ABSTRACT
The horror and shame of pauperism was at the centre of an 1871 scandal involving the Metropolitan Asylums Board's (MAB) Hampstead Smallpox Hospital, where former patients did not hesitate to contest the sudden and unwelcome status of 'workhouse inmate'. William Charles Peters, a wine and commission agent, stated that he did not admire Parisian beef, 'yet he would say that French beef was better than Hampstead beef'. Patients' ability to link their complaints to issues of sustenance, taste and civility illuminate the ways they were compelled to negotiate the official gulf between deservedness and pauperism. For the complainers, residence at the Hampstead Hospital imparted a frightening sense of the fluid and unpredictable boundary between the vulnerabilities of sickness and the stains of pauperism. As the MAB took its turn to present evidence at the inquiry, assessments of conditions at Hampstead Hospital more openly involved estimates of witnesses' characters especially as they suggested relevant markers of taste.
