect George Wilkinson, and 112 had been completed by April 1843. Sources tell us that life in Irish workhouses was even harsher than in their English counterparts with cramped, poorly ventilated dormitories, raised planks and straw mattresses for beds, and toilet facilities that were far from adequate for the numbers housed. Irish workhouses came under immense pressure during the Great Famine of 1845–50 as the system struggled to cope with the demand for space. Conditions within the workhouse worsened during the period as diseases such as typhus fever and dysentery struck many inmates and many workhouse burial grounds overflowed. Londonderry union workhouse opened its doors to the poor on 10 November 1840 and was based on one of Wilkinson’s standard workhouse designs, accommodating some 800 inmates. During the years of famine, a building was erected in the women’s yard to accommodate a further 40 people, along with temporary fever sheds for 60 people. The central part of the original building is now a library with a famine and workhouse museum situated on its upper floors. Strand union workhouse, London Where medical care came under fire This former workhouse originally opened in 1778 but hit the headlines in 1865 after criticisms of its medical care and infirmary were printed in The Lancet medical journal. The Lancet stated that “very few [of the nursing staff] can be considered fitted for their work as far as regards knowledge, and many are mainly incompetent from age or physical feebleness. The helpers are, of course, mere ignorant drudges”. Dr Joseph Rogers, who became medical officer for the workhouse in 1855, was also appalled at the conditions he encountered and began a campaign to improve medical care. The ensuing outcry was instrumental in the passing of the Metropolitan Poor Act of 1867, which introduced changes for the care of London’s poor. The mental welfare of workhouse inmates was also under scrutiny during the mid-19th century, and 1858 saw the introduction of the Workhouse Visiting Society for “the promotion of the moral and spiritual improvement of workhouse inmates”, allowing volunteer visitors, as well as small comforts such as flowers and books, into the workhouse. This, together with support from prominent figures such as Charles Dickens and Florence Nightingale, led to positive changes in the medical provision for London’s sick poor. Until recently, the Strand workhouse, on Cleveland Street, housed the outpatients department for the Middlesex Hospital. Much of the original building still stands – though it is currently under threat of demolition. The Spike, Guildford Where vagrants were put to work Vagrants made up a large proportion of most workhouse populations and were usually placed in more basic accommodation than that in the main workhouse. On entering the casual ward, or ‘Spike’ as it was commonly called, a vagrant’s clothes would be seized and fumigated overnight in a sulphur or steam oven to kill any vermin or fleas – often clothes and shoes came out in a worse state than when they went into the oven. Food usually consisted of bread and water, possibly with a little porridge in the more sympathetic institutions, but casuals were expected to work hard for their bed and board. A popular form of labour assigned to vagrants was the breaking of large stones into smaller pieces, which could then be used on the roads. The casual ward at Guildford Spike comprised a prison-like corridor of cells, many of which were used for stone breaking. The broken particles were then passed through a metal grid. Some casual wards even show evidence of tramp ‘graffiti’ left in the form of messages and poems, often commenting on the type of relief available in the different unions. There are even suggestions that vagrants used a system of secret signs scratched outside workhouses to warn others of the treatment they could expect. Guildford Spike is now preserved as a heritage centre that is open to the public. Chorlton union workhouse, Lancashire Where the Nightingale Ward was introduced On its opening on Nell Lane in 1855, the Chorlton union workhouse could house up to 1,500 inmates and was one of the largest institutions of its kind in the country. As well as being renowned for its size, Chorlton boasted England’s first ever ‘pavilion plan’ workhouse infirmary, comprising five well-spaced ward blocks, linked by a covered way, and each accommodating 96 patients. Later known as ‘Nightingale Wards’, the layout was praised by Florence Nightingale herself who commented: “Your hospital plan is a very good one: when completed it will be one of the best, if not the best, in the country… we shall hasten to imitate you; for you will have set up a model for the whole country.” The design, of elongated wards with beds and windows alternating down either side, was later adopted as a standard infirmary layout. Although the infirmary blocks have been demolished, the main workhouse building still stands. Words by Charlotte Hodgman. The historical advisor was Peter Higginbotham, creator of www.workhouses.org.uk and author of The Workhouse Cookbook (Tempus Publishing, 2008) This article was first published in the Christmas 2010 issue of BBC History Magazine
The evolution of the British home: from the Georgian era to the present day
How much have British homes changed since the Georgian era? Ahead of the return of A House Through Time on BBC Two, house historian Melanie Backe-Hansen explores the evolution of housing in Britain over the past 300 years
House historian Melanie Backe-Hansen explores the huge changes in Britain’s homes – from Georgian townhouses to post-war suburbia Early to mid Georgian (1714-1800) The early Georgian period saw the country transform from a rural economy to the beginnings of an industrial one. After the 1666 Great Fire of London, a number of building acts introduced guidelines on the use of materials, room sizes and height, along with four grades of house – and so the ubiquitous Georgian terraced house with sash windows was born. The late 18th century would also see the beginning of the Industrial Revolution, and the associated mass migration to large cities had an impact on the number of houses available. In a large terraced house, the basement was used for the kitchen and scullery, while on the ground floor was the dining room and other private family rooms. The principal rooms could be found on the first floor, with taller windows and higher ceilings – known as the piano nobile ('noble floor'). These were intended to be shown off to guests, so they would be finely decorated. In smaller urban homes, the main rooms were entered on the ground floor, with a parlour at the front and a kitchen and scullery at the rear. There were no internal toilets or bathroom – the privy was sited in the yard. Top architectural points to look out for... Built predominately in the Classical style, inspired by the ancient Roman world, centred on simplicity, symmetry, and precise proportions. Early in the period, houses were largely plain brick or stone with sash windows, but later stucco began to appear along the ground floor exterior. Later in the 18th century, more decoration began to appear, including fanlights over the front door, pilasters along the façade, as well as decorative mouldings. Professor David Olusoga: “Any home can offer up a micro-version of british history” The presenter of A House Through Time shares his thoughts on the series When people set out to discover the histories of their own homes, what many soon discover is that alongside the bricks and mortar history of architecture and design runs another narrative. Just as fascinating is the long, intergenerational history of the lives of the former residents. Each of the houses featured in the three series of A House Through Time were, over the centuries, home to in excess of 200 people. For houses built in the 18th and 19th centuries, these figures are entirely normal; the numbers are always higher for homes that, for part of their history, were subdivided into flats or tenements. As houses and the districts in which they stand move up and down the social spectrum, and in and out of fashion, the range of people from different class backgrounds and life experiences that may have lived in any individual home is often broader than many people imagine. What this means is that any home can offer up a micro-version of British history. Listen | David Olusoga delves into the story of Bristol’s past and explains the value of studying history through our own homes Regency (1800-1830s) Strictly speaking, the Regency period dates from 1811 to 1820 (when the future George IV ruled as regent for his father), but stylistically it spans the early 1800s. By the final years of the 18th century, the appearance of the urban house was beginning to include more decorative features, but it was the early 19th century that would see this come to full fruition. By this time the Industrial Revolution was in full swing: many homes were smaller, including terraced houses, two-up two-downs and back-to-backs. The two sides of George IV: is his wretched reputation deserved? For many, the layouts of Regency housing were limited in variation, but for those with more income they included more decorative features, such as cornicing and moulding. There was also an increase in the number of possessions with which to fill houses during this period, such as furniture, fabrics, crockery, and tea sets. What’s more, improvements in manufacturing and the lower costs of transport, as well as improving salaries for a growing class of professionals, saw an increase in the number of people able to afford more ‘luxuries’. There might be improved facilities, perhaps with a cold water tap in the scullery, along with a ‘copper’ for heating water for washing. Top architectural points to look out for... Houses still had symmetrical facades, but they also had more decorative elements inspired by the British Empire and beyond, including influences from India, China and Egypt. This led to more ornate features, including decorative ironwork, particularly on balconies, as well as railings and drainpipes. Stucco began to be used across the entire façade and porticos or columns appeared around entrances. Windows also became more elaborate, being taller with thinner glazing bars and large panes of glass, as well as bay windows, which might run the full height of the facade, particularly in the spa towns. Early Victorian (1840s-1870s) By the time Queen Victoria came to the throne in June 1837, the country had already seen vast changes due to the Industrial Revolution, with a population boom across Britain to match: exploding from around 10 million in 1801 to around 19 million by 1841. Housing at this time ranged from large homes accommodating one family and several servants, down to the smallest working-class house, which might be shared by a large family and lodgers. ‘Back-to-backs’ and houses in narrow courts had limited facilities, where overcrowding was common; combined with limited sanitation and access to water, they led to terrible slum conditions, exacerbating the spread of diseases such as cholera. A brief history of human filth: how did people try to keep clean in the past? At the same time, however, there were the large swathes of new streets and houses, built by speculative builders popping up across the country. In the larger homes occupied by the growing middle classes and upper classes, a huge turnaround in home comforts became available. These properties featured increasing amounts of internal decoration, such as ceiling roses and cornices, along with improvements in services, including gas lighting and even a flushing water closet. Mass production of goods and materials also inspired more furniture and furnishings. Top architectural points to look out for... Architects argued between the merits of the Classical style and the Gothic, believed to be a truer English style. Earlier, the Classical style dominated and was defined by the full stucco façade with pillars. Sash windows still dominated, but improvements in glass making meant there were larger panes, and topped with pediments. Early examples of Gothic Revival appeared, based on a medieval ideal; these featured pointed windows, steeply pitched roofs, different coloured brick, as well as some elaborate features, such as towers. Late Victorian (1870s-1900) The late Victorian period would see the