There will probably be people sleeping rough tonight on the same benches, along the Embankment in London, where William Booth interviewed homeless men in 1890. The story of Booth’s Salvation Army hostels will form part of a major exhibition this spring – and people who go along may be surprised by the answers he got on the night of 13 June.

The men on the benches didn’t think they had found too bad a bed. “It’s very fair out here of nights, seat’s rather hard, but a bit of waste paper makes it a lot softer. We have women sleep here often, and children too,” one told him. There was rarely any trouble: “We’re too sleepy to make a row.”

Little material evidence survives from the lives of the Victorian poor, said Hannah Fleming, a curator at the Geffrye in east London. The exhibition will include photographs and paintings, but the poorest who went through the hostels owned almost nothing. The scraps of evidence that do survive are rare and precious: Fleming recently bought on eBay a bottle of carbolic acid and an enamel spittoon.

Treasures in the exhibition include a few colourful bits of broken pottery excavated from a pit at Gun Street in Spitalfields, once the outdoor privy for a common lodging house. These institutions were mainly regarded with horror – one report called them “extremely filthy and disgusting”. The crockery, however, is a different story: the pink roses and willow pattern fragments could have come from any middle-class house.

Jane Hamlett, senior lecturer on modern British history at Royal Holloway, and the leader of a group of academics whose research on Victorian homeless inspired the exhibition, said it was not always the desperate experience immortalised by Charles Dickens in Oliver Twist’s workhouse.

“If you were elderly, or ill, or a child, then often there was no alternative to going into an institution. You were stuck, and it could be very grim. But some of the able-bodied learned to play the system very well, went into and came out of shelters repeatedly, and some learned a trade and managed to get themselves out of poverty. The experience of the Victorian homeless was far from uniform.”

Facebook Twitter Pinterest ‘Coffin beds’ at a Salvation Army shelter in London. Photograph: Salvation Army

A photograph shocking to modern eyes shows “coffin beds”, wooden boxes barely big enough for a body, laid out in rows, but Hamlett said if the alternative was sleeping in a wet doorway, many thought a hard but dry, clean bed was a fine thing. “The Salvation Army in particular was very keen on carbolic, and put a very high store on keeping everything clean,” she said. A woman in Hanbury Street shelter, Whitechapel, in 1894 told a visitor: “I did used to think myself lucky if I’d the chance of a fourpenny lodging, but now I’d a deal sooner sleep in a bunk and have the feelin’ of safety there is about this place.”

The mealtime seen in another image, a giant room filled with hundreds of men seated in long silent rows, looks truly grim, but a report on Hanbury Street said there was always boiling water so people arriving for the night could make a cup of tea.

Middle-class Victorians expected the poor to be meek and grateful for their charity, but many were not. Hamlett, her colleagues and Fleming are working hard to recover the voices of those in the system, not just the do-gooders observing them. Their views survive in interviews such as those conducted by Booth and Henry Mayhew, visitors’ accounts, rare autobiographies – and graffiti. One man wrote on a shelter wall in Chester in 1865 “this bloody hole is lousey”. An inmate of a casual ward, where people could stay for a night or two, said: “You are obliged to bathe, of course; sometimes three will bathe in one water, and if you complain they turn nasty and ask if you are come to a palace.”

The giant Rowton House hostels were built by the philanthropist Lord Rowton in an effort to provide better accommodation than the casual wards or lodging houses. Again, experience varied widely. In 1899 WA Somerville, a journalist who spent time living in one, described it as a home where a lodger “may read books, write letters, and above all mix with what he pathetically calls his ‘mates’”, but one Jack Smithers wrote that sleep was impossible “owing to the ravings of the drunken, the coughing of the sick, the nightmares of the mentally tortured, sundry grunts, snores and other indescribable noises”.

Similarities to the growing problem of homelessness in 21st-century British cities are brutally obvious, and deliberate. The Geffrye – a museum devoted to the home in a charming square of 17th-century almshouses – will have a parallel exhibition created by the New Horizon Youth Centre, whose members are themselves homeless or vulnerable. One told a Geffrye researcher: “It seems to be going back to the way this was … it seems that all the changes that were being made in a positive way … to try and make things better for homeless people... you know, it’s just going backwards.”

Homes of the Homeless: Seeking Shelter in Victorian London, the Geffrye, London, 24 March-12 July

• This article was amended on 16 January 2015. An earlier version of the photograph of coffin beds at a Salvation Army shelter was credited to the Geffrye Museum rather than the Salvation Army Heritage Centre.

