In Victorian England, a workhouse was an institution where the indigent, including orphan children, were set to work in exchange for being housed and fed. In the 1968 film Oliver!, the title character is a child inmate of one of these workhouses. After asking for more food, the enraged beadle in charge of the workhouse parades him through the streets of the town in order to sell him to the highest bidder. (It’s been almost 20 years since I’ve read the Dickens novel the film was based on, so I’m not sure how this scene plays out in the book.)
My question is whether it was actually legal for a workhouse to sell off its orphan workers. And if it wasn’t legal, did this practice occur anyway?
From memory, in the novel Oliver Twist is not sold. He is offered as a potential apprentice, and the Poor Law Guardians offer to pay a premium to anyone who will take him on as an apprentice. (It was normal to have to pay a premium to secure an apprenticeship.)
I doubt very much that it would have been legal for Oliver simply to be sold. Slavery had been effectively abolished within Great Britain in 1772.
What the workhouse did was to give £5 (a fair amount of money in those days) to anyone wishing to take him off their hands. What we’re dealing with is not chattel slavery in the strict sense, but putting Oliver into “indentured servitude”. This was an institution where a person was apprenticed at a trade and in exchange for the training they received, and for room and board, they were bound to serve the master for the duration of the apprenticeship. You might think of it as a sort of temporary serfdom. The master could physically punish his apprentice and there was no guarantee of good treatment. In Oliver’s case, he was first offered to Mr Gamfield, a mean-looking chimney sweep. Chimney sweeps would use kids to crawl into the narrow, polluted spaces of chimneys; this was a gross and dangerous job and clearly exploitation. However, they go before a judge to ratify the indenture; Oliver begs him not to give him to that dreadful man, and the judge is kind enough to not approve the indenture. In the end, Oliver gets placed with Mr Sowberry, an undertaker, who uses him as a professional mourner at children’s funerals. The master himself is OK, but his wife and another apprentice abuse Oliver, Mr Sowberry ends up taking his wife’s side; he and the beadle beat Oliver, and he runs away to London.
There was however also a practice to re-settle poor children from the mother country with foster families in other parts of the British Empire. These “Home Children” were at times basically kidnapped into this scheme. Moreover, many of them ended up in families where they were exploited and abused. I have an associate from Nova Scotia who is a descendant of one - or two Home Children.
Yes, the OP certainly has the situation reversed. Dickens was a social reformer who used his stories to highlight the abuses that were common at that time.
Since 1576 the law had stipulated in the Poor Relief Act that if a person was able and willing, they needed to work in order to receive support and the legal responsibility fell on the parish.
After various reforms, in 1834 the Law formally established the Victorian workhouse system and under the new system of Poor Law Unions, the workhouses were run by “Guardians” who were often local businessmen for whom profit and power were the driving force.
Well, to be clear, it’s not me who reversed things, but rather the film adaptation. It most definitely has the beadle, Mr. Bumble, asking, not offering, payment for Oliver:
Customer 2 actually doesn’t buy Oliver as he absconds before Mr. Bumble concludes the auction. Eventually Mr. Sowerberry appears and calls Mr. Bumble over. We don’t see him pay for Oliver but it’s implied that he does.
Sure, but that didn’t stop people from engaging in slavery anyway. For example, it wasn’t unheard of for Victorian men to sell their wives outright, so I’m curious as to whether the same may have been true of parishes selling indigent children.
I guess that Lionel Bart thought it was more dramatic for Oliver to be sold.
Dickens wrote it differently:
“Mr. Limbkins, I beg your pardon, sir! Oliver Twist has asked for more!”
There was a general start. Horror was depicted on every countenance.
“For more !” said Mr. Limbkins. “Compose yourself, Bumble, and answer me distinctly. Do I understand that he asked for more, after he had eaten the supper allotted by the dietary?”
“He did, sir,” replied Bumble.
“That boy will be hung,” said the gentleman in the white waistcoat. “I know that boy will be hung.”
Nobody controverted the prophetic gentleman’s opinion. An animated discussion took place. Oliver was ordered into instant confinement; and a bill was next morning pasted on the outside of the gate, offering a reward of five pounds to anybody who would take Oliver Twist off the hands of the parish. In other words, five pounds and Oliver Twist were offered to any man or woman who wanted an apprentice to any trade, business, or calling.
“I never was more convinced of anything in my life,” said the gentleman in the white waistcoat, as he knocked at the gate and read the bill next morning: “I never was more convinced of anything in my life, than I am that that boy will come to be hung.”
It may be worth noting that second helpings were forbidden by law.
It’s one of those odd things that no-one can really agree on how common it was, but public wife sales certainly were at least an occasional custom among poorer, often rural, folk who wouldn’t be able to get a divorce.
The typical apparent situation was that the buyer was the wife’s lover and the whole thing was done with her cooperation; it seems to have been more or less a way of letting the village know that the former husband was no longer responsible for his wife, that authorities at least on a local level accepted.
Thank you. That’s very different than psychonaut’s claim, in which he offered this as an example of people engaging in slavery after it was abolished.
In these cases the wife merely switched husbands but remained a wife and did not become a slave. Per your link, they could at most have been forced marriage, but don’t appear to have even been that, and were apparently done by mutual consent for the most part (“Although the initiative was usually the husband’s, the wife had to agree to the sale”) or in some cases even at the insistence of the wife.
Indeed, some of the cases were via mutual consent, but the article also makes it clear that in some cases the wife objected, that in some cases the wife was auctioned to complete strangers, and that in some cases the husband sold the wife simply to enrich himself. Keep in mind that during the period in question, women had very few property and civil rights, were legally dependent on and beholden to their husbands, and were actually viewed by many as personal property. This is a situation that many modern-day commentators and scholars have likened to or even equated with slavery. The fact that women were bought and sold as chattel only reinforces this view.
I have no doubt that, regardless of the law, children (and other humans) are still bought and sold to this very day, even in the UK and the rest of the civilized world. I’d be surprised if, in Dickens’ day, there weren’t workhouses that sold children, though perhaps not as openly as depicted in the film.
Spousal sale is a major plot point in Thomas Hardy’s 1886 novel The Mayor of Casterbridge. A drunk young man, angered with his wife and infant daughter, puts them up for public auction at a fair and they are purchased by a sailor who promptly takes them away. The sale is, of course, not legally binding, but the sold wife doesn’t know that and makes the best of her situation.