continued development of the outer suburbs, encouraged by improvements in transport. The population growth continued, rising rapidly from 16.8 million in 1851 to 30.5 million by 1901 in England and Wales. Inside medium-to-large homes, the ground floor would boast either the main reception rooms or private family rooms. The kitchen was more likely to be found at the rear of the ground floor. In larger houses, the first floor remained the main entertaining space, while in smaller homes this floor would contain bedrooms. After the popularity of the water closet at the Great Exhibition of 1851, internal WCs became more common. Smiling Victorians: why it's a myth that our ancestors didn't smile for pictures The later Victorian period saw attempts to overcome the dire housing conditions of the lower classes, with employers and philanthropists attempting to provide better housing. This included Saltaire near Bradford, created by mill owner Sir Titus Salt (1803-76). By the end of the period, the introduction of various bye-laws and health acts would also begin to see great improvements in living standards for many. Top architectural points to look out for... More alternative architectural styles appeared, including Gothic Revival, Queen Anne, and the Arts and Crafts. Houses had more red brick and terracotta, Gothic-shaped windows and door surrounds, as well as timber features, large chimneys and turrets. The repeal of the brick tax in 1850 (in force since 1784) and the Window Tax in 1851 (in force since 1696) paved the way for moulded brickwork and terracotta, along with larger bay windows and stained glass. Rows of late Victorian homes included a mixture of features, including towers, Gothic-shaped windows, plus terracotta details, patterned roof tiles, and a recessed door with stained glass panels. Listen| Historian Emma Griffin explores how economic changes in 19th-century Britain affected family life for working class Victorians Edwardian (1901-1914) The Edwardian period, named for King Edward VII, was brought to an abrupt end at the outbreak of World War I in 1914. Standards in housing had improved greatly since the early Victorian period, while the improved affordability of goods, as well as changes to work practices, meant many were better off in the Edwardian period. New streets were laid out with larger plots, which allowed for greater front and rear gardens. Inside the house, there might be more decoration and a wider, tiled hallway. The main reception rooms on the ground floor were similar to their Victorian predecessors, but often featured more creature comforts, such as curtains and carpets. The way houses were managed also began to alter, with a shift in the way servants worked. And better services and appliances were becoming more available in the home, such as gas, electricity, and internal plumbing. Following early attempts at philanthropic housing, including Bournville for Cadbury workers in Birmingham, the Edwardian period would see the introduction of the garden suburb and garden city – pre-planned communities surrounded by greenbelt. The first of these was Letchworth, in 1903. Top architectural points to look out for... Houses featured front porches with timber detailing, gables and mock-Tudor decoration. Interiors also featured large rooms with high ceilings, along with large windows and stained glass. Stucco was no longer popular; the Edwardian period saw an increased use in other building materials, including terracotta and coloured brick, along with pebble dash. The mixture of architectural features continued, but with additions such as tile cladding, bargeboards on gable ends, plus protruding windows with casements on the top part. Inter-war (1918-1939) After the devastation of World War I, the inter-war period saw a growing focus on providing better housing for all. The success of the garden city movement inspired further garden suburbs, but also influenced local council projects. Returning servicemen were promised “Homes Fit for Heroes”, while the Housing and Town Planning Act of 1919, known as the Addison Act, offered subsidies to local authorities to build new houses. The most common form of abode was the semidetached house in the suburbs, featuring a living room, dining room, three bedrooms, as well as bathroom, toilet, and a small kitchen. The kitchen was small, but would include a cooker and built-in cupboards, and most new homes had electricity and a boiler for hot water. Other new laboursaving devices included vacuum cleaners. Other accommodation in this period included bungalows and private flats, which featured fitted kitchens and internal plumbing, and lifts and concierges for flats. In the early 1900s, only around 10 per cent of people owned their own home, but by the end of the 1930s this had risen to around 25 per cent. By 1939 more than one million council houses had been built. From slums to suburbs: Britain’s council house revolution Top architectural points to look out for... The neo-Georgian style was popular at this time, particularly with council housing, which featured brick facades with simple details. Mixtures of historic architectural features continued, including Tudor timber-framing, nicknamed ‘Tudorbethan’, along with tile hanging, inspired by the Arts and Crafts, and the new ‘Streamline Moderne’ (often described as Art Deco). Prominent gables, as well as large front bays, squared or round, were popular. The casement window was more popular, along with feature coloured glass. The front door was often in a porch with glazed tiles. They might also feature decorative elements inspired by Art Nouveau. Post-war (1950s-1960s) The impact of German bombing raids during World War II caused widespread devastation, with close to half a million homes destroyed or made uninhabitable. The provision of housing became a top priority. The initial post-war period saw a rush of non-standard construction, including the ‘pre-fab’. The 1946 New Towns Act allowed the government to acquire land and create communities around ‘New Towns’ (purposely built to reduce crowding in urban areas) and by the end of the 1960s more than 20 such towns had been completed. Planners and authorities also aspired to a new housing future, illustrated by the popularity of the tower block in the 1960s, providing good quality homes with indoor bathrooms and toilets and fitted kitchens. Initially these were well received but, by the 1970s, the utopian ideals had fallen short. Have high-rises ever been the answer to our housing woes? A history of homelessness The private 1960s home had larger rooms, particularly after the Parker Morris report in 1961, which highlighted the importance of space. This period also saw the adoption of the L-shaped living arrangement, as the kitchen became integrated with a dining space. There were more appliances, including washing machines, fridges, and even televisions. A noticeable change was also the removal of the fireplace. Top architectural points to look out for... The tower blocks of the 1960s were largely built with concrete. Many suburban houses of the 1950s and 60s appear rather plain, flat, and boxy, but they feature large rectangular windows, with opening ‘top lights’ and front doors glazed with rippled glass. Roofs could be flat, but were more likely to be low pitched, with the end gable covered in barge board. By the 1960s, brick was popular, but with various colours, including red, yellow, white and brown. Melanie Backe-Hansen is a house historian, and research consultant for A House Through Time. Her most recent book is Historic Streets and Squares: The Secrets on Your Doorstep (History Press, 2013) A House Through Time series three, presented by David Olusoga, begins on BBC Two on 26 May This content first appeared in the June 2020 issue of BBC History Revealed
Jane Austen’s tips for “health and happiness”
Descriptions of health, says author Bryan Kozlowski, run throughout the work of famed novelist Jane Austen – from the character of Mr Woodhouse in Emma to the health resort setting of her unfinished Sanditon. Writing for History Extra, Kozlowski shares four tips that can be found in the Regency-era writer’s classic novels, and what they tell us about contemporary attitudes towards healthy figures, women’s exercise and more…
While most of us have focused on the heart of Jane Austen’s novels or its portrayal of the society of the period, Austen herself was equally fascinated by something rather more functional: health. For some time now, I’ve been following the Jane Austen diet. Yes, you did read that correctly. To quote the character Mr Collins in the author's Pride and Prejudice, “do not make yourself uneasy”. Because not only is the diet real, it’s been hiding right under our literary noses for more than two centuries. It is incorporated into nearly everything Austen wrote, as this quote from Emma (1816) shows: “Where health is at stake, nothing else should be considered.” Themes of health are woven into her earliest stories; they continue strongly throughout Emma and Persuasion (1817); and are centre-stage in her last, unfinished novel Sanditon (set in a seaside health resort). Ironically, as Austen’s own health was fading [she died at the age of 41 after becoming ill with what is today thought to have been Addison's disease], she wrote about cherishing true health even more. In fact, look closer at her fiction and you’ll find that “improvement of health” has always been a part of Austen’s happily-ever-after package, freely bestowed on her most worthy characters, from Marianne Dashwood in Sense and Sensibility (1811) to Anne Elliot in Persuasion, who begins her own story a bit “faded” in the physical department. Yet to gradually regain one’s natural “bloom” is the birthright of Austen’s great and good. Even the word “health” itself pops up more than one hundred times in her six novels. Yet if Austen’s passion for doling out “secure and permanent health” is news to you, join the club; I only recently discovered it myself. Though interested in Jane Austen since adolescence it wasn’t until I neared my 30th birthday that I noticed something remarkable. What Austen had to say about health more than 200 years ago, and what science says today, is astonishingly similar. A day in the life of Jane Austen The way her healthiest characters eat, exercise and think about their bodies can be seen to have unique patterns and modern parallels to heed. The discovery led me on a personal research project that has forever transformed my image of Austen – from 'dowdy Hampshire spinster' to timeless health guru with a sparkling wit. So, for lack of a better description, I’ve been on the Jane Austen ‘diet’ for more than two years now, incorporating wellness strategies found her in her writing into everyday life, finding new and fascinating ways to approach old body problems. Here are just a few of the many health lessons that Jane Austen advocated in her writing… Look at the whole “picture of health” Whatever might be said for Austen’s perhaps narrow formula for matrimonial bliss (handsome gent + large fortune = success), when it comes to health she was by no means a reductionist. Compared to today’s clinical definitions of health – often defined by numbers on a bathroom scale or on a BMI chart – Austen viewed health in far broader terms. Austen’s influences: Lucy Worsley on the author’s life and work Influenced by classical medicine and the ‘non-naturals’ theory, which based good health more on environmental factors and less on fretting over one’s body size, health for Austen seemed to hold a refreshingly literal meaning. The word ‘health’ etymologically means ‘whole’, from the Old English hale; something that should bring a rejuvenating wholeness to one’s body, mood and mind. It’s no coincidence, therefore, that Austen’s healthiest characters don’t look inward in their pursuit of health – worrying about their corset size or reflection in a ballroom mirror – but take many other factors into consideration: their energy levels; their relationship with food and exercise; their physical comfort and mental happiness; even the glow of their skin. Austen calls it the bigger “picture of health” in Emma, something that can flourish, regardless of body size. Romance and reality in Jane Austen’s world Indeed, rather than promoting a one-size-fits-all standard of physical beauty, there’s a wide and progressive range of healthy, energetic body sizes in