This chapter uses working-class autobiographies of the period to look more closely at how children experienced the institutions of poor relief. It extends recent concern with the ways in which the late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century operation of the poor law contributed to the deregulation of the labour market and thereby to a boom in child labour. As the nineteenth century wore on there was progress in the ways in which orphaned, abandoned and merely poor children were treated. Under the New Poor Law, in the place of apprenticeship, children were to be maintained within a workhouse and there educated and reformed; educated to be productive and reformed to purge them of the dissolute tendencies inherited from parents who had brought them to destitution. Thus an interaction with the poor law could take many and varied forms, but for children it likely involved a sojourn in the poorhouse or workhouse.