Life in the 1890 Whitechapel Asylum in London

This photo was taken in 1890 inside the Whitechapel Workhouse in London — the same street where Jack the Ripper killed just 2 years earlier.

Look at the women on the benches. They are not prisoners. They are poor. In Victorian England, if you had no money, no husband, no job, you were sent here. Their job today is picking oakum — tearing apart old, tar-covered ship ropes with their bare fingers to make new ropes for the Royal Navy.

Their fingers bleed. The tar burns their skin. But if they stop, they get no food.

The woman in the black dress with the cane is the matron. She will hit any woman who talks. Silence was the rule. From 6 AM to 8 PM, they sat here in this freezing stone hall with one tiny window, tearing ropes.

See the children next to them? They are 6, 7 years old. In 1890 London, a child in a workhouse had to work too. No school. If a mother entered the workhouse, her children were taken from her and sent to a different room. She could only see them on Sunday for 1 hour.

At night, they slept 50 in one room, on straw, 2 to a bed. Dinner was watery gruel and a piece of bread with mold.

Why were they here? Most are widows. Their husbands died in factories. No husband meant no money, no house. The workhouse was the last place before the street.

This is the London that Charles Dickens wrote about. This photo is the reason he wrote Oliver Twist.

This hell was just 136 years ago, in the heart of the British Empire.