"Workhouse" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... to the workhouse folk in Ireland, was moved by the strange contrast between the poverty of the tellers and the splendors of the ...
— The Art of the Story-Teller • Marie L. Shedlock
... eternally chopping and changing it. His Kathleen-Ni-Houlihan, though a dream-play, always appeals to an audience of Irish people. Perhaps his one-act Deirdre is the nearest approach to real drama he has done. Some of Lady Gregory's earlier one-act farces, such as The Workhouse-Ward, are very amusing; The Rising of the Moon is a little dramatic gem, and The Gaol Gate is touched with genuine tragedy. Synge wrote only one play—Riders to the Sea—that acts well. The others are admired by critics for the strangeness of their diction and the beauty of ...
— The Glories of Ireland • Edited by Joseph Dunn and P.J. Lennox
... rather, bedwards—with Peter's flowers in the carriage beside her—"that is the extent of my tether in this direction. A christening mug, and a bit of jewellery on her birthdays—I shall be allowed that; otherwise I can be of no more use to them than if I were a workhouse pauper. They are independent of me ...
— Sisters • Ada Cambridge
... farming, and the sooner he went to the wall the better. Now, how would all the grocers and other tradesmen whom he had just enumerated like to be told that if they had not got 10,000l. each they ought to go at once to the workhouse! That would be a fine remedy ...
— Hodge and His Masters • Richard Jefferies
... wearer of the smock frock. Even Crabbe blindly accepted the sanctified lie of social inequality. And this assumption was religiously acquiesced in by the lower animal himself—who doubtless glorified God for the distinctly unsearchable wisdom and loving-kindness manifested in those workhouse regulations which separated his own toil-worn age from the equal feebleness of the wife whose human rights he should have died fighting for when he was young. And, as might be expected, this strictly gentlemanly principle looms larger in your ...
— Such is Life • Joseph Furphy
... represented Charles Francis Howard, the other claimant, gave the whole case a new complexion by informing the court that he was in a position to prove that, in the month of August, 1864, Mrs. Howard and another lady visited a workhouse in Liverpool, and procured a newly-born child from its mother, Mary Best, a pauper, then an occupant of one of the lying-in wards of the workhouse hospital. In support of his assertion he was able to produce three witnesses—Mrs. Higginson, the head-nurse, ...
— Celebrated Claimants from Perkin Warbeck to Arthur Orton • Anonymous
... warehouse, or workhouse on Sunday is a fifty dollar offense, and it is fifty dollars also for doing "any manner of labor, business or work" on Sunday, unless the judge considers it a matter of necessity or charity; nevertheless, the "making of butter and cheese" is good ...
— Buchanan's Journal of Man, July 1887 - Volume 1, Number 6 • Various
... speaks of the south arm of the transept as the "old Galilee" and the north arm as the "new Galilee." In the plan in Willis's "Survey of Cathedrals," 1727, the south part is described as the "South galilee, now the church workhouse," while on the north side we read, "Ruined part of Galilee." No doubt the character of the architecture is not inconsistent with the theory that the northern part may have been built or finished by Bishop Eustace, ...
— Bell's Cathedrals: The Cathedral Church of Ely • W. D. Sweeting
... month after his death; and the infant, whose nourishment from its birth had been mingled with bitterness, followed in a few days. I saw myself seven children crowd round the coffin that was provided by charity; I saw three taken to the workhouse, and the elder four distributed amongst kind-hearted hard-working people, who are trying to inure the young soft hands, accustomed to silken idleness, to the toils of homely industry. I ask you, John Adams, how the husband ...
— Turns of Fortune - And Other Tales • Mrs. S. C. Hall
... long letter full of details to Madame Chabert. That, monsieur, was the fourth! If I had had any relations, perhaps nothing of all this might have happened; but, to be frank with you, I am but a workhouse child, a soldier, whose sole fortune was his courage, whose sole family is mankind at large, whose country is France, whose only protector is the Almighty.—Nay, I am wrong! I had a father—the Emperor! Ah! if he were but here, the dear man! If he could see his Chabert, as he ...
— Colonel Chabert • Honore de Balzac
... (Frank had even found himself mechanically gathering up crumbs on a wet finger.) They had had a bad week of it; the corn was not yet ready for cutting, and there seemed no work anywhere for honest men. The Major's gloom had become terrible; he had even made remarks upon a choice between a workhouse and a razor. He had got up after supper and turned his waistcoat pockets inside out to secure the last possible grains of tobacco, and had smoked about a quarter of a pipeful gathered in this way without uttering one word. He had then uttered a short string ...
— None Other Gods • Robert Hugh Benson
... well-to-do working men did not hope, since they were not pinched and had no means of learning their degraded position: and lastly, the drudges of the proletariat had such hope as charity, the hospital, the workhouse, and kind death at last ...
— Signs of Change • William Morris
... into tears, 'my poor mother and sisters must go to the workhouse or starve if I did not stay and work for them, and I could not be happy if I lived in a fine house, and knew they were in want of a bit of bread ...
— Forgotten Tales of Long Ago • E. V. Lucas
... much all in one atmosphere, that it can best be considered as an exception or a solitary excursus in his work. Perhaps it can best be considered as the extension of one of his old sketches, of some sketch that happened to be about a visit to a workhouse or a gaol. In the Sketches by Boz he might well have visited a workhouse where he saw Bumble; in the Sketches by Boz he might well have visited a prison where he saw Fagin. We are still in the realm of sketches and sketchiness. The Pickwick Papers ...
— Appreciations and Criticisms of the Works of Charles Dickens • G. K. Chesterton
... decent beds, baths, and breakfast, and a system of investigation of the lodger's claim that is yet to be developed to useful proportions. The link that is missing is a farm school, for the training of young vagrants to habits of industry and steady work, as the alternative of the workhouse. Efforts to forge this link have failed so far, but in the good time that is coming, when we shall have learned the lesson that the unkindest thing that can be done to a young tramp is to let him go on tramping, and when magistrates shall blush to discharge him on the plea that "it is no crime ...
— The Battle with the Slum • Jacob A. Riis
... that case I shall certainly tell the master of your workhouse. To think that there should be a thief in ...
— Happy Days • Alan Alexander Milne
... which the officers observed, as to the hour and place of interment, increased in a great degree the anxiety of those that were waiting, and it being suspected that the body would have been privately carried away, through the back part of the workhouse (St. George's) into Farm Street Mews, and from thence to its final destination, different parties stationed themselves at the several passages through which it must unavoidably pass, in order to prevent disappointment. ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 191, June 25, 1853 • Various
... my father thinks she'll do it. If she does, my uncle will probably find himself with an heir of his own. Anyway the value of my prospects is enormously less than it was. All the neighbours are perfectly aware of what is going on. Oh, I suppose he'll leave me something—enough to keep me out of the workhouse. But there's nothing to be got out of ...
