The People of the Abyss - the opposite of Downton Abbey

If you look out of the college's back windows you will see some renovated buildings. They look all cheerful now, with gilded weathervane and sandblasted brickwork. But once upon a time, not that long ago, this was a prison. And the people confined therein were guilty of being poor. This was Stockport workhouse.

Yoe see the poor in places like India today - people living on the streets, scratching a living as best they can. Well, it was worse here. Being poor was seen as god's punishment. A comforting philosophy for those who weren't poor, to be sure; we still get it today from the tory party - bedroom tax, anyone?

Jack London was a successful american author. You may have read 'The Call of the Wild' or 'White Fang' at school. These were adventure stories set in the Alaskan wilderness. But in 1902 London set out to explore another wilderness, the east end of London. He disguised himself as a poor man and sampledu the life of hunger and deprivation that was the fate of most of the population in those good old days

.I've ben reading this book for months and I'm still only two thirds through it. It's not that it's heavy going, or even boring. It is just unremittingly horrible. Read it and see what the good old days were really like, then thank the moon and the stars that you live now and not then.

No - one was allowed to sleep on the streets, for one thing. Oh you could sit on a pavement all night, and thousands did; but go to sleep and a copper would move you on. Keep on doing it and you'd be gaoled - and unlike now, no - one went to the hellish victorian gaols if they could possibly avoid it. So the homeless were expected to look for work whilst having little food and no sleep. So they signed themselves into the casual ward of the workhouse just for a night's rest. Except you were in for two nights, because you were expected to do a day's labour for your foul food and verminous bed. And if you had any money at all, you weren't allowed in.

Workhouses didn't disappear until the advent of the welfare state in 1948. They were rebranded a couple of times, but even on the eve of the second world war there were almost 100,000 people living in them. So when you see the bunch of posh, rich sociopaths in the government attempting to dismantle the welfare state by stealth, read this book and consider what the alternative used to be.