“In the Workhouse, Christmas Day” is a longish poem, much parodied, by George R. Sims (1847-1922), often referred to as “Christmas Day in the Workhouse”. A poor man in the midst of the Christmas feast brought by the wealthy to the parish workhouse angrily refuses to eat his pudding because of the memory of his wife who starved to death rather than go to there last year. The parish had refused him “relief” and told him the House was the only option. Its penultimate verse gives a sample of the bathos the poem invokes:
Yes there, in the land of plenty,
Lay a loving woman dead,
Cruelly starved and murdered
For a loaf of parish bread.
At yonder gate, last Christmas,
I craved for a human life.
You who would feast us paupers,
What of my murdered wife!