Shadows of the Workhouse by Jennifer Worth

In the 1950s Jennifer Worth became a midwife attached to a convent in the East End. The system wasn't abolished until the 1930s and then only in name. What most of us don't realise is how long 'the Workhouse' survived. But it did have a ring of finality about it, a fate every bit as terminal as a revolution tumbrel. The very fact that we use those words carted off implies an inescapable fate. Pictures of grimy people in 1800s unable to fend for themselves, ending up destitute and scared and carted off to the workhouse. What does that make you think of? Dickens probably. Evocative, heartbreaking, and a valid historical social record. In Shadows she shares some of their life stories with us. This is an enduring work of literary nonfiction, at once a warmhearted coming-of-age story and a startling look at people's lives in the poorest section of postwar London.Summary: Jennifer Worth worked as a midwife-cum-district-nurse in Poplar and the Isle of Dogs in the 1950s, working among people whose lives had always been hard. Though these are stories of unimaginable hardship, what shines through each is the resilience of the human spirit and the strength, courage, and humor of people determined to build a future for themselves against the odds.

Collett, a Boer War veteran, lost his family in the two world wars and died in the workhouse.

Bubbly Jane's spirit was broken by the cruelty of the workhouse master until she found kindness and romance years later at Nonnatus House.

Orphaned brother and sister Peggy and Frank lived in the workhouse until Frank got free and returned to rescue his sister. Woven into the ongoing tales of her life in the East End are the true stories of the people Worth met who grew up in the dreaded workhouse, a Dickensian institution that limped on into the middle of the twentieth century. When twenty-two-year-old Jennifer Worth, from a comfortable middle-class upbringing, went to work as a midwife in the direst section of postwar London, she not only delivered hundreds of babies and touched many lives, she also became the neighborhood's most vivid chronicler. The sequel to Jennifer Worth's New York Times bestselling memoir and the basis for the PBS series Call the Midwife

Shadows of the Workhouse by Jennifer Worth