Christmas Day in the Workhouse

[4] It is Christmas Day in the Workhouse, And the cold bare walls are bright With garlands of green and holly, And the place is a pleasant sight; For with clean-washed hands and faces, In a long and hungry line The paupers sit at the tables, For this is the hour they dine.

And the guardians and their ladies, Although the wind is east, Have come in their furs and wrappers, To watch their charges feast; To smile and be condescending, Put pudding on pauper plates, To be hosts at the workhouse banquet They've paid for—with the rates.

[4][6] Christmas Day in the Workhouse was for a time vigorously denounced as a mischievous attempt to set the paupers against their betters, but when a well-known social reformer died recently I read in several papers that he always declared that it was reading Christmas Day in the Workhouse which started him on his ceaseless campaign for old age pensions, a campaign which he lived to see crowned with victory.

[8] He went on to write detailed exposés of the life of the poor for periodicals such as the Weekly Dispatch, The Pictorial World and The Daily News, which had been founded by Charles Dickens.

[12] An abbreviated and bawdily modified version, entitled "Christmas in the Workhaus", is recited by Edward Asner's character in the 1977, made for TV movie, "The Gathering" (although the poem is erroneously attributed Rudyard Kipling, instead of George Robert Sims).