— Lady Connie • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... also—last but not least—the burning earnestness of the author's tone as he contrasted the hopeless, heartless misery of the poor in our great cities with the ideal life of man. His pictures of London life, drawn from the street, the hospital, the workhouse, were touched in with merciless fidelity: his satire on the modern benevolence and modern civilization which allows such evils to flourish side by side with lecture-rooms, churches, intellectual culture, and refined luxury was keen and scathing. It was a book ...
— Brooke's Daughter - A Novel • Adeline Sergeant
... was one of the foibles of Dean Swift, who advised Irishmen to burn everything that came from England except its coal, has only of very recent years been resuscitated. So much is this the case that the action of the South Dublin Board of Guardians, who in 1881 insisted that the workhouse inmates should be clothed in Irish produce, was conspicuous by its exceptional nature. At this day all are agreed, whatever be their religious or political opinions, on the advocacy of this form of exclusive dealing at which economists may scowl as at a deliberate attempt to fly in the ...
— Ireland and the Home Rule Movement • Michael F. J. McDonnell
... mission and home for erring women; a social settlement conducted by the University of Cincinnati; the house of refuge (1850) for "the reformation and education of homeless and incorrigible children under 16 years of age"; and a workhouse for adults convicted ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 6, Slice 3 - "Chitral" to "Cincinnati" • Various
... parents care by helping them. England is disgraced by the number of old people who are left to the care of the parish by children who ought to be thankful to be allowed to support them. Secondly, that it is your duty to make provision for the future, so that the workhouse may not even enter into your calculations, as a possible refuge in old age for you and yours. This can be done by regular savings, even though very small, and by insuring your life. Post office and other savings' banks, will help you in ...
— Boys - their Work and Influence • Anonymous
... denounced; if, upon their discharge, they roam about in hunger and idleness, they are called vagabonds, are abused, and not infrequently dogs are set upon them to chase them from the yards as "tramps," unwilling to work, and they are handed over to the constabulary for the workhouse. ...
— Woman under socialism • August Bebel
... Filicaja. He found a very strong, angry, and general sentiment, not against the principle of the poor law as regards the able-bodied, but against the regulations for separating man and wife, and sending the old compulsorily to the workhouse, with others of a like nature. With the disapprobation on these heads he in great part concurred. There was to be no contest, but arrangements of this kind still leave room for some anxiety, and in Mr. Gladstone's case ...
— The Life of William Ewart Gladstone, Vol. 1 (of 3) - 1809-1859 • John Morley
... has grouped against her Dartmoor setting in Sareel (PHILIP ALLAN) just the characters to act out the well-worn story of the mutual infatuation of a young man of birth and an ignorant country maid. But though Sareel, the little workhouse-reared servant at the farm, falls in love in the accepted fashion with the best-looking of the three young men who lodge there on a reading tour, and though he duly falls in love with her, the innocence of ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 158, June 2, 1920 • Various
... Mill An Iron Foundry Inutility of Machinery Demon of War A Country Assembly Vice of Balloting Plan for rendering Society social Characteristics of Novels —— Villages round London Condition of Poverty Poverty and Wealth contrasted Inadequate Remuneration of Labour Visit to Wandsworth Workhouse Philosophy of Roads Cruelty to Horses Value of good Foot-paths Citizen's Villas Axioms of Political Economy Putney Heath The Smoke of London Earl Spencer's Park Hartley's Fire-House Means of Preventing ...
— A Morning's Walk from London to Kew • Richard Phillips
... attractive for young men. It is true that the old buildings combine with a dignity a millionaire could not surpass a standard of material comfort which in some respects is below that of an up-to- date workhouse. An amusing instance has occurred of this during the war. The students of one of the women's colleges, expelled from their own modern buildings, which had been turned into a hospital, became tenants of half of one of the oldest colleges. ...
— The Charm of Oxford • J. Wells
... the scorching country from which we had just made our escape lying stretched out before us like an enormous map in relief. Towards the mountains were the military stations of "Dugshai" and "Subathoo," and the boys' asylum of "Senore," the latter rather marring the face of nature by the workhouse order of its architecture. "Simla" we could just distinguish, nestled among the blue ...
— Diary of a Pedestrian in Cashmere and Thibet • by William Henry Knight
... his lodging, and had only a week to provide himself. His brother John was in as bad a case, for he was quite out, and had only begged leave of his master, the biscuit-maker, to lodge in an outhouse belonging to his workhouse, where he only lay upon straw, with some biscuit-sacks, or bread-sacks, as they called them, laid upon it, and some of the ...
— A Journal of the Plague Year • Daniel Defoe
... well six months after admission to the hospital. Soon after that, she left the husband, once had him arrested in 1908 and sent to the workhouse. She was again examined in 1913, and was found to be perfectly well, and she stated she had been well ...
— Benign Stupors - A Study of a New Manic-Depressive Reaction Type • August Hoch
... grant that I owe you much more; but it would be wasting ink to write it down. I cannot pay you that: and if you take my livery from me too, which, by the way, I have not yet earned,—I would rather you had let me die in the workhouse. ...
— Minna von Barnhelm • Gotthold Ephraim Lessing
... bundled wholesale into the streets, and they formed up in a large body, many of them with only a shift and a petticoat on, and with a lot of drunken men and boys with a fife and fiddle they paraded the streets for several days. They marched in a body to the workhouse, but for many reasons they were refused admittance.... These women wandered about for two or three days shelterless, and it was felt that the remedy was very much worse than the disease, and the women were allowed to go ...
— Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 6 (of 6) • Havelock Ellis
... drop into prose again, and have done with this iliad of odds and ends. Portsmouth has the honor, I believe, of establishing the first recorded pauper workhouse—though not in connection with her poets, as might naturally be supposed. The building was completed and tenanted in 1716. Seven years later, an act was passed in England authorizing the establishment of parish workhouses there. The first and only keeper of the Portsmouth almshouse up to ...
— An Old Town By The Sea • Thomas Bailey Aldrich
... She had left me a sum of money to continue my studies, but after eight months had passed, and no word had come from her, I decided to go on to England. I have since learned what had happened. My mother had been seized with a stroke and had been conveyed to the workhouse infirmary by Crawley, who had left her there and had taken my sister, who apparently he passed off as ...
