Emma Sheppard (1813–1871) was an English writer and workhouse reformer in Frome, who became widely known for her book Sunshine in the Workhouse and for efforts, both local and national, to improve conditions for inmates.
Early life
Emma Brown from Bath married George Wood Sheppard (1807–1894), the second son of George Sheppard, in 1834; they had a daughter, Mary Stuart in 1841. They first lived in Berkley House. In 1848, by which time she had had seven children, they moved into Fromefield House with George Sheppard senior, some ten years after the death of his wife, Mary Ann Stuart Byard.
Emma's husband was a pillar of local society: a JP, chair of the Board of Guardians which ran the workhouse as part of the Poor Law Amendment Act 1834, vice-president of the Frome Literary and Scientific Institution (now the Frome Museum), trustee of Frome charities, supporter of the Frome School of Art (founded by Singer) and of the Church Missionary Society. The Frome Times documented his public life. He addressed Queen Victoria at a levee in 1842. In this milieu, his wife had opportunities to examine the lives of less fortunate members of society.
In 1833, a cottage was built on the corner of Bath and Rodden Roads. This was built as a Dame school on her behest, before their marriage, as a school for the children of domestic servants and estate workers of Fromefield House.
In the Community
Emma became interested in her husband's local endeavours, particularly the workhouse and its inhabitants, making her first visits in 1850. She was initially taken aback by the empty life of the hospital wards and the lack of simple everyday comforts. Quite quickly she adopted the position of a workhouse reformer.
In 1857 Emma wrote a pamphlet anonymously: 'Experiences of a Workhouse Visitor'. This was published by James Nisbet of Berners Street, London (now absorbed by James Clarke and Co Ltd.). The fifteen pages were printed and sold for threepence a copy in Penney's bookshop in Frome. It was that shop and circulating library in 3 Bath Street which was the first premises in Frome to be lit by gas supplied by Edward Cockey in 1831. In the pamphlet she talks of seven years experience within a workhouse of 800 inmates. She advocates small changes to the regime that would enhance the life of the inmates: provision of a cup-and-saucer rather than one tin, which looks more fit for my dog to drink its water from'; more solid fuel than the gruel offered; above all, that the inmates be allowed out into the garden every day, and now and then allowed 'outside the walls to see their friends, and thus it is not a prison they are in, but an asylum for their helpless old age.' She mentions Elizabeth Fry and her efforts to ameliorate the Workhouse system.
Sunshine in the Workhouse
Her pamphlet was circulated, going through four editions, and gained so much attention that in 1859 as Mrs George Wood Sheppard, she expanded it into a book, "Sunshine in the Workhouse", running to a second edition in the same year. She noted in her preface that in the year before there were 704,300 people enclosed within 624 'dull and dreary' workhouses across England and Wales; this figure did not include the able-bodied, just the old, infirm, disabled and children.
She noted the extreme cleanliness of existing workhouses, but astutely commented that they were ‘painfully spotless, making one almost shudder to think of daily scouring under the beds and feet of the sick and rheumatic’. She was distressed by 'the monotonous rituals of cleaning.... which both disturb the bedridden inmates and potentially increase their rheumatic pain.'
There she gives examples "she has successfully arranged, by the aid of private assistance, to keep aged persons from the workhouse, and this seems to be a very legitimate mode of applying charity, and a likely means of encouraging persons to exert themselves in maintaining, at least partly, their aged relations. One shilling a week added to the 2s.6d. allowed by the parish is found to be sufficient to keep them at home." She records seven specific examples and 'of several more whom I am enabling, by this added 1s. per week, to live out of the House in their extreme old age'; she would like to see a countrywide system where a small addition to local funds could support the 'aged poor' to live out their days in their own homes, though her sympathy does not extend to 'the habitually drunken and worthless', who should be sent to the Union to die.' She is clearly dissatisfied that 'English Guardians can walk through these dreary wards, and because the inmates are clothed, and fed, and warmed, think they have fulfilled our LORD's parting words, - "Inasmuch as ye did to the least of these my brethren, ye did it unto Me." '
She is aggrieved by the ill treatment meted out in some workhouse schools. One of her correspondents near London found one small girl with 'her back and arms .... covered with great weals and marks of ropes'; in this particular case, the report to the guardians of the workhouse led to the dismissal of the master and his wife. Emma herself is clear that, in spite of rules that forbad the corporal punishment of boys (there is no mention of girls) except with the prior permission of governors, such cruelty must have prevalent. 'What are the joys of these poor children? I say, none - expect an hour's shivering play in a large, cold room in winter, or, in summer, a dried-up playground - not a flower or tree in it, no outlet for busy, roving childish limbs.'
In her efforts to compare her local knowledge with other locations, she visited homes across the UK, from Limerick (where with two of her daughters she visited a penitentiary for 'fallen women') to others in the south of Ireland, and others across Somerset. She was in active correspondence with a range of parties, from Liverpool, Northamptonshire, St Pancras in London and Kingston.