Austen’s novels – from “plump” Harriet Smith in Emma to the “squareness” of Mrs Croft in Persuasion, to the “stout”, curvy appeal of Lydia Bennet in Pride and Prejudice. And don’t forget pretty Jane Fairfax in Emma, described in delightfully ambiguous terms as “a most becoming medium, between fat and thin”. In short, attractive bodies can come in “every possible variation of form”, says Elinor in Sense and Sensibility, a refreshing statement that brilliantly anticipates our current understanding of diverse body shapes. Such examples show Austen’s thoughtful rebuttal to the contemporary vogue of reducing health to a number on a scale or dress size during the late 18th century. At the time, the new-fangled fad of weighing oneself (on a large hanging scale) was fuelling a dangerous cultural obsession with weight that, paradoxically, sapped the health out of many of Austen’s contemporaries. This was the age of a growing trend towards sickly-thin physiques that sought to mirror the wastage of tuberculosis, a disease which had ravaged Europe during the period. Marianne Dashwood even gets sucked into the craze in Sense and Sensibility. “Confess, Marianne”, says her cooler headed sister Elinor. “Is not there something interesting to you in the flushed cheek, hollow eye, and quick pulse of a fever?” Though perhaps no one fell harder for the “tubercular look” than the famous Regency poet, Lord Byron. Never one to do anything by half measures, Byron was one of history’s first neurotic weight watchers, compulsively weighing himself on hanging scales and putting himself on endless rounds of starvation diets when the number wasn’t to his liking. Yet Austen repeatedly seems to refute the cultural fad that thinness alone has any real connection to “health and happiness”. Just ask any of the comical characters in Austen’s novels who spend too much time myopically focused on their bodies while forgetting the bigger picture of total wellness (Mr Woodhouse, Mary Musgrove, Lady Bertram, to name a few). From Austen & Brontë to Woolf: literature’s forgotten female friendships Don’t be a foodie Despite the ostensibly sparse references to food in her novels, Austen seemingly understood the modern ‘foodie’ culture better than most of us do today. Much like our own, the Georgian era was an age of epicurean excess. Thanks to improved farming techniques, food was more abundant in Austen’s England than ever before and the rising leisure class had more time to eat it. The combination posed inevitable health risks, plunging the upper classes into a mini obesity epidemic. As the 18th-century physician Thomas Short observed: “I believe no age did ever afford more instances of corpulency than our own.” Austen reflected this concern in her fiction, creating food-obsessed characters like Mr Hurst in Pride and Prejudice “who lived only to eat”. But while her contemporaries were advocating stringent diets to remedy the problem, Austen had other, more practical secrets up her sleeve. Her novels reference mental strategies for how to eat, satisfyingly and sanely, in any age of excess. One of her 'tips' involves adopting what she would call “a proper air of indifference” to food: the importance of keeping one’s relationship with food at an emotional arm’s length. Her fictional heroines are famous for it, refusing to talk, think, or emote about food more than is absolutely necessary. In Pride and Prejudice, for example, Lizzie’s brief friendship with Mr Hurst comes to an awkward halt when she refuses to indulge him in a conversation on the giddy delights of French “ragout”, a highly-flavoured stew that he can’t seem to get enough of. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2019/06/GettyImages-590652243-57d951b.jpg" width="1024" height="708" alt="Painting titled 'Still life with Apples, Grapes, Melons, Bread, Jug and Bottle by Luis Egidio Meléndez (1716-1780) Spanish painter. Dated 1771. (Photo by Universal History Archive/Universal Images Group via Getty Images)" title="Still life with Apples, Grapes, Melons, Bread, Jug and Bottle." /> While Austen was not puritanical about food – far from it, she fully enjoyed its gustatory pleasures, as her personal letters attest. But she also knew the dietary pitfalls of developing a deeper, irrational romance with food. Just ask Dr Grant of Mansfield Park (1816), whose habit of emotional eating and its subsequent binges lead him to an early grave (one of the few rare characters to die in the course of her novels). Modern research confirms Austen’s intuitive wisdom. Much research now suggests that thinking about food when you’re not hungry can still trigger your pancreas to secrete insulin, which pumps powerful hunger signals to your brain. Austen’s writing displayed an insistence to never get too touchy-feely with food. Marianne and Elinor even refuse to dwell too long over a dinner menu at an inn in Sense and Sensibility. But while Austen fully encouraged this mental diet of sorts, she never encouraged actual dietary deprivation. Quite the contrary. Austen seemed to grasp what science only started understanding in the 1950s, that the only way to stop obsessing about food is to start eating. It may seem paradoxical, but no one can trick their hunger hormones for too long and Austen certainly makes sure her heroines eat, in ways that are fully and naturally satisfying. Though she might be mentally stoic about food, Catherine Morland is proud of possessing “a good appetite” in Northanger Abbey. She simply eats when she’s hungry, even late at night after a ball. Emma Woodhouse, in turn, respects the food calls of nature, duly promising “that she would take something to eat, if hungry”. Yet Austen’s simple reminders to eat well, regularly and without guilt, still feel as revolutionary today as they did in the early 1800s. Indeed, period fashions promoted exactly the opposite. “A woman should never be seen eating or drinking,” snickered Lord Byron, reflecting the sexist sentiment of the day, one that considered the natural act of eating as somehow an unwomanly enterprise. It was one of the first cultural fads Austen lambasted as a teenager with biting wit in her story, Love and Friendship, particularly in one frank acknowledgement: “It was first necessary to eat.” It was a fad she continued to rebut throughout her literary life. A survivor's guide to Georgian marriage Exercise like Elizabeth Austen was a passionate and progressive advocate of exercise, especially for women. The 18th-century cult of sensibility had done its best to enfeeble the era’s definition of femininity, to spread “an idea of weakness”, as contemporary observers like Edmund Burke wrote. “Women are very sensible of this,” he wrote, “for which reason they learn to lisp, to totter in their walk, to counterfeit weakness”. Austen fought back: “Do not consider me now as an elegant female,” insists Lizzie Bennet in Pride and Prejudice. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2019/06/GettyImages-464463201-8a7014a.jpg" width="1024" height="846" alt="An engraving of figures walking in London's Temple Gardens, c1750. (Photo by Guildhall Library & Art Gallery/Heritage Images/Getty Images)" title="An engraving of figures walking in London's Temple Gardens, c1750. (Photo by Guildhall Library & Art Gallery/Heritage Images/Getty Images)" /> Though she was never the Regency equivalent of a modern gym rat, Austen embraced something far more thoughtful; a philosophy we might today call intuitive exercise. A world away from the leaden weights and agonised grunts of modern gyms, intuitive exercise is the belief that the most effective workouts involve easy, natural movements, that pushing our bodies too far beyond their physical comfort zones is not a sustainable strategy for lifelong fitness. There’s the sound logic of Austen’s observation in Mansfield Park: “Nothing ever fatigues me but doing what I do not like.” Read more | Persuasion review: “The essence and spirit of Austen’s work are fundamentally changed” It’s also interesting to note that only enjoyable, pleasure-producing words like “comfortable”, “delightful” and even “snug” define the daily workouts in Austen’s novels, with very little sweat or physical stress involved. Motion, frequent and routine, is all Austen advises, whether that’s a stroll to the nearest village, a potter about the garden, a country dance, or simply another “turn” around the room. Where we have guilt, ‘no-pain-no-gain’ attitudes, and the pressure to ‘power through’ the latest modern workout, Austen’s characters feel fit and fully satisfied by simply enjoying “the felicities of rapid motion” (then taking a comfortable breather whenever necessary). Science seems to have caught up with Austen, rediscovering the truth behind the Regency medical idea that the human body is a ‘body machine’ that relies on more regular (not necessarily more vigorous) movement to keep its metabolic gears running smoothly. And walking, of course, has always been the easiest way to do just that. Walking is certainly the exercise of choice in Austen’s world, where characters walk miles, every day, to the nearest house or village and enjoy consistently high levels of energy and physical fitness as a result. Radiating “life and vigour” in Pride and Prejudice, Lizzie Bennet eagerly jumps at the opportunity of taking a three-mile stroll to Netherfield to visit her sister. Period diaries confirm just how typical these daily strolls were; people of Austen’s class would often walk up to seven miles a day, just by visiting nearby friends and relations. Flummery and Bath Olivers: how to make 5 different foods from Jane Austen's England Develop a taste for nature One of the most unexpected aspects of Austen’s health code has become, for me, one of her most surprisingly effective – her insistence that a naturally healthy diet requires a daily dose of nature itself. Getting outside and soaking up the sunshine and fresh air isn’t just encouraged in her novels, it’s practically prescribed as a wonder drug. The character Jane Fairfax, for example, is catapulted into the plot of Emma only after being advised to dose up on fresh country air for her health. Other characters who stay cooped up indoors, by contrast, ultimately suffer mysterious slumps to their overall wellbeing. Though a solid component of historic medical theories since Hippocrates have studied nature’s impact on human health, many readers today still find Austen’s nature prescriptions something of a romantic mystery. But modern research is starting to appreciate that nature is indeed an essential nutrient too, just as Austen firmly believed. “I advise you to go out: the air will do you good,” says Sir Thomas with conviction in Mansfield Park. Is Jane Austen's fiction an accurate portrayal of life in Georgian England? Austen’s repeated calls to reconnect with nature – at the seaside at Lyme, on the rolling downs of Devonshire, or the gardens of Pemberley – is being scientifically supported in fascinating new ways. The recent interest in Japanese ‘forest bathing’, the importance of sunlight in regulating our happiness and hormone levels, and the modern dangers of ‘sick building syndrome’ (the myriad health risks of spending too much time indoors) – all find historic parallels and portents in Austen’s novels. After all, Austen fully grasped the original, wider scope of the word ‘diet’. Extending far beyond just food, diet derives from the Greek diaita, meaning ‘way of life’, a life made manifestly better by developing an Austen-style taste for nature. Bryan Kozlowski is the author of The Jane Austen Diet: Austen’s Secrets to Food, Health, and Incandescent Happiness (Turner, March 2019). A passionate champion of “lit wit” – bringing the wisdom of classic literature in everyday life – his works have appeared in Vogue, the New York Times and the Washington Post. This article was first published by HistoryExtra in April 2019
7 things you (probably) didn’t know about Charles Dickens and his family home
Charles Dickens (1812–70) was a famed writer of Victorian literature, whose most famous works include Oliver Twist and Great Expectations. Often considered to be one of the greatest writers of the 19th century, his writing is famous for its social commentary and observation of Victorian society. Louisa Price, curator of the Charles Dickens Museum at 48 Doughty Street in London, shares seven lesser-known facts about Charles Dickens and the family home in which he wrote many of his famed novels