— The Man Who Knew • Edgar Wallace
... had moved into a sitting posture. His body was much bent, and his face was wrinkled and yellow. His dress denoted him an inmate of the workhouse: he had the appearance of being very old, but it looked more the effect of dissipation or disease, than the length of years. He was staring hard at the stranger, and though his eyes were lustreless and heavy at first, they appeared to glow with an unnatural and alarmed expression ...
— The Pickwick Papers • Charles Dickens
... women in the cage next to the Police Court room. A marshal stands at the door of the cage and takes them out one at a time. You will hear the judge say: "ten dollars and cost," which means thirty days in the workhouse. Forty days pass and here is the same man in the Police Court: thirty days to serve his time, ten days to get a little money and then another drunk. Some do not know how many times they have been before the court. I was there one day when an Irishman was arraigned. The Judge said: "Pat, ...
— Wit, Humor, Reason, Rhetoric, Prose, Poetry and Story Woven into Eight Popular Lectures • George W. Bain
... done. Did he think I would recommend him, when I know nothing about him? He is a conceited puppy, and, in my opinion, a worthless fellow. One of these days he will be 'an honor and an ornament' to the workhouse, if he does business ...
— Poor and Proud - or The Fortunes of Katy Redburn • Oliver Optic
... than the fact of his having money at all. If he had had to wait till he was sixty or sixty-five, and become broken down from long failure in the meantime, why then perhaps he might have been allowed to have whatever sum should suffice to keep him out of the workhouse and pay his death-bed expenses; but that he should come in to 70,000 pounds at eight and twenty, and have no wife and only two children—it was intolerable. Christina was too ill and in too great a hurry to spend the money to care much about such details as the foregoing, and she was ...
— The Way of All Flesh • Samuel Butler
... sir, to think where the like o' poor folks is to get such things. Lucky to be able to get a bit o' bread and a drain o' tea without sugar, them as is off their work, just to rub on and keep theirselves out o' the workhouse. I know I'm thankful to do it. Jim, he ...
— Verner's Pride • Mrs. Henry Wood
... other than it is and has been. As in Africa, it is all trees trees, trees with no other world conceivable; so is it here—it is all vice and poverty and crime. To many the world is all slum, with the Workhouse as an intermediate purgatory before the grave. And just as Mr. Stanley's Zanzibaris lost faith, and could only be induced to plod on in brooding sullenness of dull despair, so the most of our social reformers, no matter how cheerily they may have started off, with forty ...
— "In Darkest England and The Way Out" • General William Booth
... to the Congress a special message on January 11, 1909, accompanying the report of Commissioners theretofore appointed to investigate the jail, workhouse, etc., in the District of Columbia, in which he directed attention to the report as setting forth vividly, "the really outrageous conditions in ...
— State of the Union Addresses of William H. Taft • William H. Taft
... beggars, both, and all, if they don't marry before two months are out. I'm a beggar then. I'm ruined. I shan't have a penny. I'm in a workhouse. They are in good homes. They are safe, and thank their old father. Now, then; now. ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... reading the various scraps. Some of these, they told me, were very pathetic. In one, for instance, a poor old woman had apparently sent her son a packet of chocolate, bought with her last shilling, (she was just going into the Workhouse), and she hoped that it would taste as sweet as if she had paid a sovereign for it. Had they had any mails? No, not since they had been here. They thought all their people must be dead, and "it does cheer one up to get a letter." In Burma they always give a cheer when the English ...
— A Yeoman's Letters - Third Edition • P. T. Ross
... of their duty of supporting, when they have the means, their aged parents and relations. In accordance with these principles it was laid down that outdoor relief should be either absolutely refused to the able-bodied or only granted under most exceptional circumstances; that the workhouse test, with its stringent, deterrent discipline, should be steadily maintained; that relaxations and special favours granted out of public funds should be limited, as far as possible, to cases of special ...
— Historical and Political Essays • William Edward Hartpole Lecky
... having stolen a Post Office savings bank book. A policeman, giving evidence, said: "Until the 6th of December she was in the Wacks." "You say," said the judge, rather bewildered by the good appearance of the girl, "that she was in the workhouse!" "In the Wacks, my lord." "I think he means the Royal Air Force," prosecuting counsel helped the judge out of his perplexity. And the word "Wraf" went from mouth to mouth round the court. The girl was guilty, but the judge told her that he was not going ...
— The Pleasures of Ignorance • Robert Lynd
... look-out for the missing child. At the same time, an officer was told off to accompany the anxious father on a personal search for his little girl. First of all, they visited the casual ward at the workhouse, and astonished its motley and dilapidated occupants by waking them to ask if they had fallen in with a strayed child on any of the roads by which they had severally approached the town. When they had recovered from their first alarm beneath the gleam of the policeman's bulls-eye, these waifs ...
— The Golden Shoemaker - or 'Cobbler' Horn • J. W. Keyworth
... suppose, and Jane had to stop and leave me to take up the thread. Poor dear Jenny, the festival days are no days of rest to her, but I am not sure that she would enjoy repose, or that it would not be the worse possible penance to her. She is gone down now to the workhouse with Valetta to take cards and tea and tobacco to the old people, not sending them, because she says a few personal wishes and the sight of a bright child will be worth something to the old bodies. Then comes tea for the choir-boys, before Evensong and carols, and after that my turn ...
— Beechcroft at Rockstone • Charlotte M. Yonge
... play on words; to do so is low vulgar, smelling of the pothouse, the workhouse. Belle, I insist on your declining ...
— Lavengro - The Scholar, The Gypsy, The Priest • George Borrow
... (if he has that faculty of imagination, without which most faculties are void) how it tastes to his poorer neighbours, who must drain it to the dregs. In every contact with authority, with their employer, with the police, with the School Board officer, in the hospital, or in the workhouse, they have equally the occasion to appreciate the light-hearted civility of the man in office; and as an experimentalist in several out-of-the- way provinces of life, I may say it has but to be felt to be appreciated. ...
— Lay Morals • Robert Louis Stevenson
... proposed to conjugate the verb "to love" in Armenian was master of his intentions in plain English. It was even so. The man of tongues lacked speech wherewith to make manifest his passion; the vocabulary of the word-master was insufficient to convince the workhouse girl of one of the plainest meanings a man can well have. When the distracted Borrow had reached the decision that it was high time to give over his "mocking and scoffing," and returned with this ...
