Retitled 'Wapping Workhouse' in collected editions of the series
'My knowledge of the general conditions of the sick poor in workhouses is not of yesterday,' Dickens wrote in 1866 to the Secretary of the newly-formed Association for the Improvement of the Infirmaries of London Workhouses: 'nor are my efforts in my vocation to call merciful attention to it. Few anomalies in England are so horrible to me as the unchecked existence of many shameful sick wards for paupers side by side with the constantly increasing expansion of conventional wonder that the poor should creep into corners and die rather than fester and rot in such places' (Pilgrim, Vol. XI, [late Feb 1866] pp. 164–65). Dickens's 'efforts' included the commissioning and publishing of dozens of articles in HW and ATYR on workhouse conditions, and also the writing of such powerful papers as 'A Walk in a Workhouse' ([HW, Vol. I, 27 May 1850] see Vol. 2 of [the Dent Uniform Edition of Dickens' Journalism], Item 45), 'A Nightly Scene in London' ([HW, Vol. XIII, 26 January 1856] (see Vol. 3 [of the Dent Uniform Edition of Dickens' Journalism], Item 45), and the present article.
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