Call the Midwife: Shadows of the Workhouse by Jennifer Worth

Call the Midwife: Shadows of the Workhouse by Jennifer Worth --- 294 pages

This is a continuation of the real life story, published in 2005, that inspired the BBC/PBS series "Call the Midwife."

Lee was hired as a staff nurse at the London Hospital in Whitechapel, in London's East End, in the early 1950s. With the Sisters of St. John the Divine, an Anglican community of nuns, she worked among the poor of London's docklands during the social upheavals of the post war years.

In this volume of her memoirs, Worth focuses on stories of people she met whose lives were affected (some for better but most for worst) by the infamous British institution of the workhouse. The workhouse system was established by the Poor Law Amendment Act of 1834 as a means of providing for the needs of the destitute. It was the first attempt at an organized system of social welfare in Britain, at a time when the Industrial Revolution was upending the economy and the population was exploding. Millions of unemployed and dispossessed agricultural workers descended on the cities, desperate for work and ruthlessly exploited by the new order.  Anyone judged to be unfit or unable to fend for themselves was rounded up by local officers and sent to the workhouse. Once committed, few ever emerged, and those that did were often traumatized for life by the brutality of the system.

The workhouses were officially closed by an Act of Parliament in 1930, but there were thousands of inmates who had been institutionalized for so long they could not function on their own in the outside world. So the former workhouses were "re-branded" as "public assistance institutions;" and continued --- with a few cosmetic changes but basically run in the same manner --- as mental hospitals, nursing homes, orphanages, infirmaries and such, well past the midpoint of the 20th century. The stigma of the workhouse continued to be associated with these institutions, and in areas like the East End, people were still terrified of ending up in them.

Worth has a wonderful knack for bringing people to life and revealing the immense vitality of the Cockney community and a way of life now vanished. Her first book, Call the Midwife, was published in 2002, followed by Shadows of the Workhouse in 2005, and Farewell to the East End in 2009. All three books became best sellers in Great Britain. The BBC began broadcasting the series "Call the Midwife," based on her memoirs, in January 2012. The series was rebroadcast on PBS in America later that same year. Responding to popular and critical acclaim, a second series followed in 2013.