— George Borrow - Times Literary Supplement, 10th July 1903 • Thomas Seccombe
... force a gleam of light from the vast unknown; let us examine and question and, here and there, wrest a few shreds of truth. We shall sink under the task; in the present ill ordered state of society, we shall end, perhaps, in the workhouse. Let us go ahead for all that: our consolation shall be that we have increased by one atom the general mass of knowledge, ...
— The Life of the Fly - With Which are Interspersed Some Chapters of Autobiography • J. Henri Fabre
... character had given way the moment he left the guardianship of home, and who now came to sponge upon her! And if he should be ill! He would rather lie down and die on the roadside than present himself dirty and ill at Cairncarque!—rather go to the workhouse, than encounter even the momentary danger of such a misunderstanding! These reflections were hardly worthy of the faith he had hitherto shown, but he was not yet perfect, and unproved illness had ...
— Warlock o' Glenwarlock • George MacDonald
... even a girl so much as touched him he must flood himself with tears; and the only way out of his misery was the rope. What a disgrace it was, that he should have earned his daily bread and yet have been kept in the workhouse, as though they did him a kindness in allowing him a hole to creep into there, when with his capacity for work he could have got on anywhere! And it became quite unendurable as he grew up and was still misused by all ...
— Pelle the Conqueror, Complete • Martin Andersen Nexo
... a year was spent on wines and spirits at the Medway (Chatham) Workhouse and Infirmary, while to-day the annual expenditure is only L5. In these hard times even paupers have ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, May 6, 1914 • Various
... incurred by the Messrs. Ashworth might one day be turned against them, to their annoyance and pecuniary loss. The prediction was realized in only a single instance. A young man of considerable talent, who when a child had been removed to the factory from a neighbouring workhouse, made very rapid progress at school, especially in arithmetic; and when a strike of the workpeople occurred in 1830, one of the great strike years, he became very officious as a leader. The strike was defeated by the employment of new hands, and it was attributed to the influence ...
— Thrift • Samuel Smiles
... State had to do their work. You could not simply flog beggars out of existence, as Elizabeth tried to do. Then the inevitable happened, and it began to be a mark of disgrace to be helped by the State in a workhouse: people often preferred to starve. Then at the beginning of the twentieth century a well-meant attempt was made, in the Old-Age Pensions and George's State Insurance Act, to remedy this and to help the poor in ...
— Dawn of All • Robert Hugh Benson
... found in a deranged state, and taken before a magistrate. There was one of two things to do,—either to put him in the workhouse, or pay his board at the insane hospital. Mr. Hawthorne, of course, chose the latter. It was just like him to choose it. The young man's mother had lately married a second time, and was in Naples. When Mrs. Blodget came to see me, a day or two since, ...
— Memories of Hawthorne • Rose Hawthorne Lathrop
... effect a discrimination between those who are paupers by vice, unthrift, and idleness, and those whom God has striken for no fault that humanity is entitled to pass judgment upon; between the fitting inmates of the workhouse, and those—helpless from age, infirmity, accident, and disease—to whom the associations of the workhouse are humiliating, painful and demoralizing. Nothing is more essential, under democratic rule, than the ...
— The Quarterly Review, Volume 162, No. 324, April, 1886 • Various
... from London to Babbicombe, where Jack used to practice. But Jack saw at once under this rough exterior he had the voice and address of a cultivated gentleman, though he was so broken down by want and long suffering and exposure and illness that he looked like a beggar just let loose from the workhouse. ...
— Recalled to Life • Grant Allen
... other kind of corn to the mill, nor would they be able to bring back from thence flour, or any other sort of meal whatsoever. Without it, how could the papers and writs of lawyers' clients be brought to the bar? Seldom is the mortar, lime, or plaster brought to the workhouse without it. Without it, how should the water be got out of a draw-well? In what case would tabellions, notaries, copists, makers of counterpanes, writers, clerks, secretaries, scriveners, and such-like persons be without it? Were it not for it, what would become of the ...
— Gargantua and Pantagruel, Complete. • Francois Rabelais
... dollars, payable to Polly's mother, which he gave to the Church of England clergyman to send for him. About two months afterwards he received a letter from the clergyman of the parish in which Polly's mother lived, telling him that the money had reached the old lady in time to save her from the workhouse; a heart-broken letter of thanks from Polly's mother herself accompanied it, calling on God to reward them for their kindness to her and ...
— Sowing Seeds in Danny • Nellie L. McClung
... pauper children is adjacent to the practising-school, on the north side. This building is certified for 180 children, who are received from the workhouse, etc. They enter at the age of three years, and leave at sixteen for situations. It was founded and is managed by the Daughters of the Cross, and was established in its present quarters September 19, 1892. Faulkner says of Brook Green, "Here is ...
— Hammersmith, Fulham and Putney - The Fascination of London • Geraldine Edith Mitton
... shorters, or a set of authors. How touching is this debasement of words in the course of time; it puts me in mind of the decay of old houses and names. I have known a Mortimer who was a hedger and ditcher, a Berners who was born in a workhouse, and a descendant of the De Burghs, who bore the falcon, mending old kettles, and making horse and pony shoes in ...
— The Pocket George Borrow • George Borrow
... old Tories are the paupers in the Workhouse. The Radical working men are jealous of their own leaders, and the leaders of one another. Schopenhauer must have organized a labor party in his salad days. And yet one can't help feeling that he committed ...
— The Big Bow Mystery • I. Zangwill
... a dash of the Celt in him that made him vivacious and peppery; Mr. Rake polished his wits quite as much as he polished the tops, and considered himself a philosopher. Of whose son he was he had not the remotest idea; his earliest recollections were of the tender mercies of the workhouse; but even that chill foster-mother, the parish, had not damaged the liveliness of his temper or the independence of his opinions, and as soon as he was fifteen Rake had run away and joined a circus; distinguishing himself ...
— Under Two Flags • Ouida [Louise de la Ramee]
... but—the clergyman—he has money of his own, or else he's paid; the poet or the musician—just the same; the tramp—he's no different. The tramp goes to the workhouse in the end, and is paid for with other people's money. Miss Schlegel, the real thing's money and all ...