She does not confine herself to her own observations but calls upon Elizabeth Fry, Sydney Smith, Thomas Arnold, Bishop Armstrong and others to support her case for greater humanity towards workhouse inmates. She asks for small changes in the Poor Law to bring this about.
Fallen Women
In her pamphlet "Experiences of a Workhouse Visitor", she comes across a closed ward in Frome's Union Workhouse, the refractory or "Foul Ward". She is told it is for 'women of bad character', 'that no lady or gentleman can go in'. She finds 'ten wretched bedraggled women crouching round the fire'. Over time she is told by them: "What can we do? No one would give work to such as we; we must have either died on a dunghill, or gone back to sin."
It is difficult to ascertain how widespread prostitution was in Frome. Like anywhere in the UK in the 19th century it was certainly present. Lawlessness was in part due to economic trends. Independent workers were cast out by the developing factory system. Poverty held sway for many in a wool town where the economic power had shifted to the employers. Treatment of the poor was based on a model wherein unemployment and low wages were due to laziness rather than economics. The Poor Law Board of Guardians was established in Frome in 1837, replacing the workhouse at Welshmill that had been running since 1727, operated by the Parish Overseers of the Poor. Somerset Constabulary did not arrive in Frome till 1856 under the terms of the County and Borough Police Act 1856; other areas had already formed their own Police Forces. The contingent consisted of a superintendent, two sergeants and eighteen officers. Previous to that the law had been administered by two local constables. In the next year a new police station and magistrates court was erected in Christchurch Street West.
If the court and police records of public houses are examined, some view as to prostitution in Frome may be gathered: In 1856, soon after the Somerset Constabulary arrived in Frome, Superintendent Summers found six prostitutes and a group of soldiers, in the Three Swans in King Street, all worse for drink. “Do you know you have a lot of bad girls in your house?” he asked. The landlord said he had no way of knowing and let them drink on till after midnight. The next night there were even more prostitutes; one of them was ‘in a most disgraceful position’, four of the others absolutely drunk. The landlord claimed not to have seem them. He was heavily fined. The same Superintendent found four prostitutes in the tap room of the Victoria in Christchurch Street East, the landlord allowing drunkenness and disorderly conduct. In 1859 the Bridge Hotel was in trouble for cramming a hundred people into its small tap room, including several prostitutes. In the same year the ‘’Somerset & Wiltshire Journal’’ reported the landlord of the Clothiers Arms in Milk Street had been fined for allowing prostitutes on the premises. In 1862 one customer of the Three Crowns was charged along with her male companion for behaving in Bath Street ‘in a grossly indecent manner’. In the same year the Angel & Crown in Vallis Way was nearly lost its licence for drunkenness and ‘harbouring of prostitutes’. In 1865 prostitutes were arrested in the Bridge Hotel, in spite of surveillance by the police and threatened suspension of its licence. In 1868 the landlord of the Waggon & Horses in Gentle Street was fined for allowing ‘persons of notoriously bad character to assemble in his house’: four prostitutes drinking with five completely drunk customers. In the same year the landlord of the Globe in Vallis Way was fined for having ten women - some of them well known as prostitutes - drunk on his premises. In 1873 the landlady of the Ship (now the Artisan) in Christchurch Street West was summonsed for ‘knowingly allowing immoral characters for longer than necessary for the purpose of taking reasonable refreshment’; it was ‘an habitual resort’. In 1883 the landlady of the Anchor in Catherine Street was fined for ‘knowingly permitting her premises to be the habitual resort of reputed prostitutes’.
Emma Sheppard wrote to The Times of her concern for paupers with venereal disease: "Once they have recovered from the disease that brought them into the workhouse, they are ‘driven from the “foul ward,” (properly so called,) into the “wide, wide, world,” to inevitable iniquity’." In her 1859 book "Sunshine in the Workhouse", she writes of that ward: 'One may well say of it as one enters, Lasciate ogni speranza, quoting from Dante's Divine Comedy Canto III, 'Abandon hope all ye who enter here'. She saw a possible future for such women:I tried hard to get some of them employment, but they were too ill, or had never been brought up to work. Oh! how I used to long for some kind Reformatory Asylum attached to the Union Workhouse as part of its machinery, where they would be not only fed and warmed, as they were now; but where, when recovered, they could be taught a trade and be taught to live decently. .... for want of means some are turned daily away from that door, and then think of their only alternative, starvation or sin!
By December 1859, in an appendix to the next edition of her book, she had bought 'a house in the town at £6 per annum .... I bought some second-hand beds and bedding; a little needful furniture of chairs, tables, crockery, &c.; some new coarse sheets, blankets, and counterpanes; costing me altogether about £20. Then I placed an old woman, whom I could depend on, over all.' She called a meeting of the 'fallen', some of whom she had already met in the workhouse. She offered them accommodation: 'I was going to trust to their honour, for I believed there was still a tiny corner of right good womanly feeling left in all their sin-degraded natures which would keep them from disobeying one who was trying to befriend them.' Four of the women immediately accepted her terms (no alcohol, no locks but a curfew after five o'clock) and three joined the refuge the next week.