维多利亚时代小说中的济贫院书写

Workhouse writing in Victorian fiction

1834年新《济贫法》要求每个教区建立一个联合济贫院,禁止院外救济,采取“济贫院检验”和“劣等处置”等威慑性原则,实施惩罚性“监狱”管理模式,目的是以贫治贫,淘汰老弱。狄更斯、勃朗特、特罗洛普、盖斯凯尔夫人、爱略特和哈代等一大批维多利亚时代作家们本着批判现实和改革社会的目的,控诉济贫院对贫民实施的监狱式管控的残忍,直陈英国济贫制度的虚伪,同时揭橥对自助与互助想象的幻灭、对社会贫困与人间苦难的同情。

The New Poor Law of 1834 stipulates that each parish should establish a joint workhouse,prohibit outdoor relief,adopt deterrent principles such as“the workhouse test”and“less eligibility”,and implement strict admission examination and punitive“prison-type”management.The aim is to cure poverty with poverty and eliminate the old and the weak.While revealing the disillusionment with the imagination of self and mutual aids,and their sympathy for social poverty and human misery,a large number of Victorian writers represented by Charles Dickens,Charlotte Bronte,Francis Trollope,Mrs Gaskell,George Eliot and Thomas Hardy,by means of critical realism and social reform,complain about the cruelty of prison control imposed on the poor by workhouses and expose the hypocrisy of the English poor relief system.