— Howards End • E. M. Forster
... due course, enacted, that the summons left at the houses, or usual place of residence, or with the wife, child, or menial servants of the person so summoned, should be held as legal notice, as well as the leaving such notice at the house, workhouse, warehouse, shop, cellar, vault, or usual place of residence, of such person, directed to him by his right or assumed name; and all dealers in coffee, tea, or chocolate, were subjected to the penalty of twenty pounds, as often as they ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.II. - From William and Mary to George II. • Tobias Smollett
... day; the masters that no one will have to pitch his tent on a sand-dune, or spread a straw litter in a bathing-machine. The level of comfort was, of course, not uniform. How should it be? Probably there is a choice of corners in a workhouse or casual-ward. Some of our party tasted the painful pleasures of the poor in the scant accommodation and naked simplicity of cottage lodgings. It was long after our arrival that we discovered a valued friend still sitting on the corner of his packing-case, ...
— Uppingham by the Sea - a Narrative of the Year at Borth • John Henry Skrine
... I write thee as to the contention which hath arisen among our stock actors and supes of the Globe. Nicholas Bottom, whom you brought from the Parish workhouse in Stratford, is in ill humor with thee in especial. He says when he played with you in Ben Jonson's comedy, "Every Man in his Humor," he was by far the better actor and did receive the plaudits of all; despite which he now receives but 6 shillings ...
— Shakespeare's Insomnia, And the Causes Thereof • Franklin H. Head
... Sir Charles Deacon," interposed Job, "a man so devotedly fond of good eating and drinking as he is, and yet to be compelled to live on less than even workhouse allowance for fear of the gout—and then that silly Lord Muddeford, who's fretting himself to death because ministers wouldn't make him an earl—Mrs Bundy, with her two thousand a-year, making herself miserable ...
— Blackwoods Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 59, No. 365, March, 1846 • Various
... theory and practice. This friction is caused partly by the disturbance of vested interests which every invention involves, and which will be found intolerable when men become millionaires and paupers alternately once a fortnight— living one week in a palace and the next in a workhouse, and having perpetually to be sold up, and then to buy a new house and refurnish, &c.—so that artificial means for stopping inventions will be adopted; and partly by the fact that though all inventions breed in geometrical ratio, yet some multiply more rapidly than others, ...
— Alps and Sanctuaries of Piedmont and the Canton Ticino • Samuel Butler
... them under captains, and send them upon enterprises, and in short render life human to them. Our English plan of Poor Laws, which we once piqued ourselves upon as sovereign, is evidently fast breaking down. Ireland, now admitted into the Idle Workhouse, is rapidly bursting it in pieces. That never was a "human" destiny for any honest son of Adam; nowhere but in England could it have lasted at all; and now, with Ireland sharer in it, and the fulness of time come, it is as good as ended. Alas, yes. Here in Connemara, your crazy Ship of ...
— Latter-Day Pamphlets • Thomas Carlyle
... these expeditions, choking with bronchitis, in a fireless room, too weak to light a fire or prepare food for herself. Lady Conyers, a neighbour of Castle Talbot at Mount Esker, had tried to induce Lizzie to go into the workhouse, with many arguments as to the comfort which awaited her there. But Lizzie was about as much inclined for the workhouse as the free bird for the cage, and, rather to Lady Conyers' indignation, Lady O'Gara had abetted the culprit, saying that ...
— Love of Brothers • Katharine Tynan
... wines or foaming ale. They gave not less to the poor because they delighted to honour the brave and good, or to greet one another in the loving cup. Unlike the coldly intellectual reformers and theorists of the present day, they did not consider the gaol and the workhouse as the only asylums for poverty. They were men of feeling and kindly impulse, not of abstract principles. They gave their cheerful alms to the mendicants, and spread a bounteous board for their neighbours. Fools ...
— The Corporation of London: Its Rights and Privileges • William Ferneley Allen
... ask Oldinport. I'm going to write to him tomorrow morning, for to tell him the arrangement I've been thinking of about having service in the workhouse while the church is being enlarged. If he agrees to attend service there once or twice, the other people will come. Net the large fish, and you're sure ...
— Scenes of Clerical Life • George Eliot
... inculcation of the lesson derived from precisely such a scene as this which will always make the grave of Charles Dickens seem "as though it were the very grave of those little innocents whom he created for our companionship, for our instruction, for our delight and solace." The little workhouse-boy, the little orphan girl, the little cripple, who "not only blessed his father's needy home, but softened the rude stranger's hardened conscience," were severally referred to by the preacher when he ...
— Charles Dickens as a Reader • Charles Kent
... who were successful or wealthy could not be sure that they would not eventually die of want. In every workhouse might be found people who had at one time occupied good positions; and their downfall was not in ...
— The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists • Robert Tressell
... culture, and of worthier joys, Larger attainments, and less coarse desires, And gentler tastes; these shall be heard of youth. And echo'd by old folk beside their fires, For comfort after their wage-work is done— No workhouse fires, but cosy fires of Home!— These thee shall greet, PUNCH-MERLIN, in thy time, Shall voice them also, not in jest, and swear, Though men may wound Truth, that she will not die, But pass, again to come; and, then or now, Utterly smite foul Falsehood ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Volume 102, Jan. 2, 1892 • Various
... way to the workhouse, Polly?" he inquired of the little lodging-house servant who came to clear ...
— A Sheaf of Corn • Mary E. Mann
... under Nelson and lost both, arms, yet kept "the rheumatics" in either stump) was appointed, in an evil hour, to the Cornish coast-guard; and he never rested until he had caught all the best county families smuggling. Through this he lost his situation, and had to go to the workhouse; nevertheless, such a stir had been roused that (to satisfy public opinion) they made a large sacrifice of inferior people, and among them this Solomon Gundry. Now the Gundries had long been a thickset ...
— Erema - My Father's Sin • R. D. Blackmore
... has turned me out of doors after borrowing every penny I'd got, to put it into his business, and then accusing me of laziness when I was only waiting for a situation. I am at the mercy of the world! If you can't take me and help me, Jude, I must go to the workhouse, or to something worse. Only just now two undergraduates winked at me as I came along. 'Tis hard for a woman to keep virtuous where ...
— Jude the Obscure • Thomas Hardy
... about women that is sublime: they understand nothing of money; they do not meddle with it, it is no affair of theirs; they are invited guests at the 'banquet of life,' as some poet or other said that came to an end in the workhouse." ...
— The Collection of Antiquities • Honore de Balzac
... in Parliament, a large income, and finally the promised hand of an acknowledged beauty can make a man happy, the world was right. It is true that Sir Roderick Ayre had been heard to pity the poor chap on the ground that his father had begun life in the workhouse; but everybody knew that Sir Roderick was bound to exalt the claims of birth, inasmuch as he had to rely solely upon them for a reputation, and discounted the value of his opinion accordingly. After all, it was not as if the late Mr. Lane had ended life in the undesirable shelter ...
