The Five
Page 5
According to her own account of events, when Polly left 6 D block in March 1880, she went directly to Lambeth Union Workhouse on Renfrew Road.2 However, it’s far more likely that she first went to the house where her father and brother lived. One who had never before passed through the gates of a workhouse would do so only with extreme reticence and after all possible alternatives had been exhausted.
It is difficult to paint an accurate picture of the Victorian working-class experience without the foreboding and ever-present shadow cast by the austere brick edifice of the workhouse. In 1834 the Poor Law Amendment Act sought to bring an end to what the government saw as the abuse of the system of charitable relief offered, up to that time, by local parishes. The poor were judged to be lazy and immoral paupers who refused to do honest work and bred bastards and enormous families while “living off handouts.” Now the government wished to compel the indigent to lead moral, hardworking lives by reducing what was called “outdoor relief,” or charity that was paid to impoverished families while they inhabited their own lodgings. Rather than giving them the opportunity to drink away parish funds or indulge in illicit sexual behavior that led to more illegitimate children, a new system of highly regulated “indoor relief” was to be meted out inside the workhouse. It had two main goals: to regulate the lives of the poor by forcing them to earn a meager sustenance within the filth-ridden workhouse walls and ultimately to frighten them into leading upstanding, industrious lives outside, in the community.
One of the workhouse’s primary functions was to humiliate those who were forced to rely upon it. Regardless of their circumstances, the old, infirm, the sick and abandoned, the able-bodied but unlucky were treated with equal disdain. If the head of a household lost his income, he and all of his dependents had to join him under the workhouse roof. Upon entering, families were divided by gender and made to live in separate wings. Young children were allowed to remain with their mothers, but those over age seven were placed in the workhouse school and isolated from their parents. All new inmates were stripped of their clothing and whatever personal belongings they possessed. They were then required to enter a communal bath and scrub themselves in water that had been used by every other person who had gained admission that day. Following this, much like prisoners, inmates were clothed in a functional workhouse uniform, which never truly belonged to them. Their diet was basic: watery porridge known as skilly, as well as small portions of poor-quality bread, cheese, and potatoes, and occasionally meat. Though minor improvements were made to the workhouse diet later in the century, by 1890, complaints about the need to pick rat droppings out of the skilly were still being heard.3
At the workhouse, no able-bodied person received anything for free. Both men and women were assigned work considered gender-appropriate. Men were generally tasked with stone-breaking (creating aggregate for making roads), pumping water, milling corn, chopping wood, or picking oakum. This latter activity was also often assigned to women. It involved using a spike and bare hands to pull apart old ships’ ropes, so that the fibers could be mixed with tar and used to caulk ships. Other tasks deemed suitable for female inmates included cleaning, working in the laundry, and preparing food. Life inside the workhouse entailed constant hunger, frequent illness, and poor sleep in a dormitory of pallet beds. Violence, including brutal coercion by staff, was common. Poor sanitation, restricted access to water, and exposure to vermin and contaminated food ensured that inmates suffered regularly from diarrhea and infections, which could spread quickly.
Conditions inside the workhouse were well known among those who gazed at its walls from the outside. The Poor Law Board of Guardians, who administered the system, wanted it that way. Just as the guardians had hoped, self-respecting working-class families came to pride themselves on avoiding indoor relief, crediting themselves with resourcefulness as they looked down on those who apparently lacked it. Within laboring communities, the social stigma of time spent at the workhouse was so great that many would rather beg, sleep rough, or become a prostitute than place themselves at the mercy of this institution. Neighbors rarely forgot those who had been tarred by misfortune, and many families continued to suffer the humiliation that followed a stay in the workhouse long after they had departed.
All her life, Polly would have feared the workhouse, and heard it reviled. Both the Walkers and the Nicholses were hardworking families who could hold up their heads, knowing that they earned a respectable living. Winning a place in the Peabody Buildings would have made them proud of their status and even more likely to look down their nose at those whose lack of industry or moral vice led them into the yard of Renfrew Road or Prince’s Road. However, in an era when divorce was an option only for those who could afford the exorbitant court fees, a working-class wife who wished to “officially” separate from her husband had to first demonstrate her desperation and destitution. Entering the workhouse was the only means of achieving this. Nonetheless, it would have cost Polly dearly. Many wives in similar circumstances described it as “the most humiliating experience of their lives,” which left “a permanent stigma.”4
In 1880, when Polly turned her back on her husband and walked out of her matrimonial home, she would have understood the consequences. It was an enormously bold step. While separation from a husband was not uncommon among the working class, it spelled the end of a woman’s status as a respectable member of that class. Culpability did not matter; according to the moral tenor of the day, even if a woman left her husband for good reason, she had failed. A decent wife was “enduringly, incorruptibly good; instinctively, infallibly wise,” and not simply for the sake of “self-development, but for self renunciation.” Her duty to her husband was “to never fall from his side.”5 Her responsibility as a mother was likewise fixed: to never forsake or abandon her children. Leaving the familial home rendered her unfit, immoral; a specimen of broken womanhood. In parting with her husband, she was also committing herself to the embrace of poverty and further degradation. Earning a living was barely possible. Traditional women’s labor, such as domestic service, laundry work, sewing, or home-assembly piecework, did not yield a livable wage. Unless a woman could take refuge with another male family member, she would hardly be able to support herself.
