A letter from the Union house, by Agnes Thornbury
An original letter written in a nineteenth-century voice; a period simulation, not an archival document.
In this letter, written in 1872, a woman who has recently begun visiting the women’s wards of a town workhouse writes to her sister.
My dear Harriet, you asked me to tell you honestly what the Union house at Kelsall is like, now that I have been a visitor there for a month, and I shall try, though I hardly know where to begin. It stands on the hill above the canal, a long brick building with forty windows to a side, and from the road it looks very like a barracks or a gaol. The Master is a tall, civil man who keeps everything in perfect order. The floors are scrubbed white every morning; the tin mugs hang on their hooks in rows as straight as soldiers; and the bread is weighed to the half ounce before it is cut. I confess I was at first a good deal impressed.
It is the women who have unsettled me. There are sixty of them in the old women’s ward, sitting on benches without backs from breakfast until bedtime, for there is nothing else to sit upon and nothing else to do. They wear the same striped gowns and the same white caps, so that on my first visit I could not tell one from another. They are not permitted to keep anything of their own. One old body, a Mrs Kitchingman, who made lace in Nottingham for fifty years, showed me where she had hidden a bobbin in the hem of her gown, and made me promise not to tell the matron.
Last Tuesday I took them a basket of oranges, which the Guardians allow at Christmas but not, it seems, in March. The matron took the basket from me at the door with a look I shall not forget. ‘We do not encourage favours, ma’am,’ she said. ‘It unsettles them.’ I was too much a coward to argue. I went in empty-handed and read to them from the Psalms, and they listened politely, and I think a good many of them were asleep.
Yet I would not have you think it all misery. The infirmary is clean and warm, the doctor is kind, and a girl of nineteen who came in starving at New Year is now plump and cheerful and is to go out to service in April. There are people in this town who would be dead without this house. I know that, and I try to remember it.
But I cannot get Mrs Kitchingman out of my mind. She asked me, quite calmly, whether I thought she would be allowed to be buried in her own name, and not as a number. I said of course she would. I do not know if it is true. I mean to ask the Guardians at their next meeting, and to take the oranges again, and this time I shall not give them up at the door. Your loving sister, Agnes.
“The writer admires the workhouse and the way it is run.”
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120 exam-style questions on Eduqas GCSE English Language 2.1 Section A (30%) - Reading, covering 2.1.1 Two unseen non-fiction texts, 19th and 21st century. Each one has a worked solution and a mark scheme showing where the marks go.