— Father Stafford • Anthony Hope
... are committed for assault and battery or larceny, for terms varying from one month to four years and a half; those committed for graver offences are confined at Sing Sing; all drunkards, vagrants, and disorderly characters at the workhouse. During the past year two thousand three hundred and fifteen persons were incarcerated for different periods—two thousand one hundred and thirty-nine whites, one hundred and seventy-six blacks. Of these about one third were native Americans, one third Irish, one tenth ...
— The Secrets Of The Great City • Edward Winslow Martin
... one another. You hear of men painting pot-boilers to keep an aged mother—well, it shows they're excellent sons, but it's no excuse for bad work. They're only tradesmen. An artist would let his mother go to the workhouse. There's a writer I know over here who told me that his wife died in childbirth. He was in love with her and he was mad with grief, but as he sat at the bedside watching her die he found himself making mental notes of how she looked and what she said and the ...
— Of Human Bondage • W. Somerset Maugham
... and listen to me. The next time you look at a public-house say to yourself, Peter Crawley, that is not a public-house to you—it is a hospital, a workhouse, for a dunghill—for if you go in there John Meadows, that is your friend, ...
— It Is Never Too Late to Mend • Charles Reade
... in educational matters, and formed an acquaintance with Joseph Lancaster, the founder of the Monitorial system, and quickly turned her talents to account in visiting the workhouse and school belonging to the Society of ...
— Elizabeth Fry • Mrs. E. R. Pitman
... motion, he disappeared, and in his stead I saw a withered old pauper with the Victoria Cross on his breast. "I went to the mouth of hell for thee," he said, with large reproachful eyes; "and thou leavest me to rot in the workhouse." ...
— Without Prejudice • Israel Zangwill
... stand no more, and said, 'You ought to be prosecuted for violating the midnight closing law.' At this the saloonkeeper and policemen rushed upon me and put me into the street; and one of the policemen, grasping my arm like a vice, hissed in my ear, 'I'll get you a thirty days' sentence in the workhouse, and then we'll see what you think about suing people.' He called a patrol wagon, pushed me in, and drove to jail; and, Judge, you know the rest. All day yesterday I was locked up, my children at home alone, with no fire, no food, ...
— Questionable Amusements and Worthy Substitutes • J. M. Judy
... discovered one such library still in existence at Rheims. It belonged originally to the Jesuits, who had constructed it about 1678, and when the Order was expelled from France in 1764, and their House became the workhouse (hopital general) of the town, it was fortunately made use of as the lingerie, or linen-room, without any material change. Even the table has been preserved. The view here presented of the interior (fig. 132) may serve to give a general idea, not merely ...
— The Care of Books • John Willis Clark
... broke down. He was afeard for his life. He wint in wid the rest, an' refused to pay rint', an' iv coorse he got evicted, an' lost his five thousand pounds he put into the farm, an' then he lost his business, an' before long he died with a broken heart. An' where did he die? Just in the workhouse. 'Twas all thro' William O'Brien, the great frind iv Oireland, that this happened. An' if O'Brien an' his frinds got into power, why wouldn't it happen again? But we're afeard to breathe almost in this unfortunate counthry, ...
— Ireland as It Is - And as It Would be Under Home Rule • Robert John Buckley (AKA R.J.B.)
... Unluckily the house is haunted, if I may use that expression, not only by night, but by day; though at night the disturbances are of a more unpleasant and sometimes of a more alarming character. The poor old woman who died in it three weeks ago was a pauper whom I took out of a workhouse, for in her childhood she had been known to some of my family, and had once been in such good circumstances that she had rented that house of my uncle. She was a woman of superior education and strong mind, and was the only person I could ever induce to remain ...
— Pausanias, the Spartan - The Haunted and the Haunters, An Unfinished Historical Romance • Lord Lytton
... Walling meant tenpence a day and regular work for at least six months, and the choice lay between that and the dreaded "Bastile," as Yorkshiremen in the years that succeeded the French Revolution had learnt to call the workhouse. ...
— Tales of the Ridings • F. W. Moorman
... was the spoilt darling of my parents and of every one round me. After that I was a pupil teacher, taken in literally out of charity, in a second-rate suburban school. I am sure for a time I must have behaved too hatefully for words, and if Miss McDonald had sent me to the workhouse it would have served me right. But she knew that she was the only friend I had, and was awfully good to me. If I had only been older when the crash came I daresay I should have been better provided ...
— The Rebellion of Margaret • Geraldine Mockler
... produce discontent among the surrounding slaves; yet I have seen this woman tremble with rage, when her slaves displeased her, and heard her use language to them which could only be expected from an inmate of Bridewell; and have known her in a gust of passion send a favorite slave to the workhouse to be ...
— The Anti-Slavery Examiner, Omnibus • American Anti-Slavery Society
... a civil trial. When the law does not have a set penalty, the jury virtually has to sentence the defendant after convicting him, choosing between one of two proposed penalties. Greek courts can inflict death, exile, fines, but almost never imprisonment. There is no "penitentiary" or "workhouse" in Athens; and the only use for a jail is to confine accused persons whom it is impossible to release on bail before their trial. The Athens city jail ("The House," as it is familiarly called—"Oikema") is a very simple affair, one open building, carelessly ...
— A Day In Old Athens • William Stearns Davis
... of the Forsytes, with its wealth, its misery; its dirt and noise; its jumbled stone isles of beauty, its grey sea of hideous brick and stucco? That London which had seen Irene's early tragedy, and Jolyon's own hard days; that web; that princely workhouse ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... the Parson as he saw and remembered that which had been done to him. He called to him his servant Lissi Workhouse, and her he told to take Gwen to Deinol. The cow lowed woefully as she was driven; she was heard even in Morfa, and many hurried to the ...
— My Neighbors - Stories of the Welsh People • Caradoc Evans
... the Board-room of the workhouse of St. Margaret's, Westminster, is a portrait of Margaret Patten, which corresponds with the picture just described, and bears the ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 210, November 5, 1853 • Various
... 3. The workhouse, being lately enlarged, and to which belongs a corporation or a body of the inhabitants, consisting of sixty persons incorporated by Act of Parliament Anno 1698 for taking care of the poor. They are incorporated by the name and title of the governor, deputy governor, ...
— Tour through the Eastern Counties of England, 1722 • Daniel Defoe
... even if it condemns me. If it condemns my heart, my head, Lord, pour it on me. If it condemns my life, pour it on me. If it condemns those companions, those indulgences, pour it on me: I will give them up. If it condemns my business, pour it on me: I will abandon such business, and sooner die in the workhouse than continue in it. If it condemns my family relations, I will come out from them, and follow Thee." The Lord will always answer such a soul as that. He will put His finger down on this sore spot and the other, and He will tell you what to do, and you will be as sure ...
