The Act of 1834, and its subsequent administration by men like Chadwick and K a y , was perhaps the most sustained attempt to impose an ideological dogma, in defiance of the evidence of human need, in English history. No discussion of the standard-of-living after 1834 can make sense which does not examine the consequences, as troubled Boards of Guardians tried to apply Chadwick's insane Instructional Circulars as to the abolition or savage restriction of out-relief in depressed industrial centres; and which does not follow the missionary zeal of the Assistant Commissioners as they sought to bring the doctrinaire light of Malthusian-Benthamism into the empirical north. The doctrine of discipline and restraint was, from the start, more important than that of material "less eligibility"; the most inventive State would havć been hard put to it to create institutions which simulated conditions worse than those of garret-masters, Dorset labourers, framework-knitters and nailers. The impractical policy of systematic starvation was displaced by the policy of psychological deterrence: "labour, discipline and restraint". " Our intention," said one Assistant Commissioner, "is to make the workhouses as like prisons as possible"; and another, "our object . . . is to establish therein a discipline so severe and repulsive as to make them a terror to the poor and prevent them from entering". Dr. Kay recorded with satisfaction his successes in Norfolk; the reduction in diet proved less effective than "minute and regular observance of routine", religious exercises, silence during meals, "prompt obedience", total separation of the sexes, separation of families (even where of the same sex), labour and total confinement.
Edward P. Thompson (1966): The Making of the English Working Class, 267.