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“She sold her hair; she sold her teeth, but it was never enough. The baby became lethargic and ceased to thrive. She called it “wasting feverâ€�.
When the baby died no money could be spared for burial, so she sealed him in an orange box weighed down with stones, and slipped him into the river.
That furtive journey in the middle of the night with her dead baby was the moment when she finally accepted defeat, and knew that the inevitable had come. She and the children would have to go to the workhouse.â€�.”
― Jennifer Worth, The Midwife: A Memoir of Birth, Joy, and Hard Times

“In large groups of enclosed people who were not allowed out, infectious diseases spread like wildfire. For example, in the 1880s in a workhouse in Kent, it was found that in a child population of one hundred and fifty-four, only three children did not have tuberculosis.”
― Jennifer Worth, Shadows of the Workhouse

“The reason why Jane’s spirit was not broken was that she had a secret. It was her own special secret and she had told no one else except Peggy. She locked it in her heart and hugged it to herself. It was this glorious secret that filled her with such irrepressible joy and exhilaration. But it was also to be the cause of her greatest disaster, and her life-long grief.
The rumour that her father was a high-born gentleman in Parliament must have reached Jane’s ears when she was a little girl. Perhaps she had heard the officers talking about it, or perhaps another child had heard the adults talking and told her. Perhaps Jane’s mother had told another workhouse inmate, who had passed it on. One can never tell how rumours start.
To Jane, it was not a rumour. It was an absolute fact. Her daddy was a high-born gentleman, who one day would come and take her away. She fantasised endlessly about her daddy. She talked to him, and he talked to her.”
― Jennifer Worth, Shadows of the Workhouse

“Poverty ... is a most necessary and indispensable ingredient in society, without which nations and communities could not exist in a state of civilisation. It is the lot of man â€� it is the source of wealth, since without poverty there would be no labour, and without labour there could be no riches, no refinement, no comfort, and no benefit to those who may be possessed of wealth.”
― Patrick Colquhoun