settings
Jane Eyre vocabulary
432 vocabulary words, including people, places, music, artists, etc.
help & settings
[x]
-
workhouse
-
synonyms: spike ???
► definition
Definition:a place where those unable to support themselves were offered accommodation and employment. The earliest known use of the term dates from 1631, in an account by the mayor of Abingdon reporting that "wee haue erected wthn our borough a workehouse to sett poore people to worke".[...]Life in a workhouse was intended to be harsh, to deter the able-bodied poor and to ensure that only the truly destitute would apply.text from Wikipedia, licensed under Creative Commons - Attribution - Sharealike
image: By Albert Edelfelt, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=27920786
► uses
Uses:
At the beginning of 1847 Lurgan workhouse in county Armagh suffered a death rate that was as bad as the hardest hit areas in the south and west of the country and included both Catholics and Protestants. Throughout Ireland a third of a million people died in workhouses during the course of the famine.
PBS. Ireland's Great Hunger and the Irish Diaspora (2016)
---
Baldrick: I thought it was going to be such fun, too - we all did - joining the local regiment and everything. The Turnip Street Workhouse Powers. It was great. I'll never forget it. It was the first time I ever felt really popular. Everyone was cheering, throwing flowers. Some girl even come up and kissed me.
Edmund: Poor woman; first casualty of the war.
BBC. Blackadder, season 4: Goodbyeee
---
The Orfling and I stood looking vacantly at each other in the middle of the road, and then shook hands and said good-bye; she going back, I suppose, to St. Luke’s workhouse, as I went to begin my weary day at Murdstone and Grinby’s.
Charles Dickens. David Copperfield (1850)
---
The other went on lecturing her, predicting they would end in the workhouse.
Gustave Flaubert. Madame Bovary
help with search