Nuneaton Workhouse is the institutional setting that gives the novel’s stories of abandonment, exploitation, and chosen family their material force. Its residents are divided and managed through rules governing where they live, what work they do, what they eat, and how they may be punished. For Sunday Small and other children, the workhouse is not simply a refuge from poverty: its routines also expose them to neglect and abuse. Later testimony about those conditions helps prompt change, even as residents who leave continue to carry its losses and inequalities with them.

Identity and Institutional Structure

The workhouse is organized into four separate sections for women, boys, girls, and men. Residents rarely come together except on Sundays, when they are permitted to attend church. Sunday has seen how this separation can devastate families, making the institution’s layout more than an administrative arrangement: it restricts ordinary contact between people who might otherwise support one another.

The establishment depends on a hierarchy of staff and visitors. Miss Frost inspects the girls’ rooms, assigns their daily duties, and leads prayers at breakfast alongside the housemaster. The dining room’s top table is occupied by staff; a sick-bay matron, the head of the nursery, a guardian, or the vicar, Mr Lockett, may also be present. The guardians contribute money intended to ensure that residents are fed well. When Lady Lavinia Huntley asks Sunday about the meals, however, Sunday describes a persistent gap between that expectation and the children’s experience. The author’s afterword clarifies that Nuneaton Workhouse was an actual place, while the novel’s characters, including Miss Frost and Albert Pinnegar, are fictional.

Daily Regimen and Labor

Work is divided by age, gender, and perceived ability. Some able-bodied men and stronger boys pick oakum, teasing fibres from old hemp ropes so the recovered material can be sold to shipbuilders. Others crush bones delivered from a local slaughterhouse; the resulting material is sold to farmers as fertilizer. Some men and boys work in the gardens, growing fruit and vegetables for the institution’s meals.

Women and girls sew uniforms, make or repair clothes for parish residents who can afford them, cook, clean, or work in the laundry. The daily assignment system reaches into Sunday’s life directly: Miss Frost sends her to kitchen duties, where she washes dishes in hot water after scrubbing floors the previous day. Sunday prefers occasional work in the nursery with the babies, but does not tell Miss Frost, fearing that the matron would prevent her from going there. The laundry, by contrast, is laborious and physically taxing, involving steam, soda crystals, hot water, and the turning of a heavy mangle.

The workhouse’s daily schedule also includes compulsory routines of washing, dressing, bed-making, inspection, prayer, and meals. Sunday knows the institution’s practices well enough to accept them as ordinary, while newly admitted girls may feel shame and distress. At breakfast the children receive porridge, grey bread, and watered-down milk; staff at the top table eat more plentifully. Sunday clears her bowl because hunger makes even poor food preferable to having nothing. Her private hope that her absent mother will one day return is sharpened by the contrast between the children’s meal and the staff’s breakfast.

Punishment, Separation, and Abuse

The workhouse’s discipline is backed by Miss Frost’s split cane and by confinement in a punishment cell in the cellar. In her later account to Lady Lavinia Huntley, Sunday describes the cell as having only a bucket, with no bed or blanket, and as cold, damp, and dark. She says she was confined there for three days without food or drink. Verity Lockett eventually came looking for her; Sunday was so weak when released that she had to spend the night in the sick bay. Sunday also recalls two little girls being locked there and never seen again. Miss Frost told residents that they had died of influenza, and Sunday remembers their burial in the small graveyard without recalling a proper funeral. Her account establishes what she witnessed and was told, not what happened to the children beyond that.

The institution’s authority also shapes the fate of unmarried mothers. Cissie Burns confides to Sunday that she is expecting a baby and believes Albert Pinnegar is the father. Cissie has understood that she will be sent to a pleasant place where she can care for her child. On the day of her departure, however, an asylum carriage arrives. Cissie recognizes it and protests that she had been promised a different destination. Miss Frost denies her account of Pinnegar’s abuse and accuses her of sexual misconduct. The men take Cissie away despite her resistance; because she has no one to come for her, Sunday understands that confinement may be indefinite. This episode connects the workhouse’s internal power structure to the wider control of poor, unmarried women and their relationships with their children.

Testimony and Reform

After Sunday has left the workhouse, Lady Lavinia Huntley asks her about the conditions she has seen. Taking notes, Lady Lavinia asks specifically whether residents were always well fed, how punishment was enforced, and whether Pinnegar was a kind master. Sunday first describes the bread, porridge, and soup, then recounts the cellar confinement and Cissie’s removal to Hatter’s Hall asylum. Though she hesitates when Pinnegar is mentioned, remembering Cissie brings her account forward. She hopes that telling the truth may improve life for those still inside.

Later, Verity Lockett reports that the meals have improved and that fear and bullying have receded. A new matron has snapped Miss Frost’s cane in two and thrown it away. Verity also proposes replacing the inadequate blankets, showing that improvement is real but incomplete: reform requires attention not only to abusive discipline but to the material conditions in which residents live. The novel thus distinguishes the guardians’ intended provision from the children’s experience, and presents testimony and changed management as means by which the gap may be addressed.

Departures and Continuing Legacy

The workhouse is also a point of departure. Sunday leaves it for employment with the Spooners, and Daisy Branning and Tommy Branning later leave to work in the same household. Michael Lomax, known as Mickey, has lived in the institution since the age of two, after his grandmother’s death, before joining the Spooner household. Emily, a young maid at Treetops Children’s Home, has also only recently arrived there from the workhouse. These movements connect the institution to the novel’s alternative households, where care and belonging may be built outside its rules.

That contrast does not erase what residents carry with them. Sunday’s account of the workhouse’s neglect helps explain her attachment to children who lack secure family care, while her later protection of Mickey against prejudice echoes the solidarity she once needed herself. Through its separations, labor system, unequal meals, punishments, and eventual reforms, Nuneaton Workhouse functions both as a specific institution in the story and as the setting against which safer, more chosen forms of family become possible.