Charles Dickens loved decorating his home Dickens cared a great deal about how his home looked. Here at the Charles Dickens Museum we hold letters in our archive detailing requests to the landlord for painting and cleaning at 48 Doughty Street (a Georgian townhouse in Bloomsbury that Catherine and Charles Dickens called home from 1837–39). Dickens made various changes to the property, particularly the drawing room. He removed the unfashionable dado rail [a decorative waist-high moulding round the wall of a room], hung wallpaper, and installed a fitted carpet and a veined marble hearth stone. Decorative items in our collection such as ostentatious gilt candlesticks illustrate Dickens’ preferred style. My history hero: Charles Dickens (exclusive to The Library) Did Charles Dickens invent Christmas as we know it today? At Doughty Street and in subsequent homes, Catherine participated in decision-making about decorating, but she still had to contend with Dickens’ strong opinions on the matter. While travelling in northern Italy in 1844, Dickens wrote home to Catherine, urging her not to rearrange furniture in his absence: “Keep things in their places. I can’t bear to picture them otherwise.” Charles Dickens worked from home For the first half of his career Dickens worked from a study inside his family home, which would have been alive with the noise and bustle of young children, servants and visiting family members. At 48 Doughty Street, Dickens’ study was situated on the first floor, with a door leading into the drawing room. By the time he and Catherine left in 1839 they had three children under the age of three (Charley, Mamie and Katey), and employed four servants. Dickens tended to keep to a strict routine of working in the morning without disturbance. There were, of course, exceptions to the rules: one day at Doughty Street, hearing the hilarity in the drawing room, Dickens left his study and joined his family, bringing with him his portable writing desk, ink pot, quill and paper. There he went on writing Oliver Twist, telling the family not to worry about him but rather to go on with their play. Charles Dickens's house had plumbing and draining issues Just like any other Londoner, Dickens experienced problems with draining and water supply into his homes. Upon leaving the property at Doughty Street in 1839 he complained to the landlord that “the drains... have been a serious annoyance to us, and although we have had the plumbers in the house half a dozen times, we have not been able to make them last our time without often receiving strong notice of their being in the neighbourhood”. One article in Dickens’ weekly journal, Household Words, concerns a trip he and a friend made to assess a water pumping station off the river Thames. Dickens’ interest in water supply for Londoners hit close to home: letters written during his time at Tavistock House (his London home from 1851–60) include a complaint about intermittent water supply to the house from the New River Company. Top 5 Dickensian recipes A brief history of beards Although Charles Dickens loved music, he had no talent for it Both Charles and Catherine came from musically talented families, so it is little surprise that they kept a piano in their home. Letters recall how Dickens and his friend John Hullah composed pieces for the operetta The Village Coquettes on Dickens’ piano in Furnivals Inn in around 1836, and a cottage piano is listed in the inventory of another home in 1843. Escaping the workhouse: the Victorian war on child poverty Victorian London’s East End: what can a foul murder tell us about life in the city? Though the Charles Dickens Museum at 48 Doughty Street does not possess a Dickens instrument, we have installed a late 18th-century Longman & Broderip piano – the kind a middle-class couple like Charles and Catherine would have owned. It is positioned in the drawing room, and each Christmas it is used for concerts to entertain our guests. But although Dickens had a passion for music, he was not necessarily a great pianist. In a letter to the Daily News in around 1871, Dickens' old school chum John W Bowden recalled that Dickens had tried to learn music, but that one day their music master had given up teaching him the piano, declaring: “He had no aptitude for music, and it was robbing his parents to continue giving him lessons.” Charles Dickens loved mirrors Dickens is known to have loved mirrors. Several still hang in the drawing room of his final home at Gad’s Hill Place in Kent (where Dickens lived from 1856 until his death in 1870), and photographs of Dickens’ Swiss chalet summer house, where he spent much of the warmer months writing, show mirrors situated around his desk. As well as being a decorative feature that brought more light into rooms, Dickens used mirrors in the process of writing his novels. His eldest daughter, Mamie Dickens, remembers a day she was ill and her father permitted her to lie on the sofa in his study while he worked. She recalls: “He suddenly jumped from his chair and rushed to a mirror which hung near, and in which I could see the reflection of some extraordinary facial contortions which he was making... for the time being he had not only lost sight of his surroundings, but had actually become in action, as in imagination, the creature of his pen.” Dickens immortalised some of his pets through taxidermy The Dickens family had many pets, ranging from a canary called Dick to a series of dogs including Mrs Bouncer the pomeranian and a large mastiff called Turk. One of the more famous pets was Grip the raven, who died unexpectedly after consuming paint. Dickens had Grip stuffed, and the creature now resides in the Philadelphia Free Library. Grip is believed to have been the inspiration behind the raven in Barnaby Rudge (1841). Grip was followed by another raven, ‘Grip the second’, and when painting a portrait of the Dickens children in 1841 (pictured below), Daniel Maclise includes Grip sitting behind the siblings. This portrait is today on display at the Charles Dickens Museum. A pet kitten named Bob, who was known for his devotion to the writer, was also memorialised through taxidermy like the original Grip. When Bob died, Dickens made his paw into a letter opener. This is now on display in the New York Public Library. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2018/01/GettyImages-171390639-93a2478.jpg" width="1328" height="1311" alt="A 1841 drawing depicting four of Charles Dickens' children - Charlie, Mamie, Katie, and Wally - with Grip the raven. (Photo by Culture Club/Getty Images)" title="A 1841 drawing depicting four of Charles Dickens' children - Charlie, Mamie, Katie, and Wally - with Grip the raven. (Photo by Culture Club/Getty Images)" /> Charles Dickens was a bit of a party animal Dickens was in his element when hosting, and Christmas presented the perfect opportunity to invite friends and family to his home for meals and parties. Catherine and Charles’s eldest son, Charley, was born on Twelfth Night (the last day in the Christmas season), and the couple celebrated with a joint birthday/Twelfth Night party, which grew over the years to include dancing, magical performances and even amateur theatricals. At one such party in the 1850s, Dickens staged Fielding’s Tom Thumb, casting his children in various roles and himself as the ghost. English novelist William Thackeray was among the audience, and is reported to have fallen off his chair with laughter at the performance. Over the festive period at the Charles Dickens Museum in London, visitors can enjoy candlelit tours, evening performances of A Christmas Carol, and a new exhibition titled ‘A Christmas Carol Reimagined’. To find out more, visit www.dickensmuseum.com This article was first published on History Extra in December 2015
Inside Osborne: Queen Victoria and Prince Albert's island residence
Osborne House on the Isle of Wight was Prince Albert’s pet project and he was heavily involved with its design from the outset. By 1846, when the royal family began visiting Osborne, Queen Victoria had already given birth to five children in six years, and the rapidly expanding royal nursery needed somewhere where it could be a family. Professor Jane Ridley and Charlotte Hodgman visit the former royal residence that offers a fascinating insight into the private lives of Queen Victoria and Prince Albert...
“It is impossible to imagine a prettier spot,” said Queen Victoria of Osborne, the palatial family home where she and Prince Albert chose to periodically retreat from the public eye to spend quality time together, and raise their children. Tucked away on the Isle of Wight, just an hour’s ferry journey from Southampton, Osborne commands impressive panoramic views of the Solent, a prospect that is said to have reminded Albert of the Bay of Naples. The sprawling 342-acre site was purchased in 1845, with building contractor Thomas Cubitt commissioned to create a family home that could function at both a domestic and court level. By 1851, most of the house had been completed, with a central pavilion block housing the royal family’s private apartments (completed in 1846). <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2018/01/IMG_1241-a40e1f0.jpg" width="5136" height="3424" alt="The central block of Osborne – known as the Pavilion – housed the royal family's private apartments and was the first part of the house to be built. It was completed in 1846. Prince Albert was heavily involved in the landscaping of Osborne's grounds and would direct gardeners from the top of the tower shown to the right of this picture. (© English Heritage)" title="Summer 2014" /> “Osborne was very much Albert’s pet project,” says Jane Ridley, professor of modern history at the University of Buckingham, “and he was heavily involved with its design from the outset. By 1846, when the family began visiting Osborne, Victoria had already given birth to five children in six years. This rapidly expanding royal nursery needed somewhere it could, albeit rather self-consciously, come and be a family.” A queen on show While Osborne’s exterior, built in an Italian ‘palazzo’ style, cannot fail to impress, it is the interior of the house that reveals the most about the tastes and relationship of the royal couple – from the way the house was run, to the image they wished to convey to the wider world. The gold drawing room, with its marble columns, full-length mirrors and cut-glass chandeliers, tells of a queen on show. Visiting royalty were received in its sumptuous surroundings, and Victoria would have retired here after dinner to read, play cards, sing or perform on the piano. Next door, in the formal dining room, family portraits adorn the walls – a reminder, if any were required, of Victoria’s place as the ‘Grandmother of Europe’. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2018/01/DrawingRoomOsborneEH-BJ-e1e9c62.jpg" width="1200" height="800" alt="The drawing room at Osborne was restored in 2003 to reflect how it would have looked in the 1890s. Visiting foreign royalty were received in this room, and Victoria usually retired here after dinner to play cards, sing, or play the piano. The cut-glass chandeliers were wired for electricity in 1893. (© English Heritage)" title="The drawing room at Osborne was restored in 2003 to reflect how it would have looked in the 1890s. Visiting foreign royalty were received in this room, and Victoria usually retired here after dinner to play cards, sing, or play the piano. The cut-glass chandeliers were wired for electricity in 1893. (© English Heritage)" /> One painting in particular sums up the image of domestic monarchy that Albert, in particular, wished to project to the world: Franz Winterhalter’s 1846 portrait of the royal family (shown below), which hangs at the far end of the room. Victoria, dressed formally and wearing a crown, as befits her status, has been painted slightly in the background. Instead, it is Albert who is the dominant figure, leaning towards his son and heir, as founder of the dynasty, while other children play around him. “Albert had very strong ideas as to how the royal family should be brought up,” says Ridley, “and he was keen that the new dynasty distance itself from the scandals of the regency that had preceded it. Neither Victoria, nor Albert, had enjoyed conventional or happy childhoods. Yet there they were, with nine children of their own, desperately trying to project an image of being the perfect family and be an example for everyone else to follow. It was no easy task.” Victoria and Albert were first cousins but had had little contact as children. Although they had met briefly at celebrations for Victoria’s 17th birthday in 1836 – an encounter that had impressed neither party – it was during Albert’s trip to England in 1839 that Victoria fell for the German prince. After meeting Albert at Windsor Castle, dishevelled and windswept after his long journey to England, the young queen was instantly smitten. “It was with some emotion that I beheld Albert – who is beautiful,” she wrote in her diary. As a child, Victoria’s life had been controlled by her overbearing, power-hungry mother. Forced to sleep in her mother’s room and with virtually no freedom, Victoria, on her accession to the throne in 1837, was wary of diluting the power she had gained through queenship by marrying. Albert, too, had experienced an unhappy childhood, brought up in virtual seclusion with his older brother Ernest in Coburg after his mother was banished from court for adultery. