This fascinating, fully illustrated volume is the definitive guide to every aspect of workhouse life. Compiled by Peter Higginbotham, one of Britain's foremost experts on the subject, it covers everything from the 1725 publication An Account of Several Workhouses to the South African Zulu admitted to Fulham Road Workhouse in 1880. With hundreds of fascinating anecdotes, plus priceless information for researchers including workhouse addresses, useful websites and archive repository details, maps, plans, original workhouse publications and an extensive bibliography, it will delight family historians and general readers alike.

Voices from the Workhouse tells the real inside story of the workhouse - in the words of those who experienced the institution at first hand, either as inmates or through some other connection with the institution. Using a wide variety of sources — letters, poems, graffiti, autobiography, official reports, testimony at official inquiries, and oral history, Peter Higginbotham creates a vivid portrait of what really went on behind the doors of the workhouse — all the sights, sounds and smells of the place, and the effect it had on those whose lives it touched. Was the workhouse the cruel and inhospitable place as which it's often presented, or was there more to it than that? This book lets those who knew the place provide the answer.

What was it like in a Victorian Workhouse? Was the food really as bad as we imagine? Take a step back in time with Alan Gallop and ask yourself if you could have survived in such harsh conditions.

The British workhouse is the stuff of literature and legend. But what exactly was it? Surprisingly, no full-scale history of the workhouse has ever been written. Here, historian Norman Longmate tells the full story, from its beginnings in Elizabethan times until its demise in the 1940s, though mainly concentrating on the Victorian workhouse in the years of its tarnished glory. He describes the circumstances in the 1830s that led to the opening of 600 new workhouses--an event that met with astonishingly little opposition among reformers. He also records the riots, the protests, and the pleadings with which the poor challenged their virtual enslavement, and the misery of their daily lives when they were finally incarcerated within the workhouse walls.