Taking control: gossip, community and conflict in basford union workhouse 1836 to 1871

The workhouse is the totemic symbol of our understandings about the harsh life faced by the poor of nineteenth-century England. Workhouse paupers provide the human embodiment of this symbol, characterized, according to well-established assumption, in the words of David Englander, as the victims rather than makers of history. This article argues that this assumption is, in fact, false. At the core of its research is the pauper perspective. This is used to understand the role played by gossip in pauper agency at Basford Union Workhouse. The basic premise here is that much can be learnt from social exchanges, including idle and aimless talk, about the formation of social relationships and the way in which the exercise of power was manifest. This study brings a rarely used perspective to the narrative surrounding paupers under the New Poor Law, a specific focus on workhouse gossip not previously attempted. Overall, the words and writings of Basford Union's pauper inmates, augmented by relevant testimony from people in the community, and from official sources, create a sense that Basford's indoor poor depended on each other. It was they, and not the Union's officers who ‘powered’ the workhouse machine, and this independency was forged through chatter. Inter-pauper conflict was not unusual and the fracture lines between officer and pauper, and between pauper and pauper, were intertwined. These paupers' participation in the gossip of the workhouse, allowed them, however, to negotiate their own circumstances in a way that has often been under-estimated in the historiography.