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2018/01/EH20Osborne20200292020RobertSmith20201520-20small-7bb5e54.jpg" width="791" height="1200" alt="The Durbar Wing was constructed in 1890–91 to house Victoria's youngest daughter, Beatrice, and her husband. Designed by Lockwood Kipling (Rudyard Kipling's father) and master carver Bhai Ram Singh, the Durbar Room shown here was decorated with intricate Indian-style plaster work, which reflected Victoria's position as Empress of India, a title she assumed in 1877. (© English Heritage)" title="The Durbar Wing was constructed in 1890–91 to house Victoria's youngest daughter, Beatrice, and her husband. Designed by Lockwood Kipling (Rudyard Kipling's father) and master carver Bhai Ram Singh, the Durbar Room shown here was decorated with intricate Indian-style plaster work, which reflected Victoria's position as Empress of India, a title she assumed in 1877. (© English Heritage)" /> But despite her initial reservations – and perhaps deciding that marriage was preferable to remaining with her mother – Victoria proposed to Albert five days after their second meeting. The pair were married at St James’s Palace on 10 February 1840. “Albert and Victoria’s relationship was complicated,” says Ridley. “Albert’s initial status as a relatively low-standing German prince – and one with little money at that – meant that he was very much the poor relation. But Albert wasn’t particularly interested in titles and status – his ambition was for real power and a chance to rule. “Victoria's feelings about her husband’s ambitions were conflicted. On the one hand she adored Albert, recognising him as her intellectual superior, and encouraging his ideas. But she also had an incredibly strong sense of her own hereditary right. She wanted to share power with Albert, but didn’t want to give it up completely.” The dilemma was resolved in the short term when Victoria fell pregnant within months of her wedding, going on to have seven of her nine children in 10 years. With the queen pregnant or recovering from birth for most of that time, power had to be transferred to Albert. “Albert had strong opinions about how the country should be run,” says Ridley. “His ideas about constitutional monarchy were less about creating a monarchy that was limited and controlled by parliament, and more about creating a system whereby he would be in complete control of the whole agenda of the cabinet, with Victoria acting as the official mouthpiece for his ideas.” <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2018/01/IMG_9110-small-ccc0da0.jpg" width="1000" height="643" alt="Part of the dining room at Osborne. The room contains a number of family portraits, including the painting of the royal family, shown here, by Franz Xaver Winterhalter. As well as eating dinner here, Queen Victoria would sometimes take breakfast in this room if it was too cold for her to eat outside. (© English Heritage)" title="Part of the dining room at Osborne. The room contains a number of family portraits, including the painting of the royal family, shown here, by Franz Xaver Winterhalter. As well as eating dinner here, Queen Victoria would sometimes take breakfast in this room if it was too cold for her to eat outside. (© English Heritage)" /> Royal relationship Albert’s status is evident when, walking up the grand staircase, visitors are greeted by a life-size statue of the prince consort in Classical armour. Meanwhile, a huge fresco at the head of the stairs depicts Neptune handing his watery empire to Britannia. Impressive though these public declarations of Victorian power are, it is in Victoria and Albert’s private apartments – just off the first-floor landing – that the nature of their relationship is most apparent. The four rooms are small, simple and relatively self-contained. The sitting room boasts some of the best views across the Solent the house has to offer. According to Victoria’s journal she and Albert would stand on the balcony to watch the moonlight shining on the water and listen to the nightingales singing in the trees below. During the day, the royal couple would sit side by side at two desks, working through the many red boxes of correspondence that regularly arrived from London. The smaller, left-hand desk, still cluttered with photo frames and trinkets, was Victoria’s. “These items,” says Ridley, “were swept angrily to the floor when the queen was in a temper. But it is the image of the two desks, placed side by side, that encapsulates the nature of Victoria and Albert’s monarchy.” <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2018/01/GP20OH20crop202-8e32881.jpg" width="1200" height="942" alt="The nursery bedroom, sited immediately above Victoria and Albert's private apartments, was used by the royal children until the age of about 6. The swing cot was made for Vicky, the couple's first child, in 1840, while the table holds a number of baby limbs, sculpted in marble for the queen. (© English Heritage)" title="The nursery bedroom, sited immediately above Victoria and Albert's private apartments, was used by the royal children until the age of about 6. The swing cot was made for Vicky, the couple's first child, in 1840, while the table holds a number of baby limbs, sculpted in marble for the queen. (© English Heritage)" /> Albert’s fascination with new technology is apparent throughout Osborne – from the use of fireproof construction, to the plumbed-in bath, lavatory and shower that can be seen in Albert’s bathroom. His progressive ideas are also present elsewhere, most notably in the prefabricated Swiss cottage, which was erected in the grounds and fitted with child-sized furniture and a fully-working kitchen, complete with state-of-the-art equipment. Here, the royal children learnt to cook, preparing meals for their parents, and tending to the vegetables in their own little garden. Victoria and Albert: Five more places to visit Kensington Palace, London Where a princess became queen Victoria was born at Kensington in 1819 and grew up there under the watchful eye of her mother and her father’s former equerry, John Conroy, a man the young princess despised. On 20 June 1837 Victoria was visited at the palace by the archbishop of Canterbury who informed her that she was queen. Beaumaris Castle, Isle of Anglesey Where Victoria was greeted with joy In August 1832, 13-year-old Victoria, then Princess of Wales, visited Beaumaris as part of a tour of England and Wales. Despite an outbreak of cholera in the town, Victoria was greeted with much excitement and a festival of literature, music and performance was held at the castle in her honour. Windsor Castle, Windsor Where Victoria and Albert honeymooned Still an official royal residence, Windsor Castle is the largest and oldest-occupied castle in the world. It was here, in 1839, that Victoria and Albert had their significant second meeting, and where they spent a three-day honeymoon after a whirlwind romance. The royal couple are buried in the Royal Mausoleum built nearby at Frogmore. Buckingham Palace, London Where the royal family set up home Victoria was the first monarch to use Buckingham Palace as the official royal residence and moved into the building in 1837. Today’s front wing of the palace was added in the 1840s to accommodate Victoria and Albert’s rapidly expanding family. Balmoral Castle, Aberdeenshire Where the queen mourned in private Balmoral was a popular base for the royal family and was described by Victoria as “my dear paradise in the Highlands”. The scenery is said to have reminded Albert of his home country. The queen spent much of her time here after his death, often in the company of her Highland servant, John Brown. Monarchy in mourning Victoria was utterly devastated when Albert died in December 1861 and sank into a deep depression. Albert’s bathroom and dressing room were kept almost exactly as they had been during his life. Hot water for shaving was brought up on a daily basis and the queen kept his dressing gown in bed with her as she slept, surrounding herself with various pieces of memorabilia as constant reminders of her beloved husband. “As Albert’s lifeless body was interred in the vault at Windsor, a grief-stricken Victoria fled to Osborne where she remained for several months,” says Ridley. “For the first 10 years after Albert’s death, the queen refused to appear at any social or public function, instead choosing to remain in seclusion at Osborne, Windsor or Balmoral.” At first it was deemed appropriate for the queen to withdraw, but by 1871 Victoria’s persistent invisibility had thrown the monarchy into a crisis, and the beginnings of a republican movement were starting to surface. But grief suited Victoria to a degree, allowing her the privacy she craved, and an excuse to avoid the public appearances she found so nerve-wracking. “She stubbornly refused to change her behaviour,” says Ridley, “and it was only when the Prince of Wales [the future Edward VII] fell seriously ill that the tide turned in favour of the royal family once more.” Victoria never remarried after Albert’s death, and was incredibly lonely. Two friendships she formed in widowhood did much to revive her low spirits but caused friction within her immediate family. Highlander John Brown, with his gruff manner and lack of deference, took the queen riding in the hills around Balmoral but was hated by the royal children. Similarly, Victoria’s Indian servant Abdul Karim – whose portrait (shown below) hangs in the Durbar Wing – was resented for his close relationship with the queen. Osborne was an integral part of the queen’s life until her death at the age of 81. In fact, it was in her bedroom here that she breathed her last – not, as Ridley puts it, “in the bed she had shared with her beloved Albert but in a small bed in the middle of the room, surrounded by her family.” For all that, Osborne remains a permanent snapshot of the private lives of one of Britain’s most formidable royal couples. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2018/01/Osborne280813_005_JH-575bae8.jpg" width="1200" height="684" alt="The private beach at Osborne was a favourite destination for the royal family. Queen Victoria used the bathing machine here to bathe privately in the sea, while the children learnt to swim in a floating bath apparently devised by Albert himself. (© English Heritage)" title="The private beach at Osborne was a favourite destination for the royal family. Queen Victoria used the bathing machine here to bathe privately in the sea, while the children learnt to swim in a floating bath apparently devised by Albert himself. (© English Heritage)" /> Words by Charlotte Hodgman. The historical advisor was Professor Jane Ridley, historian and broadcaster. Jane’s most recent book is Victoria (Penguin Monarchs, 2015). This article first appeared in the June 2015 issue of BBC History Magazine
David Olusoga on house histories: "Our homes are often the sites of great dramas and tragedies"
The first series of BBC Two's A House Through Time turned an unheralded Liverpool townhouse into a media sensation. Now, fresh from filming a second series, David Olusoga reveals why Britons are finding the history of their homes so captivating. Accompanies the four-part BBC Two series A House Through Time
