Hello and welcome to the political orphanage, a home for plucky misfits and problem solvers.

I'm your host, Andrew Heaton.

Charles Dickens was not a fan of the Industrial Revolution.

In a Walk in a Workhouse, written in 1850, he described the congregation as follows.

Mumbling, bleary-eyed, spectacled, stupid, deaf, lame, vacantly winking in the gleams of sun that now and then crept in through the open doors

from the paved yard, shading their listening ears or blinking eyes with their withered hands,

pouring over their books, leering at nothing, going to sleep, crouching and drooping in corners.

There were weird old women, all skeleton within, all bonnet and cloak

without, continually wiping their eyes with dirty dusters of pocket-handkerchiefs, and there were ugly

old crones, both male and female, with a ghastly kind of contentment upon them, which was not at all comforting to see.

On that tour, he visits a room, a purgatory of sorts, according to him,

with eight lunatic women ranting to one another under the supervision of one sane resident.

And in their midst, a rather unfortunate 20-something, who was perfectly sane but suffered from epileptic

fits, so had been imprisoned there in the room full of lunatics, where she bitterly complained

about how difficult it was to sleep amidst the ranting. Dickens said of her, if this girl had

stolen her mistress's watch, I do not hesitate to say she would in all probability have been infinitely

better off. We've come to this absurd, this dangerous, this monstrous past that the dishonest

felon is in respect of cleanliness, order, diet, and accommodation better provided for

and taken care of than the honest Popper.

In other words, there in Victorian England, it was better to be in prison than in poverty.

Dickens is kind of the poet laureate of cruelty and poverty in this era, and he came by it honestly.

His father had been in some financial trouble and got sent to

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