Bentham, dickens, and the uses of the workhouse.(Critical Essay) From: Studies in English Literature, 1500-1900 | Date: September 22, 2001| Author: Stokes, Peter M. | COPYRIGHT 2001 Rice University. This material is published under license from the publisher through the Gale Group, Farmington Hills, Michigan.  All inquiries regarding rights should be directed to the Gale Group.Copyright information

The Victorian workhouse has come to symbolize on one hand systematic, institutional cruelty informed by abstract economic principles, and on the other hand the moral heroism of social critics who saw through and indignantly protested this inhumane dogma. This is another way of saying that the workhouse is strongly associated with Jeremy Bentham and Charles Dickens. (1) To maintain this polarity between villainous theorist and heroic novelist, however, is to be ungenerous to both pa...