— Godliness • Catherine Booth
... these last, it is no exaggeration to say that their wives in many cases work like slaves. Indeed, this falls short of the truth, for slaves have not the added burden of responsibility. As things are now, the woman who marries a farmer often goes, as one may say, into a workhouse, sentenced to hard labor ...
— A Domestic Problem • Abby Morton Diaz
... seemed to me that I had tried to find some occupation which would enable me to keep body and soul together in every other part of London, and that now only Hammersmith was left. And, at Hammersmith, even the workhouse would ...
— The Beetle - A Mystery • Richard Marsh
... 2d. Went to see a poor woman at the Workhouse; she is full of joy in the hope of heaven, and possession of the present mind of Jesus. I said, "Many wish for it who have it not;" she said, "Perhaps they are not enough in earnest: it costs a few groans, and struggles, and tears, ...
— A Brief Memoir with Portions of the Diary, Letters, and Other Remains, - of Eliza Southall, Late of Birmingham, England • Eliza Southall
... and nearly naked—that I have no friends within reach, and no prospect whatever. I am, therefore, an object for public charity, and I will ask for what is my due. I am afraid of what I may find in the workhouse;—the vicious people, the dirty people, the diseased people,—and, I suppose, not one among them who can ...
— The International Magazine, Volume 2, No. 2, January, 1851 • Various
... makes guileful tongue and lips. It is the workhouse where is the forge of deceits and slanders, and other evil speakings; and the tongue is only the outer shop where they are vended, and the lips the door of it. So then such ware as is made within, such and no other can be ...
— The Epistles of St. Peter and St. Jude Preached and Explained • Martin Luther
... however; he comes from the village, and is taken on at odd times, partly to please himself. His great aim is to be independent of his children,—he has a granddaughter who is one of the maids at the Priory,—and to keep himself out of the workhouse. He does not come from these parts—somewhere farther north, I fancy. But he's a tough lot, and has a deal ...
— Stories in Light and Shadow • Bret Harte
... permitted it all. That would indeed sicken and dishearten me. No, I believe that God never wastes anything; but it's a fearful and protracted battle; and I believe that He will win in the end. I read a case in the paper the other day of a little child in a workhouse that had learnt a lot of infamous language, and cursed and swore if it was given milk instead of beer or brandy. Am I to believe that God was in any way responsible for putting a little child in that position?—for allowing things to take shape so, if He could have ...
— Father Payne • Arthur Christopher Benson
... had fought shoulder to shoulder with Gough and Lawrence, and who had contrived to make a figure in society with very small means. Georgina's sisters had all married well. It was a case of necessity, the Colonel told them; they must either marry or gravitate ultimately to the workhouse. So the Miss Lorimers made the best use of their youth and freshness, and 'no good offer refused' was the guiding rule of their young lives. Lucy married an East India merchant, and set up a fine house in Porchester Terrace. Maud married wealth personified in ...
— Phantom Fortune, A Novel • M. E. Braddon
... time in coming. When it came, it told that pauper laborers could not be recommended; but a better sort of laborer might be sent, and his place in the parish would be filled, only too easily, by some of the young men from the workhouse. The proposal was to send the very best man of his class known to the parish officers. He and his wife had money enough in the savings' bank to pay their journey, and they were willing to make the venture. The man's name was Harry Banks. ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Volume 2, No. 12, May, 1851. • Various
... little severely. 'She were crazed, and my aunt couldn't keep her on, could she? She did keep her a long weary time, thinking as she would, may-be, come to hersel', and, anyhow, she were a motherless wench. But at length she had for t' go where she came fro'—back to Keswick workhouse: and when last I heerd on her she were chained to th' great kitchen dresser i' t' workhouse; they'd beaten her till she were taught to be silent and quiet i' th' daytime, but at night, when she were left ...
— Sylvia's Lovers, Vol. II • Elizabeth Gaskell
... a good wife sending out ships and dealing in merchandise. Women entered stores and became not only clerks but merchants, and some of the best stores she knew to-day were owned by women, who do not look to the time when they are to go to the workhouse or some worse place even, but were laying by some means to give them comfortable maintenance in their old age. Fathers who had daughters looked forward with more courage, because there were more avenues for woman's industry and better pay to ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume II • Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and Matilda Joslyn Gage
... that he should take his wife with him, to attend upon the lady passengers; so I was left at Yarmouth, and put out to nurse till they came back. But they never came back, Jack; and, as soon as I can recollect, I found myself in the workhouse, and, when old enough, was sent to sea. I had been told that my father and mother had been lost at sea, but no one could tell me how, and I thought little more about it, for I had never known them, and those we don't know we do not love or care for, ...
— Poor Jack • Frederick Marryat
... was born John Rowlands, achieved all the feats which made him an international figure under the name of his American benefactor who adopted him in New Orleans after he had run away to sea from a Welsh workhouse. He was for years to all intents and purposes an American, and carried the American flag on two ...
— An African Adventure • Isaac F. Marcosson
... discriminate between the good and the bad amongst the poor, and it is impossible not to feel pity for a man who has nothing but the workhouse to look forward to, even if he has come down in the world through his own folly. To those who are living in luxury the conditions under which the poorer classes earn their daily bread, and the wretched prospect which old age or ill health presents ...
— A Cotswold Village • J. Arthur Gibbs
... was admitted, and made good progress in his studies. Had his mother been too ignorant to know her rights, or too abject to demand them, the lad would have had a fair chance to get a living out of the State as the occupant of a workhouse, or penitentiary. ...
— An Appeal in Favor of that Class of Americans Called Africans • Lydia Maria Child
... Bundrowas Tower, Tirconnell broad was theirs; Spearmen and plunder, bards and wine, and holy abbot's prayers; With chanting always in the house which they had builded high To God and to Saint Bernard,— where at last they came to die. At worst, no workhouse grave for him! the ruins of his race Shall rest among the ruin'd stones of this their saintly place. The fond old man was weeping; and tremulous and slow Along the rough and crooked lane he crept ...
— Sixteen Poems • William Allingham
... the paupers in the Workhouse. The radical working men are jealous of their own leaders, and the leaders are jealous of one another. Schopenhauer must have organised a Labour Party in his salad days. And yet one can't help feeling that he committed suicide as a philosopher by not committing it as a man. He claims ...