What are the first things we do when we move into a new house? We immediately set about stamping on to it our tastes and our identity. We redecorate, organise the furniture and methodically arrange our books – the carefully collected volumes that we hope say something about us and our lives. This, and the frenzy of cleaning and scrubbing that precedes it, is about much more than personal taste and domestic hygiene. It is also an attempt to exorcise from our new private space the lingering presence of its past residents. In order to make the empty frame of an old house into a new home, we attempt to disguise an unavoidable truth: that until recently it was the home of other people, and before them yet more people, a line of strangers stretching back decades and sometimes centuries. Our homes – the most private and intimate spaces in our lives, and the most expensive material objects we ever purchase – are, in some ways, things we can never truly own. Because, whatever it might say on the deeds, there’s no escaping the reality that we are merely the latest characters to appear on stage for an inevitably short cameo. People live for decades. Houses last for centuries. We are just passing through, and no matter how many layers of paint we slap on, or how many changes and alterations we make, we can never quite succeed in wiping away the traces of the lives that have been lived before us. Some people find it unsettling to think too deeply about this, but there are others who have no desire to exorcise their home of its former owners and tenants and instead seek to commune with them. The television series A House Through Time, which I present on BBC Two, has tapped into that phenomenon, and perhaps played a small part in accelerating it. What the series demonstrates is that, for some homes, it is possible to excavate from the archives a full genealogy, a list stretching back in time of everyone who has ever lived there. The team behind the series uses deeds, land registry documents, wills, tax records, maps (lots of maps), business directories, the national census, local and national newspapers, birth and death certificates to build what is in effect the family tree of a single house. Fans of the series are fascinated by that process of historical detective work, and moved by the human stories that tumble out of the documents. So many people were captivated by the stories of the former residents of 62 Falkner Street – the beautiful townhouse in Liverpool's Georgian quarter, featured in the first series of A House Through Time – that it has become an unofficial addition to Liverpool's list of tourist attractions. An endless stream of selfies taken by people who watched the series appeared on social media within days of transmission. Some people apparently took day trips to Liverpool specifically to see the house. The history of one’s home is becoming a new form of popular genealogy. People who have already traced their families back through the generations and the centuries are now turning their attention to their homes. They want to commune with the ghosts of past owners and residents, to discover their names and something about their lives. Chilling discoveries What those looking for the histories of their homes quickly discover is that, while the architectural history of our homes is fascinating, it is the flesh and blood stories of the former residents that really matters. The house, and its physical fabric, is the tangible link we have to them, but our true connection is a human one. What did our home mean to them? What role did it play in their lives? Were they happy within its four walls, or did misfortune overtake them? What scenes played out in the rooms we now call our own? Every house not only has a chain of former residents; it is also, inevitably, the site of a string of dramas and tragedies. We don’t have to go far back into our national past to find ourselves in an age where births, and also deaths, took place at home rather than in hospitals. That’s a fact that leads many house historians to chilling discoveries. And our homes need not be centuries old for them to be the repositories of such dramas. We only have to go back 75 years – still within living memory – to meet people for whom homes were not just personal spaces but the refuges where they sheltered from German bombs. Hundreds of thousands of homes were destroyed in the Blitz. Many houses carry the scars of bomb damage today. Those shrapnel marks and patches of repaired brickwork, combined with the documents in the archives, can transport us back to the nights when former residents cowered inside steel Morrison shelters in what are now our living rooms, or huddled together in Anderson shelters dug into our gardens. That most tantalising of questions – “Who lived in my house during the war?” – can be one of the easiest to answer, as in 1939 the government carried out a national register of every home in England and Wales. It was used to organise the issuing of identity cards and ration books, but eight decades later this special, one-off census provides us with a snapshot of Britain at the start of the conflict. As such, it carries the names of most of the 43,000 people who were to be killed in the Blitz, and lists most of the addresses that would not appear on the first postwar census. The comparatively easy, online exercise of looking up who was living in our homes in 1939 can be the gateway to deeper research. Townhouse to flophouse In the same way that the history of a house is much more than the architectural history of the building itself, the story of any single dwelling is something that spills out into the surrounding streets. The history of any individual address is intimately wrapped up in the history of the neighbourhood where it stands – then, as now, it is 'location, location, location' that counts. Both 62 Falkner Street in Liverpool, the house in the first series of A House Through Time, and 5 Ravensworth Terrace in Newcastle, the subject of the second series, are homes whose place on the ladder of respectability and desirability has changed over time. The latter was built in the 1820s for Newcastle's booming merchant classes, who were keen to escape the noise and pollution of the overcrowded quayside area. Yet by the early 20th century, it was a lodging house in an area that had fallen out of fashion and into neglect, outdone in the desirability stakes by the emergence of newer and swankier Victorian suburbs situated ever further away from Newcastle's heavy industries. It is these rises and falls, these shifts in the fortunes of neighbourhoods and whole cities, that make the histories of individual houses so fascinating. The economic cycle, combined with the coming of the railways and the expansion of city boundaries, condemned once fashionable districts to precipitous declines. They became urban twilight zones, and houses designed for wealthy families were subdivided into lodging houses or tenements. The pattern was so common that foreign visitors to Victorian and Edwardian Britain noted with surprise that the poor lived, packed sardine-like, in elegant homes originally designed for the rich. And it didn’t take much for a once desirable residence in a formerly fashionable area to become a flophouse. A new railway line cutting across a Victorian city, for example, could condemn the streets on one side of the line to decay and degeneration. Literally on the wrong side of the tracks, such areas spiralled ever downwards – and this was only one of the mechanisms by which houses built for the rich became the homes of the poor. Material wealth What this means is that even some of the country’s grander Georgian and Victorian townhouses have humbler chapters in their pasts. Without giving too much away, the history of 5 Ravensworth Terrace begins as you might imagine, with lawyers and doctors – men of means for whom the house is a symbol of social status and material wealth. A century later, the address had little cachet. For those who lived in its rooms – as it was, by then, a lodging house favoured by Tyneside’s Irish community – it was not a ‘des res’, but simply a place to pass through. What the two series of A House Through Time demonstrate, I hope, is something many historians are well aware of: that looking at the past through a highly particular and often narrow aperture can open up, counterintuitively, into a broadened and enhanced picture of the past. The history of a single life, a single year, or, in this case, a single house, can be unexpectedly wide-ranging. The new series follows the story wherever the lives of the residents take us – to art galleries and factories, abandoned docks, faded seaside retreats, cemeteries hundreds of miles away, and even to one of the battlefields of the American Civil War. The best historical biographies do exactly the same. As well as allowing us into the inner lives of their subjects, they also take us into the worlds they moved within and introduce us to the tensions and obsessions of the age. The makers of Who Do You Think You Are? have been pulling off the same trick for 15 years, following leads and exploring the surprising hinterlands they take us into. Yet while I understand all of this in principle, I am still struck by the fact that so many people turned on their TVs and laptops last year to spend four hours with figures from the past who were neither famous nor exceptional. A House Through Time presented the viewer with a string of individual lives, a collection of strangers who had nothing to link them together other than their connection to a single house in a single British city. Why did this journey into the past – something that on paper seems so pedestrian and (literally) domestic – prove so popular and so emotionally engaging? If pushed for an answer I’d say that, when it comes to the big things – life and death, birth, marriages, childhood, love and loss, hope and despair – the lives of others become universal. We recognise the parallels with our own lives and our own families. And when arranged into a family tree or the history of a single house, they remind us of our place in a longer story. And that we are just passing through. How to research your home’s history Sarah Williams, editor of Who Do You Think You Are? magazine, offers advice to budding historical house detectives The history of a house is as much about its past inhabitants as its bricks and mortar. As David mentions, if your house predates 1939, you should be able to find who was living in it at the outbreak of the Second World War because a register was taken to provide the nation with identity cards and ration books. Next, use census records to trace who was living in your home from 1911 and all the way back, in 10-year increments, to 1841. The 1939 register and census records are available on subscription websites findmypast.co.uk and ancestry.co.uk and may be free to access at your local library. To fill in any gaps, you can use electoral rolls, phone books and even rate books and land tax records, all of which are gradually being added to these websites. Historic maps are also increasingly going online. The National Library of Scotland has put online OS maps from across the UK (maps.nls.uk), while there are local projects such as Know Your Place (kypwest.org.uk) for the west of England. For old photographs, try historicengland.org.uk or visit your local record office and see if they can help; they may also have building plans. Always check an archive's website before you visit, as they often have guides to their resources and you may need to order some records in advance. For more house genealogy advice, go to whodoyouthinkyouaremagazine.com David Olusoga is a historian and broadcaster. His books include Black and British: A Forgotten History (Macmillan, 2016) The four-part series A House Through Time, presented by David Olusoga, airs on BBC Two from 8 April This article was first published in the April 2019 edition of BBC History Magazine
The house that Bess built: the secrets of Hardwick Hall
Which historical sites in Britain have played an important role in our history? This is the question BBC History Magazine's David Musgrove put to British historians while researching his book 100 Places That Made Britain (2011). Here, in an extract from the book, Musgrove visits Hardwick Hall in Derbyshire, which was built by the "fantastically wealthy" Bess of Hardwick in the 16th century...
