Hello everyone. It's us, your hosts Maddie Pelling and Anthony Delaney.

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Hello and welcome to After Dark, the podcast where we explore the darker side of history.

I'm Maddie. And I'm Anthony. Today we're going behind the foreboding doors of the Victorian

workhouse to ask, could we survive it? Let's begin by setting the scene.

You're going in a narrow bed in the workhouse ward. You haven't slept, no one has.

Around you, grown men twitch and scratch in the dark, maddened by the crawl of lice through

their hair, the bugs nesting in the straw. The heat is

suffocating. The air dead. They gave you a calico shirt when you came in. The doorman, the only one

with a trace of pity, warned you not to wear it. Don't, he whispered. It's crawling. Even the bread he handed you was alive with insects.

The men say this is the foulest workhouse in all of London. They say you'll be eaten alive before dawn.

That night, you watch the moonlit walls, the wooden floorboards that seem to pulse with movement from

underneath. Lice pour from every crack like bees about to hive, a churning mass of legs and wings,

all racing to your beds. Some of the others have started groaning now. The nightly vomiting has set in. The smell thickens.

And when the sun rises?

...