crowyhead 's review for:

Call the Midwife: Shadows of the Workhouse by Jennifer Worth

4.0

---

This volume of Jennifer Worth's memoirs focuses on her experiences with people in her Poplar community whose lives were irrevocably impacted by the workhouses. I feel like this is such important reading, because it's so easy to forget how recently these institutions loomed large in the minds of folks living in poverty. I thought of them as a Victorian institution, and in a way they were, but it's easy to forget that in 1950, the "Victorian era" was astonishingly recent -- and the workhouses did not close until the 1930s. One of the most depressing and disheartening aspects of the stories was realizing the impact it had on the residents of these communities when the workhouses were repurposed as hospitals, asylums, and nursing homes. The idea of someone who had been an inmate of a workhouse returning their at the end of their life… for a lot of people, it must have seemed as though they had never escaped.

This is sobering reading, but the tales are also moving and deftly told.