Houses of Terror, Castles of Despair: Nightmarish Necropoetics and Necropolitics in the Victorian Workhouse

Abstract

This essay brings Achille Mbembe’s intellectually trenchant theory of necropower to bear on the early Victorian era’s most despised and iconic institution, known as the workhouse, arguably one of the most preeminent emblems of democracy’s nocturnal body located within Britain. Regarded by many of its critics as enacting the Utilitarian, inhumane, and ‘mechanistic’ treatment of the poor (Crowther, ‘Workhouse’ 194), the workhouse was frequently portrayed using the Gothic mode as a necropolitical institution, a death manufactory that monstrously combined prison, factory, asylum, slaughterhouse, and dead house – some of society’s most dehumanizing, disciplinary, and dreaded locales. Taking posters, illustrations, broadside ballads, penny dreadfuls, and novels as its primary sources – cultural productions with working and lower-middle class readerships for whom the workhouse and the Anatomy Act posed the greatest threat – this essay examines the workhouse through socio-political, economic, and theological lenses, and relevant scholarship in the rapidly expanding, interdisciplinary field of Thanatology Studies. It contextualises Workhouse Gothic in relation to Victorian Christian beliefs and attitudes towards death, dying, mourning, and memorialisation, phenomena and concerns that span both sides of the grave, and discusses what was at stake in those cultural narratives in relation to domestic and national values, and the development of working-class identity, subjectivity, and class consciousness.