To a limited extent, the law recognized the situation in which separated working-class women found themselves, though it very reluctantly offered solutions. A wife needed to remain with her family, and the government, parish officials, and the law did not wish to encourage or make it easy for women to leave their marriages. Even if Polly had been able to afford the costs of a divorce, in 1880 a wife could not cite adultery alone as a grounds for ending her union. While a man could divorce his wife for a sexual liaison outside the marital bed, a woman had to prove her husband was guilty of adultery in addition to another crime, such as incest, rape, or cruelty. This Victorian double standard was enshrined in law, permitting a man to enjoy as many sexual dalliances as he wished, so long as he did not also rape the servants, have sex with his sister, and beat his wife too severely. Had Polly possessed the means to bring a suit against William, and even if she had been successful in gathering evidence that he was having an affair with Rosetta, she would still lack grounds for divorce. However, by 1878 there was another means by which women could extricate themselves from a marriage that had failed. Under the terms of the Matrimonial Causes Act, if a man had been violently abusive to his wife and had been charged before a magistrate with such crimes, the court would uphold the wife’s right to secure a legal separation from him. Fortunately, and yet unfortunately for Polly, William Nichols had done no such thing.
The reality was that most working-class women who wished to end their marriages had no other choice but to attempt to secure a type of unofficial separation with the assistance of the workhouse by claiming they had been deserted by their spouse. According to the Poor Law, a man could not simply turn his wife or children over to the workhouse and expect the ratepayer to foot the bill for their maintena
nce. Just as a woman had the duty to remain with her family, so the law viewed the husband as responsible for her upkeep, whether or not both spouses lived at the same address. If an able-bodied man refused to pay for his wife’s maintenance, the Poor Law guardians would seek to recover the costs. They would bill him for the expenses, and if the delinquent husband did not discharge his obligation, he would suffer the indignity of being dragged before the magistrate. This rule was the working-class woman’s only friend—up to a point. Workhouses were wary of becoming an instrument to domestic breakdown. Guardians were taught to be skeptical about women who turned up at the workhouse gates claiming “desertion.” “Continual quarrelling,” claimed the 1876 Handy Book for Guardians of the Poor, “the root of which is almost invariably drink on both sides,” was “most common among these cases of desertion.” A thorough investigation into such a woman’s circumstances was required before she could be viewed with any sympathy.
Polly would have learned, somehow, what was required in order to initiate this type of unofficial separation from William. Only then would she venture to the workhouse, planning to make her stay there as brief as possible.
As part of the admission process, Polly would undergo a verbal “examination” by one of the relieving officers. These officials determined what type of assistance the applicant was worthy of: indoor or outdoor relief. Polly likely endured an intimidating and censorious inquisition. She would have stood, in her drab uniform and cotton cap, before this man and been told to account for herself. She would have been asked to provide her complete name and her age, as well as information about where she had been living, her marital status, the number of children she had, and who supported her, along with details of his occupation and wages. She would be asked if she had ever received outdoor relief, had ever been inside the workhouse, had any savings, or had ever been convicted of a crime. The legitimacy of her children would be questioned. Finally, she would report whether “she has any relatives who are legally bound to support . . . her, and whether such relatives were able to support her.”6 Here, the particulars of her separation from her husband would be probed. In Polly’s case, the relieving officer was Thomas Taverner. He scribbled down these details with the intention of interviewing William Nichols.
Mr. Taverner, who rode about town in his own private coach, was noted for conducting business according to his own methods. William Nichols may have been summoned to the workhouse or the relieving officer may have taken the liberty of paying him a visit. However it came about, whether in front of his fellow employees, his neighbors, or inside the gates of the workhouse, Nichols would have found this meeting to be a mortifying experience. When questioned, Polly’s husband was certain to have asserted what he would always claim: that his marital breakdown was due to his wife’s drinking. Thomas Taverner, however, was not convinced by this story. Had William’s account been entirely true, Taverner would not have ultimately made the decision to allow Polly to receive outdoor relief rather than enter the workhouse. As the guardians’ handbook suggested, “Whenever it is found that a deserted wife is known to drink . . . out-door relief should not be given, but the workhouse alone offered.”7 Instead, Mr. Taverner, on behalf of the Poor Law Board of Guardians, awarded Polly Nichols a weekly maintenance of five shillings. Her husband was to pay over this sum, to be collected by Polly in person from Thomas Taverner at the workhouse every week.8
Ideally, in such a situation it would be expected or at least hoped that a woman separated from her husband yet receiving a maintenance from him would be taken in by a relative. But, whether through her own choice or as a result of a family disagreement, Polly did not go to live with her father and brother. Instead, she struck out on her own.