It’s hard to know which way to look when you get to Hardwick Hall. As you step around the corner from the car park, the National Trust signs point to a sizeable window-filled wonder of a building to your left, yet plainly in front of you to your right is an equally large, and patently historic, ruin. Two grand houses shoulder to shoulder, but it’s not like they are tight on space – they are surrounded by acres of beautiful gardens within rolling Derbyshire countryside. The house that’s still intact is probably the best place to start. This is Hardwick Hall, as opposed to the ruined Hardwick Old Hall. By far the most striking aspect of its exterior is the glut of windows it boasts. ‘Hardwick Hall, more glass than wall’ is how the old ditty goes. Built at a time when glass was expensive, it was a clear indication of the wealth and status of its builder. Read more: Bess of Hardwick: schemer, social climber, scourge of Elizabeth I The dark side of Elizabethan England (exclusive to The Library) <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2018/07/1161832_crop-e351890.jpg" width="2765" height="1761" alt="A 16th-century portrait of Bess of Hardwick. Bess's talent, ambition and eye for a well-connected husband elevated her to dizzying levels of wealth and power in Tudor England. (Photo by Bridgeman Art Library)" title="A 16th-century portrait of Bess of Hardwick. Bess's talent, ambition and eye for a well-connected husband elevated her to dizzying levels of wealth and power in Tudor England. (Photo by Bridgeman Art Library)" /> In what we might consider today as something of a showy statement, that builder’s initials ‘ES’ are emblazoned above those huge windows in stone carvings atop the several turrets of the house. ES stands for Elizabeth of Shrewsbury, but the woman in question is more commonly known as Bess of Hardwick. Born in 1527, Bess married four times to a succession of rich and influential men, the last of whom was the Earl of Shrewsbury. She outlived them all and died in 1608 as one of the richest people in England. She built both halls at Hardwick, in the 1580s and 1590s, and the New Hall remains as one of the most admired Elizabethan great houses still standing. "The hall is a remarkable statement of female authority," says historian Hannah Greig. "It’s associated with Bess of Hardwick, who was fantastically wealthy in the 16th century. She married multiple times, so she has an amazing story of success in manipulating the marriage market in the Elizabethan era. But what’s so fantastic about the property she built is that she claimed it so completely as her own. On top of the building are these huge initials, and when you go into the house it’s full of her. I don’t know of any other property where you get such a strong sense of a single person, and that’s partly because of the amazing collection of textiles they have there." Listen | Kate Hubbard on the fascinating life of Bess of Hardwick who become the second richest woman in England after Elizabeth I The floor-to-ceiling tapestries that hang in most of the rooms are indeed incredible, perhaps none more so than in the Long Gallery, where almost its entire length of 51 metres (168 feet) and its 8-metre (26-foot) height are covered with a series of 13 Elizabethan tapestries, brought here by Bess in 1592. They have survived because her descendants, as the Dukes of Devonshire, inherited nearby Chatsworth House as well as Hardwick. Chatsworth was remodelled and refurbished according to changing tastes, while Hardwick was rather left behind as an unloved, unfashionable sibling. That is, until the 19th century, when the 6th Duke took a shine to the place once more and filled it with Elizabethiana and other antiques. He brought in a considerable number of new tapestries from elsewhere, but there are still numerous pieces from the 16th century in the house. Some of them include even more ancient fabric in the form of medieval vestments because part of Bess’s wealth derived from her second husband, Sir William Cavendish, who made his fortune as one of Henry VIII’s commissioners in the Dissolution of the Monasteries. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2018/12/GettyImages-532891844-c48ad22.jpg" width="6168" height="4080" alt="Inside the High Great Chamber at Hardwick Hall, where the walls are adorned with tapestries and a plasterwork frieze. (Photo by Getty Images)" title="Inside the High Great Chamber at Hardwick Hall, where the walls are adorned with tapestries and a plasterwork frieze. (Photo by Getty Images)" /> "The needlework is a form of expression available to women at the time," says Greig. "I like to think of those textiles as women’s writing, a display of female learning. We associate women’s power with Queen Elizabeth, but there were other women who could make a strong mark on the landscape and on the cultural and political landscape too." Bess herself may have worked on some of the embroidery, though she took time out from that to move with the great and the good of Elizabethan society. She was generally on amenable terms with the other notable Elizabeth of her day, though she did fall out with the queen on occasion, particularly after she engineered a match between one of her daughters and Charles Stuart without royal consent. The resulting child of that marriage, Arabella Stuart, was seen as a contender for the throne after Elizabeth. Bess also quarrelled with, and separated from, her last husband. He attempted to take control of Chatsworth, but Bess challenged him in court and won. That she survived and prospered through these years of intrigue and politicking reveals her strength and intelligence. Read more: Britain’s 7 most amazing stately homes Britain's 10 best palaces <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2018/04/sh2253-063-13645a2.jpg" width="5990" height="3999" alt="Chatsworth House, where Elizabeth I ordered for Mary, Queen of Scots to be imprisoned after she abdicated and fled from Scotland to England in 1567. (Photo by Chatsworth House Trust)" title="Chatsworth House, where Elizabeth I ordered for Mary, Queen of Scots to be imprisoned after she abdicated and fled from Scotland to England in 1567. (Photo by Chatsworth House Trust)" /> You could spend a full day admiring the tapestries and exploring the great state rooms of Hardwick Hall, but don’t forget to spare a little time for the Old Hall. This place was built by Bess between 1587 and 1596, but she appears to have decided that it wasn’t grand enough, so even before she’d finished it, work had begun on the New Hall. Nevertheless, the Old Hall was clearly a mighty house in its own right until it was partly dismantled in the mid-18th century, perhaps simply to provide a romantic garden ruin within the New Hall’s gardens. To poke around in the Old Hall provides a considerable contrast to the grandeur next door. There is still enough standing for you to ascend several floors and look down into the empty shell of the place (not something I’d recommend to those who dislike heights). You can tell that this was once a grand building from the gaps where its own great windows would have been, and from the plaster friezes that linger over long-lost fireplaces, suspended in mid-air above floors that no longer exist. With a mighty ruin and a mighty house to enjoy, there’s enough here to hold your attention for some time, and that’s without mentioning the lovely gardens around them. If you want to get a sense of how women were able to make an impact in what we tend to view as a man’s world, a day out at Hardwick will provide just that. Hardwick Hall was nominated by the historian Hannah Greig for 100 Places That Made Britain (2011) – now out in paperback. David Musgrove is Content Director of BBC History Magazine.
The UK government recently pledged to 'end homelessness' by 2027. But has such a strategy ever been attempted before and, given the success of historical examples, is it even possible? Writing for History Extra, Nicholas Crowson considers the question, tracing the history of homelessness in Britain from the Victorian era to the present day, exploring how people without homes have been grouped and treated…
Teresa May’s government recently pledged itself to eradicate rough sleeping by 2027. This came as part of a new Rough Sleepers Strategy, with a spending allocation of £100m, in which a coalition of government, local councils and homelessness charities will collaborate to address issues relating to access to housing, hostel provision and mental health. Setting aside criticisms that have been directed towards the policy (that there is no new money or that the policies are essentially a repackaging of previously announced initiatives), history suggests there is good reason to be sceptical about the prospects for success. Shifting perceptions of homelessness How ‘homelessness’ has been described through history matters. Today, the public continues to associate homelessness with rough sleeping, in large part because of its visibility. This is despite the efforts of charities, like Shelter, to widen the definition to a spectrum of need: from absolute rooflessness to temporary and insecure accommodation. Many of the public and the media suspect that homeless people are in this position after making bad life choices. Opinion polls frequently show at least a third of respondents attribute fault to the homeless. The labels that have historically been used to describe homeless people complicate the responses: vagrant; squatter; loafer; sofa-surfer; statutory homeless; dosser; beggar; of no fixed abode; and tramp are just a few of the names applied. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2018/09/GettyImages-3164662-d62a65c.jpg" width="3548" height="2866" alt="The labels that have historically been used to describe homeless people complicate the responses to homelessness, writes Nicholas Crowson. In this picture, a homeless man sleeps in Regent's Park during a heatwave in London. (Photo by Chris Ware/Keystone/Getty Images)" title="The labels that have historically been used to describe homeless people complicate the responses to homelessness, writes Nicholas Crowson. In this picture, a homeless man sleeps in Regent's Park during a heatwave in London. (Photo by Chris Ware/Keystone/Getty Images)" /> The words ‘vagabond’ or ‘vagrant’ have Latin origins and imply the aimless wandering of the dispossessed, while ‘tramp’ is derived from the verb ‘to tramp’, which means to move between locations, actively seeking employment. It was a term applied for much of the 19th century to artisans and skilled trade union workers who moved around the country supported by their craft or trade union. However, at some point during the 1870s, tramping because increasingly associated with a flotsam of unskilled labourers, displaced and reliant upon state and charitable assistance. And, so tramping assumed the negative connotations of vagrancy and social marginalisation. For contemporaries that employed these terms, each carried particular moral assumptions about the genuineness of need. The Victorian beggar elicited both sympathy and distrust: seeking a charitable penny was acceptable, but to ask again made them a ‘professional’ beggar – and pestering women and children meant they were a dangerous, ‘masterful’ beggar. During Victorian times, the wandering vagrant tramp was also viewed with suspicion. It was believed that these workshy individuals needed to be taught the value of work to encourage them to return to a settled form of living, hence the introduction of a work-duty (stone breaking, oakum picking, wood cutting) in exchange for bed and board in the Workhouse Casual ‘Tramp’ Ward. From the 1920s there was a gradual reorientation towards rehabilitating these individuals, but still through work. Read more: Have high-rises ever been the answer to our housing woes? Podcast: World War One at home <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2018/06/GettyImages-2628442-sml-db9cf7f.jpg" width="2457" height="1648" alt="A councillor and architects discuss plans for the Moss Heights development in Glasgow, 1953. Proponents of high-rise flats believed that they would provide" title="A councillor and architects discuss plans for the Moss Heights development in Glasgow, 1953. Proponents of high-rise flats believed that they would provide" /> The same ambiguity about people without homes continues today. The public appears willing to support street beggars with donations despite being urged not to do so by anti-begging campaigns employed by local councils, campaigns which mirror those promoted by local Vagrancy Committees in the Edwardian and inter-war eras. The past two decades have seen a gradual recognition that government (local and national) must work in collaboration with the voluntary sector to provide a multi-agency response to homelessness. In fact, the modern British state has never been solely responsible for the homeless. Since Victorian times, a homeless person could call upon the services of the Poor Law’s workhouse casual wards (known as Reception Centres after 1948) but also charitable concerns, like the Salvation Army, which operated hostels, shelters and soup kitchens, as well as private entrepreneurs running multi-occupation properties such as common lodging houses. The challenge of understanding homelessness is amplified by the absence of homeless peoples’ voices from history. Too often the experience of homelessness has been narrated and imagined by others, such as social investigators, charities, politicians, writers and the judiciary; the homeless areoften passive and voiceless. There is a persistent romantic notion of the tramp wandering the highways of Britain, which is nicely captured in a 1947 Pathe newsreel, which employed an actor to capture the ‘happiness’ of the tramp. The reality of the vagrant was very different. Reconstructing the life stories of Victorian vagrants shows many were incapable of holding down jobs because they disproportionately experienced, what today would be termed ‘complex trauma’ – ill health (physical and mental) disability, addictions and relationship breakdowns. Their homelessness was not a lifestyle choice. Their individual fragilities were compounded by structural issues, such as employment cycles, that could be enough to tip these vulnerable individuals from mere poverty into the abyss of the underclass. