Applicants for Admission to a Casual Ward, 1874
Oil on canvas
Fildes first treated this subject as an engraving reproduced in The Graphic in December 1869.
Under the Houseless Poor Act (1864), applicants applied for a ticket from a Police Station in order to qualify for a bed in one of the casual wards, which were attached to workhouses. As Fildes recalled, he had no shortage of material, and made more studies for the painting than he could use.
Despite its harrowing subject-matter, which repelled many critics, the painting proved hugely popular when exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1874, to the extent of a rail and a police presence to protect it from eager crowds; it was later voted ‘Picture of the Year’.
Courtesy of Royal Holloway, University of London
The Graphic, vol. 1, 4 December 1869, ‘Houseless and Hungry’
Wood engraving
Fildes’s social realism was a new phenomenon in British nineteenth-century art, with a direct relationship to current debates on how (if at all) the poor should be provided for. Here, too, there is a ‘struggle for existence’. Fildes shows homeless people waiting outside a police station in wintry weather for tickets that will admit them to the casual ward of a workhouse for overnight shelter. The mother with young children has been left without support - her husband has been imprisoned for abusing her. The sick, unemployed artisan clasping his child equally arouses our sympathy. But Fildes also depicts a range of social misfits who do not struggle to survive honourably: an alcoholic, a professional beggar and petty criminals.
Manchester Central Library
