jennifer worth call the midwife shadows of the workhouse

When people who are looking to assert themselves aggressively are given a position that is unmanaged, they become unchallenged tyrants-very Dickensian.

Worth is diplomatic in how she describes the workhouses, saying that any attempt to help the poor and needy is good but that the workhouses went wrong, not because the idea itself was bad but because the people who ran the workhouses (a thankless job) were poorly paid, and so mostly only people who enjoyed the penal aspects of the job took it. As the title suggests, book two of the trilogy discusses workhouses and how they continued to haunt the East End even though they were either abandoned or converted to hospitals by the early part of the 20 th century. While Worth continues her tour of education with Shadows of the Workhouse, it simply took a different turn than most readers would expect. It was one of those books that really made you want to go out there and read more about the field of midwifery. The first Call the Midwife book was great-it educated, titillated and intrigued. In the first book, Worth dabbled with narrative by going in and out of stories she was a part of-however these borrowed stories only added to the authenticity of Worth’s agenda, which was to bring awareness to midwifery and to show what heroic and selfless acts were done by the nuns and midwives living in the East End after WWII. Shadows of the Workhouse, the second in the midwife trilogy by former East End midwife Jennifer Worth, actually has almost nothing in it about midwifery, birth, or even Jennifer Worth. Since the rip-roaring success of my review of Call the Midwife: A Memoir of Birth, Joy, and Hard Times (What? You haven’t read it? That’s ok, look here), I decided that the best follow-up was to continue on the path Worth set before me and see if my feelings from the first book continued down the line.

Call the Midwife: Shadows of the WorkhouseĪ Continued Conversation About Memoir, Voice, and Authenticity

Jennifer worth call the midwife shadows of the workhouse