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2018/09/GettyImages-985034070-b337f7f.jpg" width="3072" height="1723" alt="During Victorian times, the wandering vagrant tramp was also viewed with suspicion, writes Nicholas Crowson. (Photo by: Picturenow/UIG via Getty Images)" title="During Victorian times, the wandering vagrant tramp was also viewed with suspicion, writes Nicholas Crowson. (Photo by: Picturenow/UIG via Getty Images)" /> Homelessness statistics With the problems of labels and definitions of homelessness, another challenge arises – how do you count the homeless? There are no reliable statistics, yet each generation attempts to judge the scale of the problem. Victorians relied upon collected figures including: workhouses for admissions to the casual ‘Tramp’ ward;police forces undertaking head counts of those sleeping rough; counts from the era’s common lodging houses or local crime statistics for prosecutions under the 1824 Vagrancy Act. The 1824 Vagrancy Act, after all, was a Georgian response to the perceived anti-social behaviours of military veterans and migrants congregating in urban areas. But the flexibility of the law’s statutes meant that a local homed person was as much at risk of being prosecuted for acts of anti-social behaviour such as begging, loitering, wandering abroad (rough sleeping), misbehaving in the workhouse, telling fortunes, engaging in or living off prostitution, or abandoning one’s family. In one notable cause célèbre in the 1880s, one which went all the way to the House of Lords on appeal, a group of North Staffordshire colliers, who were pulling a cart seeking ‘charity’ for striking workers, were prosecuted for ‘begging’. The act remains on the statute books to this day, and its critics argue that it criminalises the homeless: there were 2,365 prosecutions under section three of the act in 2015–16. The 20th century has seen endless policy inquiries prompted by the visible numbers of rough sleepers: the Departmental Committee on Vagrancy (1904–6), the Homeless Single Persons (1966) and the Working Party on Vagrancy (1976) are just some illustrations. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2018/09/GettyImages-929238568-049a54a.jpg" width="4885" height="3585" alt="Since Victorian times, a homeless person could call upon the services of the Poor Law’s workhouse casual wards and also charitable concerns like the Salvation Army. In this penny sit-up c1901, operated by the Salvation Army, people would be allowed to sit on a bench in a reasonably warm room all night long, but were not allowed to lie down and sleep on the bench. (Photo by: Universal History Archive/UIG via Getty Images)" title="Since Victorian times, a homeless person could call upon the services of the Poor Law’s workhouse casual wards and also charitable concerns like the Salvation Army. In this penny sit-up c1901, operated by the Salvation Army, people would be allowed to sit on a bench in a reasonably warm room all night long, but were not allowed to lie down and sleep on the bench. (Photo by: Universal History Archive/UIG via Getty Images)" /> Each time a crisis is declared, pleas for better insights into the causes of homelessness are made. Though if we concentrate less on the numbers (which we should treat as highly problematic anyway) we can use these scares to understand what they tell us about societal attitudes to the homeless. Those with dependents who are homeless are always viewed more sympathetically. But this sympathy is ambiguous. Once these families are ‘homed’, no matter how poorly, the public assumes the problem is resolved. Those who have expressed surprise and disquiet about the re-homing of the survivors of the Grenfell Tower fire in temporary emergency accommodation evidently appear unaware that this is the norm for modern families accepted as homeless by their local councils. In the 1970s and 1980s, homeless families were housed in B&Bs; today it maybe budget hotel chains, or industrial units converted into multi-occupancy dwellings. But as Ken Loach’s 1966 film Cathy Come Home showed, before the 1970s matters could be worse still: the 1948 National Assistance Act split up homeless families, placed them in time-limited emergency accommodation, and ultimately took homeless children into care. Read more: The cruel cost of the Blitz Where history happened: 9 places affected by the Blitz Postwar pressure One particular problem has always been family homelessness. In 1945 there were two million more ‘potential’ households than actual homes, in part exacerbated by the wartime damage to housing stock (Coventry, for example, lost one third of its homes in the Blitz), but also because the state was unable to build new homes quickly enough due to the short supply of building materials. Also, two-thirds of the skilled building workforce was either in the military or committed to other government reconstruction contracts. In 1946, only 55,400 new homes were built, and in the same year one of the UK’s largest acts of civil disobedience took place when 55,000 people rushed, in a matter of weeks, to occupy and squat over 1,500 ex-military camps across the United Kingdom, many in rural areas. The vast majority were seeking to escape the intolerable conditions of overcrowding, slum housing or because their homes had suffered bomb damaged during the recent conflict. Yet, the story is largely forgotten. According to police reports the majority were ex-servicemen and their families, or the wives of serving military personnel, and “of good character”. Ironically, the conditions of many of these camps were not much better than the housing conditions they were escaping. Most lacked basic services (water, sanitation and power) and the War Office had condemned many as being unfit for habitation. Yet these huts were structurally sound, some wooden and others of a corrugated-asbestos-cement construction. And despite often being of a dormitory style, the squatters set about partitioning, making improvements and organising the day-to-day running of the camps via committees. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2018/09/GettyImages-161730837-3814687.jpg" width="5281" height="3475" alt="The Second World War damaged housing stock (Coventry, for example, lost one third of its homes in the Blitz), but also the state was unable to build new homes quickly enough due to the short supply of building materials. Pictured are east Londoners displaced by bombing raids in September 1940. (Photo by Bert Hardy/Picture Post/Hulton Archive/Getty Images)" title="The Second World War damaged housing stock (Coventry, for example, lost one third of its homes in the Blitz), but also the state was unable to build new homes quickly enough due to the short supply of building materials. Pictured are east Londoners displaced by bombing raids in September 1940. (Photo by Bert Hardy/Picture Post/Hulton Archive/Getty Images)" /> The overwhelmed government transferred responsibility for the camps to local authorities to use as temporary accommodation under Part III of the 1948 National Assistance Act and with orders to restore utilities. Fresh waves of squatting occurred each summer until 1950. Public opinion was sympathetic to these ‘ordinary’ working people trying to escape the housing crisis. Pledges were subsequently made in 1951 by new housing minister Harold Macmillan to accelerate new house building to 300,000 per annum. Yet despite this target being achieved in 1953, a year later 19,000 people were still resident in these camps, and many would remain so until the end of the decade. It was not until the 1977 Housing (Homeless Persons) Act that homelessness was legally defined. It prioritised the state’s responsibility to rehouse ‘deserving’ families (the statutory homeless) in preference to the single person (non-statutory homeless) and continued the link between local connection and a council’s responsibility to house. The burden for looking after the single homeless fell upon charitable concerns or the state’s limited network of Reception Centres (whose closure was announced in 1985). The 1977 act has been revised and replaced a number of times, most recently with the 2017 Homelessness Reduction Act obligating councils to assist all who present as homeless. Read more: Escaping the workhouse: the Victorian war on child poverty History explorer: Life in the Victorian workhouse Does history suggest that homelessness can be eradicated? When Shelter, one of the UK’s best-known homeless charities, was launched in December 1966, it aimed to eradicate homelessness within a few years. This it expected to do by working in conjunction with the Housing Association movement and by commissioning re-housing projects of its own. At the same time, it worked closely with media outlets to highlight the housing crisis, and to generate funds by hard-hitting advertising campaigns. Despite raising millions of pounds, this goal was quietly dropped in 1970 – money alone could not buy a solution – and Shelter began to re-focus its activities away from that of a direct service provider to one of a campaigning and housing advice organisation. Governments have made bold pledges before: in 1990 the first Rough Sleepers Initiative planned to reduce the numbers sleeping on the streets by two-thirds with initial funding of £96m. New government initiatives were launched in 1999 with the appointment of Louise Casey, formerly of Shelter, to oversee the Homelessness Action Programme (1999-2002). Read more: Postwar squatters: a very British uprising <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2018/04/GettyImages-3092289-b7446a3.jpg" width="3543" height="2726" alt="Schoolchildren helping workmen construct a new estate of pre-fabricated houses in Watford, Hertfordshire in 1946 following the devastation of the Second World War. (Photo by Keystone Features/Getty Images)" title="Schoolchildren helping workmen construct a new estate of pre-fabricated houses in Watford, Hertfordshire in 1946 following the devastation of the Second World War. (Photo by Keystone Features/Getty Images)" /> In 2001 government claimed success at hitting its reduction target. However, what became apparent in the longer term was that many, who had found spaces in newly funded hostels (sometimes criticised as ‘beds in sheds’), were unable to sustain the transition to longer-term, settled living. Rough sleeping has persisted, despite the positive efforts of initiatives like ‘no second night out’ (whereby outreach teams aimed to intervene when an individual was found on the streets). In 2009, Boris Johnson as London mayor pledged to end rough sleeping in the nation’s capital by 2012. However, counts suggested the numbers of London’s rough sleepers actually doubled in that time. More recently an influential parliamentary committee reported in December 2017 that nationally there were 9,100 sleeping rough nightly and 78,000 households in poor quality temporary accommodation. The latest incarnation of that collaboration arrived in April 2018 when the Homelessness Reduction Act (2017) come into force. Time will only tell whether it succeeds in its stated intention of assisting all those who present as homeless. Or whether, as some fear, it allows central government to offload further responsibilities onto already cash-strapped local authorities and charities. Supporters of the latest Rough Sleepers Strategy will argue that in placing priority access to housing and welfare support, it is seeking to address some of the underlying causes of homelessness. Many of these organisations delivering services are offering vital support to some of the most vulnerable people in modern society, and they are doing so on the basis of lessons learnt since the 1990s. The problem remains that the response is reactive “crisis management”, and still does nothing to address the underlying structural problems surrounding social housing and the access to the welfare system. Nicholas Crowson is a professor of contemporary British history at the University of Birmingham and researches histories of homelessness from Victorian times to the present This article was first published by HistoryExtra in September 2018