WELL, the way things are going – cuts, homelessness, unemployment – how long before we need an update on one of the most celebrated tear-jerkers ever penned – the epic saga which told us as much about the poor in Queen Victoria’s golden days as any sociological tome?

Yes, the poem which gave us a phrase which has become part of the language: Christmas Day in the Workhouse, five words evoking dark, Dickensian images, just as Oliver inspires visions of workhouse children, angels with empty stomachs, which is about all we know these days of life in those grim institutions.

When George R Sims, “a jobbing journalist”, finished it in 1877, he called his poem In the Workhouse, Christmas Day, and you can bet there was never a dry eye in the house when some music hall baritone boomed it out.

You can also bet that Sims never wrote “Twas Christmas Day in the workhouse, the happiest day of the year, the paupers’ hearts were filled with joy, their bellies filled with beer.” Just one of the dozens of parodies, few fit to be printed in your family newspaper, certainly not the one about the sultan, the eunuchs and his harem (yours in a plain brown envelope for just £....).

But Sims’ poem had serious intent. It was an attack on the awful Poor Laws of his time and it described the anguish of an ancient inmate, not celebrating Christmas but remembering the first anniversary of his wife’s death on Christmas Day. It begins with no hint of the pathos to come: “It is Christmas Day in the workhouse, and the cold bare walls are bright, with garlands of green and holly, and the place is a pleasant sight.”

The Guardians with their Ladies, although the wind is east, have come in their furs and wrappers, to watch the paupers eat. Christmas pudding, as it happens. Then comes the drama. For one of the old men mutters, and pushes his plate aside. “Great God”, he cries, “but it chokes me, for this is the day she died.”

Well, what ingratitude. The Guardians gaze in horror, the Master’s face goes white, for a pauper refuses his pudding, could their ears believe aright?

Not exactly how it’s described in another version when “the paupers, bold as brass, say you can keep your Christmas pudding, and stick it up yer...” But enough of parodies, back to the drama. Last Christmas, the old pauper cries, Nance, me dear old wife of 50 years, lay dying, starving, she was. He tells Nance the workhouse is their only hope. Her response is startling.

She sits up on her rag-covered bed and sobs: “Bide the Christmas here, John, we’ve never been apart, I can bear the hunger, the other would break my heart.”

The other meant that Nance and John would be separated once inside. But the old pauper runs to the workhouse, screaming for bread. The answer from behind the gate: “Too late. Too late.”

On his way back he meets a dog who happened to have a crust. “So I tore from the mongrel’s clutches, a crust he was trying to eat.” He carried it home but old Nance was dead, happily saved from gnawing on the mongrel’s leftovers.

Well, there hasn’t been a Christmas Day in the Workhouse since 1929, flats now sprout where our own workhouse stood on Cowbridge Road before becoming St David’s Hospital. When Sims wrote his poem there were almost 2,000 inmates there, living mainly on gruel, potatoes and bread with the occasional meat treat.

The men chopped wood and smashed rocks, the women picked oakum and even the kids worked, crushing bones while doubtless snatching at what little meat was left on them.

A reporter summed up “respectable” Cardiff’s take on the paupers. The women, he wrote, his nose held high, appeared to be in a rather repulsive condition of dirt and rags. But, he snapped indignantly: “They stated their cases boldly with the air of people claiming their rights.”

Not a lot has changed, the same sentiments expressed in certain tabloids, incandescent at “workshy layabouts” claiming: “It’s me right.”

On Christmas Day they got roast beef and beer, mince pies and pudding, an apple and an orange and sweets for the children and there was tobacco and snuff and tea. Then the best treat of all – the Guardians allowed mothers to hold their children, to talk to their husbands, rules relaxed on a day celebrating a birth to another far-off homeless family. And then, at 8pm, the lights went out. Christmas Day in the Workhouse was over.