Grim insight into daily grind of life in the workhouse

Thomas Marriott took a suitably dim view of the behaviour of the 796 "vagrants and trampers" who benefited in 1870 from the generous care offered by the Southwell Workhouse.

As the man entrusted with ensuring standards in this Nottinghamshire bastion of Victorian social engineering, Mr Marriott indignantly reported that in one month alone four paupers had set fire to their bedding. Writing to the guardians of the workhouse, he added: "Twelve were committed to prison for destroying their clothes; 18 had broken up the wooden bedsteads and burnt them, notwithstanding they had been supplied with a fire and warm gruel as well as bread on account of the severity of the weather."

The exasperation of Mr Marriott, a real-life version of that expressed by Mr Bumble in Oliver Twist, is just one of thousands of grim but fascinating insights into the daily grind of a Victorian workhouse offered for the first time by a free electronic archive.

Described as "invaluable" for research into Victorian social history, the records chronicle early attempts to provide a social safety net in the Midlands, from the appalling medical care suffered by an impoverished mother of twins to an illicit affair between the workhouse's two teachers.

The 5,000 documents from the Southwell Workhouse Poor Law Union between 1834 and 1871 went online yesterday after a remarkable five-year partnership between the National Archives and a group of enthusiasts. Without the resources necessary to read and catalogue the muddled records, part of a vast library of documents covering all Victorian workhouses inherited from the Ministry of Health, the National Archives handed over electronic copies to the Southwell Workhouse Research Group, based in the property, which is owned by the National Trust.

The 20 volunteers then painstakingly read through the vast quantities of correspondence, memos and reports written in the spidery script of the era, providing a detailed description of the contents of each document so it could be searched online.

Dr Paul Carter, principal modern records specialist at the National Archives in Kew, said: "It has been a unique project to make public a really important but normally pretty inaccessible set of archives.

"The result is a fantastic collection which is invaluable for researchers in a number of areas from pauper education to the medical treatment that was available to the poor in Victorian society."

Among the first-hand accounts of life in rural Nottinghamshire at the height of the Industrial Revolution offered by the archive is the case of Sarah Mayfield, a "poor woman" who was dangerously ill after a botched delivery of twins by an untrained midwife.

The archive includes a letter to the Poor Law Commission in London, which oversaw the workhouses, from a Southwell surgeon, Mr H R Smith, asking to be reimbursed a £2 fee resulting from him being called out to treat Mrs Mayfield.

The surgeon describes in graphic detail the treatment received by his patient at the hands of the local midwife: "I found the patient had been delivered of twins [and] on inquiry I found that the midwife after the birth of the first child had been using her utmost endeavours for some time to extract the deficient placenta using no special instrument. As a natural consequence a great amount of haemorrhage was the result as well as concern [that] great injury was done to the uterus and its appendages."

The Southwell Workhouse, which was built in 1824 by a wealthy philanthropic vicar and is one of the finest surviving examples of its type, was part of the austere Poor Law system brought into place in 1834. Under the strict terms of the legislation, parishes clubbed together to form Poor Law Unions to provide prison-like workhouses where conditions were deliberately designed to be as brutal as possible to ensure it was a very last resort for the impoverished.

Inmates were made to dress in uniforms, live in segregated quarters and engage in punishing work, such as picking rope, in return for meagre rations.

Even Southwell, considered a model institution, was found to be lacking. Robert Weale, a Poor Law inspector who visited the workhouse in 1863, wrote: "The main defect is the lack of a dining room, but there is no chance of this being provided. Also the sick wards are in the main part of the workhouse and the infectious wards are small... The school is tolerably well conducted. There is an urgent need for a ward for female vagrants."

Derek Wileman, one of the local historians involved in abridging the documents, which can be accessed at www.nationalarchives.gov. uk/workhouse, said: "The documents are surprising and rewarding for the individual stories they contain. They are not all sad. I found a nine-year-old boy who was deaf but comes through the workhouse to become a tailor."

Such has been the success of the project that the National Archive is applying for additional funding to allow up to 130 other history societies to catalogue records for their own local workhouse.

How Charles Dickens described the workhouse

From "Oliver Twist", published in 1839

The room in which the boys were fed was a large stone hall, with a copper at one end: out of which the master, assisted by one or two women, ladled the gruel at mealtimes...

The bowls never wanted washing. The boys polished them with their spoons till they shone again; and when they had performed this operation (which never took very long, the spoons being nearly as large as the bowls), they would sit staring at the copper, with such eager eyes, as if they could have devoured the very bricks of which it was composed; employing themselves, meanwhile, in sucking their fingers most assiduously, with the view of catching up any stray splashes of gruel that might have been cast thereon.

Oliver Twist and his companions suffered the tortures of slow starvation for three months: at last they got so voracious and wild with hunger, that one boy, who was tall for his age ... hinted darkly to his companions, that unless he had another basin of gruel per diem, he was afraid he might some night happen to eat the boy who slept next to him, who happened to be a weakly youth of tender age.

He had a wild, hungry eye; and they implicitly believed him. A council was held; lots were cast who should walk up to the master after supper that evening, and ask for more; and it fell to Oliver Twist.