I had no idea that anything like the English workhouse existed in America. Here below is a extract from a website accesses 3 December, 2010. American Almhouses Similiar in Form to Workhouses and Prisons for ...
Almshouses were part of the 19th century institutionalized care. They were similar in form and function to workhouses with a different name, while others were separate but connected with workhouses and prisons. By 1903, there were over 81,000 inmates in almshouses across America.
The poor were considered an aberration of society. The almshouses' mandate was to separate, “the poor from their families and keep them out of temptation's way.”
The government bodies of the day felt that if the poor were institutionalized they could be rehabilitated. Incarcerating the poor in these almshouses would teach them the discipline they needed to be productive individuals.
These almshouses, or poorhouses as they were also called, often housed the poor, the ill, the healthy, the insane, and the aged, together in filthy, unheated and overcrowded quarters. Though some almshouses were properly cared for, an investigation of New York Almshouses found people were cramped up and, “wrapped in wretched blankets more like beasts than human beings”
Akseli Koskela comments: Interesting post. I always liked the way that Jack London dealt with “abyss” that you mention. As well as Down and Out in Paris and London —- when so many writers observe the same phenomenon I think you can safely say that it wasn't exaggerated.
Certainly there is no exaggeration of the abyss into which people could fall — not only in Nineteenth century London, but in the other great cities of Britain (and continental Europe: for example the Paris district known as The Court of Miracles, so vividly described in Victor Hugo’s The Hunchback of Notre–Dame). An excellent book to read is Kellow Chesney’s The Victorian Underworld (‘underworld’ in both senses). I remember part of his description of Smithfield Market, where lambs were simply thrown from street level on to the market floor, their legs usually being broken in the fall. And the fat on the walls was about a foot thick... Here is a piece from Wikipedia:
In the Victorian period, pamphlets started circulating in favour of the removal of the livestock market and its relocation outside of the city, due to its extremely poor hygienic conditions[21] as well as the brutal treatment of the cattle.[23] The conditions at the market in the first half of the 19th century were often described as a major threat to public health:
Of all the horrid abominations with which London has been cursed, there is not one that can come up to that disgusting place, West Smithfield Market, for cruelty, filth, effluvia, pestilence, impiety, horrid language, danger, disgusting and shuddering sights, and every obnoxious item that can be imagined; and this abomination is suffered to continue year after year, from generation to generation, in the very heart of the most Christian and most polished city in the world.[24]
At some time in the 1980s my wife and I went on holiday to Taormina, Sicily. While there, we visited Catania. Originally a Greek colony — founded in 729 BCE — it suffered a series of natural catastrophes over the centuries:
‘An earthquake in 1169 CE wrecked the city... An eruption of Etna — the worst recorded — overwhelmed almost the whole town in 1669, and most of what was then rebuilt was shattered in the earthquake of 1693. The subsequent rebuilding makes the old quarters of modern Catania a most complete and agreeable Baroque ensemble.’ [From Christopher Kininmonth’s Sicily, in the now long out of print Traveller’s Guides series, published by Jonathan Cape, and never bettered in my opinion.]
Wandering around this strangely dark and seemingly near–deserted city, we came across the market. We might have been transported back a century: the surface of the meat vending cart was pooled with blood, which dripped onto the stones; flies were everywhere, settling on the meat and the cheeses... the scene could have come straight out of Dickens or Victor Hugo. (Though, judging from photos on Google Images, the market is no longer a health and safety nightmare.) Looking at photos of Catania generally, reminds me of just what an extraordinary city it is — the strangest, in fact, that I have ever seen. The photo here reproduced gives a very good idea of this city of ‘ash and earthquake’.
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