For a woman who had never before lived independently and who had always been surrounded by male protectors, this new mode of life would have come as a profound shock, both practically and emotionally. If rent for one room in a down-at-heel part of town cost four shillings a week, Polly would have virtually no money on which to subsist, unless she wished to take her chances at an insalubrious lodging house, where a bed might be had at four pence per day. She would also have to find work. While this was not impossible, the employment she was likely to have found would have paid poorly in exchange for seventy to eighty hours per week of grinding, ceaseless, repetitive labor, like that offered in London’s many large-scale laundries. Here, women who “worked at the tub” might receive “from 2 to 3 shillings a day,” while shirt and collar ironers, who slaved away in overheated rooms, were likely to earn 8 to 15 shillings a week.9 Polly might instead opt to take on “slopwork,” earning six shillings a day for sewing together cheap clothing: trousers, coats, skirts, and waistcoats. She would be paid by the piece and could expect to work from the earliest hours in the morning until late at night, with scarcely a break. Various types of home assembly work, such as making “fancy boxes” or artificial flowers, were also available to women. All of these tasks required nimble hands and speed; a woman might expect to work ten hours a day for as little as 2½ pence per hour.10 Factory work, which was no better than the other options, tended to favor younger female employees, and cleaning, or “charring,” was badly paid, poorly regarded, and demoralizing.
Whichever choice she made, Polly faced a loss of identity and complete isolation in a society that viewed a woman without a family, or a husband, with deep suspicion, or even incomprehension. The sexes had distinctly defined roles, and Polly, like every other female, would have internalized the belief that a woman required a man to guide her, govern her, and bestow meaning on her life. Tennyson explained this in his poem The Princess:
Man for the field and woman for the hearth;
Man for the sword and for the needle she;
Man with the head and woman with the heart:
Man to command and woman to obey;
All else confusion.
The “confusion” occasioned by a woman of Polly’s age, living apart from her husband and family, would have caused people to have concluded one thing alone; she was an aberration, a failure, and invariably, where the character of a woman was compromised, sexual immorality was also assumed. Regardless of whether or not she could support herself with laundry work or charring, the concept of a woman of childbearing age living and enjoying a single life was anathema to the Victorian era, regardless of one’s class. Without a man, a woman had no credibility, no protection against the schemes and violence of other men, and no purpose in life. Similarly, a man without a woman had no one to tend to his practical and sexual needs. It was therefore expected that men or women who found themselves alone would attempt to establish themselves in a new relationship as soon as possible. However, what was permissible for the husband was not legally permissible for the wife.
With Polly no longer present, William and Rosetta grew weary of maintaining the pretense that they were not in love, and early in 1882, they found the opportunity to remedy their situation. At some point during the late winter or early spring of that year, Rosetta learned that her legal husband, Thomas Woolls, had immigrated to Australia on February 8.11 The possibility that Woolls might suddenly reappear and assert his matrimonial rights was no longer a threat, which freed the lovers to set up a home together. They would have weighed their options carefully and calculated the expense. As an unmarried couple, they could not remain in the Peabody Buildings, and finding suitable accommodation elsewhere would increase the pressure on William’s finances. The five shillings he was paying to Polly was apt to make a big difference in his ability to afford a fresh start.
It’s unlikely that before he set out with the explicit intention of terminating his wife’s maintenance payments, William was well-versed enough in the law to know precisely what steps to take. After making inquiries, he would have learned that it was possible to cut Polly’s support by demonstrating that she was living with another man. According to the Matrimonial Causes Act, “no order for payment of money by the husband . . . shal
l be made in favour of a wife who shall be proved to have committed adultery, unless such adultery has been condoned.” Magistrates and officials recognized that couples like William and Rosetta might wish to cohabit with other partners (though immorally) following a separation; however, where the separated wife was concerned, this could only occur with the husband’s consent.
It is possible that over the years William had become aware that Polly had attached herself to another man. The 1881 census notes a Mary Ann Nichols living with a George Crawshaw in a room at 61 Wellington Road, in Holloway, North London. Crawshaw’s occupation is listed as “scavenger” and Mary Ann Nichols’s as “laundry work.” They both are recorded as being married, though not to each other.* Although she was living across the river from Lambeth, she would have returned there weekly to collect her five shillings and been seen frequently by those who knew her. Gossip would have reached William’s ears and now it was in his interest to discover the truth of the matter, a task that was easily enough accomplished with professional assistance.
Newspapers in London regularly featured advertisements placed by “Confidential Inquiry Offices” and “private investigation agents.” For a fee, lower or higher depending upon the complexity of the task, these businesses would “discreetly investigate family matters requiring secrecy.” Procuring evidence for divorce cases was always listed prominently among their specialties, as was having “suspected persons watched.” In order to confirm his suspicions about Polly’s living arrangements and wriggle free of a crippling financial obligation, William Nichols hired one such “spy.” His agent evidently followed Polly long enough to determine that she was living with another man in a state of adultery. Now, with this confirmation, William promptly refused to hand over Polly’s weekly sum and made plans to leave block D with Rosetta.