Biography
It’s 6 o’clock in the morning and Teresa is exhausted. Every day, except for Sundays, during the summer, autumn, and winter seasons, Teresa wakes early and journeys to the St. Andrew Undershaft Workhouse.[1], [2], [3] Today is the 30th of December, 1799. She rubs her hands together as she walks to warm herself while the chilly morning breeze whips at her face. She silently thinks to herself about how much her daughter has grown in the past six months. Teresa solemnly recalls the time she got angry at her daughter in June and was driven to the point that led her to put them in this situation.[4] However, to be fair, her daughter’s misbehavior made their tough lives even harder. Teresa did what she had to do.
Her daughter, Teresa Junior, had been reluctant to help out around their private living space. Every time her mother asked her to help clean out the pots and pans or fold the laundry, she would fuss and complain. Ever since her husband, John, died a few years previously, Teresa Junior became ever defiant of her duties.[5] At first, Teresa was very understanding of this—she believed that it was a natural reaction. However, as time progressed and things got worse, Teresa’s only option was to send her daughter to the workhouse and hope that this would help reform her daughter’s behavior. Teresa owned close to nothing, and caring for a daughter who won’t help out was just too much to take.
Teresa arrives at the workhouse and begins work right away. She collects a pile of dirty clothing belonging to the poor living in the workhouse and begins to rinse them in tub of hot water. After she finishes rinsing all of the clothing, she brings them to the washing bench and continuously beats them with a bat to help remove all of the soaked-up water. Finally, she hangs them up on the clothesline to dry.[6] About an hour passes and she hears the bells ring—it’s a signal that it is time to eat breakfast. She, along with all of the other workers, heads to the dining hall.
They wait in a line to get handed a small portion of bread with a few slices of cheese.[7] For Teresa, meals are the best part of her day because they are the only times she really gets to see and talk to her daughter. Teresa is served her breakfast and quickly walks to the table in the back of the room and takes a seat at the right end of the table. She and her daughter eat here across from each other during every meal. She faces the line of workers awaiting their food and patiently watches for her daughter to walk in. When she does, they make eye contact and Teresa forces a smile, but she can’t quite hide the exhaustion lying just beyond the surface. She tries to stay strong for her daughter and hopes that the future holds a better life for her. Her daughter receives her rations and sits across from her mother.
After breakfast, Teresa and her daughter separate to perform their individual duties. Teresa returns to doing laundry, as there is much more clothing to go through by the end of the day. After a few hours, she realizes that she is extremely thirsty and goes to get herself a drink of water.[8] As midday approaches, the workhouse master fetches Teresa and takes her to the Workhouse Committee. Teresa requests a new gown, petticoat, and handkerchief, as her current ones were tattered and worn down from hours and hours of working in them. Additionally, the air has been getting colder and is able to sneak through the holes in her current garments. She is worried that her request will be denied because her daughter had requested and received a pair of stockings and a petticoat just a month earlier.[9] However, to her relief, her request is approved and she leaves the committee with a genuine smile on her face—she hasn’t gotten new clothing in over a year and it's the first good thing that has happened to her in a while.
The work continues and Teresa and her daughter are fed twice more throughout the day. After work, Teresa is once again forced to brave the cold as she makes the trek back home. She arrives at around seven o’clock and sits down for but a moments rest before she has to do house chores. As she sits in her chair, she reminisces about the days when her husband was there and her daughter was back at home—when they were all together and happy as a family. She longs for these days.
[1] We are assuming that Teresa decides to take Sundays off since she lives outside of the workhouse and has the freedom to choose when she wants to come in to work. England is also fairly religious (Anglican), so we are assuming that Teresa is religious and attends church on Sundays.
[2] We also noticed that in all of the Workhouse Minute Book documents, the entries were written in the summer, autumn, and winter. We are leaving what Teresa does for work during the spring open to interpretation, but we thought it would be interesting to use the dates of the book to emphasize that the Outdoor Poor were not confined to a set-in-stone work schedule and had the freedom of choosing when they came in to the workhouse. Perhaps she could have some sort of small business that is only functional during the spring.
[3] It appears as though Teresa belonged to the class of Outdoor Poor, so we assume that she would have walked or commuted somehow to the workhouse and back each day that she worked.
[4] We are assuming that there was one instance that pushed Teresa overboard. We know that her daughter had been misbehaving.
[5] We decided to have Teresa’s husband be deceased. It really helped us to combine the issue of Teresa Junior’s misbehavior with the unfortunate circumstances that her and her mother are both in. We also thought that it would help the readers to sympathize with those poor who were forced into this situations due to misfortune.
[6] Using what we learned from watching 24 Hours in the Past: Workhouse, we had Teresa’s duties be to do the laundry.
[7] According to Gressinghall, workers ate bread and cheese for some meals (459).
[8] According to “Food for Thought,” English laborers often ate bread combined with salty food that made them perpetually thirsty for water (260).
[9] We know that Teresa Junior had gotten some clothing a month earlier from the Workhouse Minute Book and Teresa had gotten a request for clothing approved on this specific date (December 30th, 1799), so we decided to connect the two instances.