— The Grey Wig: Stories and Novelettes • Israel Zangwill
... "till they strip us of everything we've worked our lives away earning. They'll ride in our motor-cars and we'll sit in their workhouse. That'll be nice, won't it? How'll plain little girls ...
— V. V.'s Eyes • Henry Sydnor Harrison
... constantly having the nurses and sisters to visit her, and learning from them the most minute details of its working. Great is evidently her rejoicing when one of her "Nightingales" proves to be a really fine nurse, such a one, for instance, as Agnes Jones, the reformer of workhouse nursing. ...
— Great Men and Famous Women. Vol. 6 of 8 • Various
... describe him as falling back on the common land, which was a much more common incident. Mediaevalism believed in mending its broken men; and as the idea existed in the communal life for monks, it existed in the communal land for peasants. It was their great green hospital, their free and airy workhouse. A Common was not a naked and negative thing like the scrub or heath we call a Common on the edges of the suburbs. It was a reserve of wealth like a reserve of grain in a barn; it was deliberately kept back ...
— A Short History of England • G. K. Chesterton
... had let their old friends know that their father had given up the whisky, and now he, foolish man, felt half afraid and half ashamed to meet them; but he was obliged to go, for he wanted Peters to go with him, and tell the workhouse people about the rescue of the little girl, for fear they should refuse to take her in unless his ...
— A Sailor's Lass • Emma Leslie
... insane. He was sent to St. Luke's, and dismissed as cured; but his power was gone and his strength; he could no longer manage a garden, nor submit to the restraint, nor encounter the fatigue of regular employment: so he retreated to the workhouse, the pensioner and factotum of the village, amongst whom he divides his services. His mind often wanders, intent on some fantastic and impracticable plan, and lost to present objects; but he is perfectly harmless, and full of a childlike simplicity, a smiling contentedness, a most touching ...
— Our Village • Mary Russell Mitford
... fundamental social truth was revealed to him; and right well he gave expression, by words and deeds, to his strong and well-grounded conviction of the equal claim of all to the use of Mother Earth, to the use of the nation's natural home, workhouse and storehouse, whence, by labour, everything necessary to life and comfort can alone be derived. Winstanley realised, as they to-day realise, that to admit in the abstract the Fatherhood of God and the Brotherhood of Man, to admit the equal claim of all to life, and yet ...
— The Digger Movement in the Days of the Commonwealth • Lewis H. Berens
... people: but that next to it, Bredfield, has more than four hundred: and some very poor indeed. We hope to be of some use: but the new Poor Laws have begun to be set afoot, and we don't know who is to stop in his cottage, or who is to go to the Workhouse. How much depends upon the issue of this measure! I am no politician: but I fear that no political measure will ever adjust matters well between rich ...
— Letters of Edward FitzGerald - in two volumes, Vol. 1 • Edward FitzGerald
... vices are hourly exchanging deeds of kindness; a Light shining into the rooms of dingy warehousemen and thrifty clerks, whose hard labour and hoarded coins are for wife and child and friend; shining into prison and workhouse, where sin and sorrow glimmer with sad eyes through rusty bars into distant homes and mourning hearths; shining through heavy curtains, and round sumptuous tables, where the heart throbs audibly through velvet mantle and silken vest, ...
— Friends and Neighbors - or Two Ways of Living in the World • Anonymous
... whole family on its legs, and Fanny had stipulated that after the debts were paid she was to have a clear, cool hundred for her own pocket, and no nonsense about it. It was she who had done it all, and if it hadn't been for her, they might all have gone to the workhouse. But now her success was to her as dross. The thought of Diana's future wealth and glory produced in her a feeling which was an acute physical distress. So Diana was to be married!—and to the great parti of the neighborhood! Fanny already saw her in the bridal ...
— The Testing of Diana Mallory • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... museum, or curiosity-shop: every thing has the same posthumous appearance, the same inanimateness and identity of character. If Bloomfield is too much of the Farmer's Boy, Crabbe is too much of the parish beadle, an overseer of the country poor. He has no delight beyond the walls of a workhouse, and his officious zeal would convert the world into a vast infirmary. He is a kind of Ordinary, not of Newgate, but of nature. His poetical morality is taken from Burn's Justice, or the Statutes against Vagrants. He sets his own imagination ...
— Lectures on the English Poets - Delivered at the Surrey Institution • William Hazlitt
... The company—it is called the Solid Gold Reef Company, is in liquidation because, though there is really the gold there, it costs too much to get it. I have no relatives anywhere to help me. Unless I can get assistance my children and I must go at once—tomorrow—into the workhouse. Yes, we are paupers. I am ruined by the cruel lies of that prospectus, and the wickedness which deluded me, and I know not how many others, out of my money. I have been foolish, and am punished; but those people, who will punish them? Help me, if you can, my dear Reginald. Oh! ...
— Victorian Short Stories, - Stories Of Successful Marriages • Elizabeth Gaskell, et al.
... interest except the statistics of their fellows who had gone before them and who had been finally liberated by death? A still more striking passage, just because Dickens here shows unusual restraint and moderation in his language, tells us of the five women whom he saw sleeping all night outside the workhouse through no fault of any official, but simply because there was no room for them inside and because society had nothing to offer, no form of 'relief' which could touch these unfortunates. Many will be familiar with passages in Ruskin, where he ...
— Victorian Worthies - Sixteen Biographies • George Henry Blore
... feelings underwent a change. Memories of his early days came back to him—his life in the workhouse, his schooldays, when he took his place among the rest of the pauper boys, the learning of a trade, and his work in the mine. Always his life had been overhung with shadow, and yet he had enjoyed it. He had found pleasure ...
— The Day of Judgment • Joseph Hocking
... you maintain order by the steadiness and reasonableness of your difficult lives, still avoid and resent that slavish obedience to the yoke fastened upon you by capitalists,—who have no other comfort to offer you in poverty than the workhouse; and no other remedy for the sins into which you are thrust by their neglect, than the prison! Take, and keep the rights of your humanity!—the right to think,—the right to speak,—the right to know what is being done with the money you patiently earn for others;— and work, all ...
— Temporal Power • Marie Corelli
... There is a railway-station, bleak, gray, and windswept, situated, for the benefit of local car-owners, a mile and a half from the town, and the road which connects the two is execrable. There is a workhouse, in Ballymoy as everywhere else in this lost land the most prominent building. There is a convent, immense and wonderfully white, with rows and rows of staring windows and a far-seen figure of the Blessed Virgin, poised in a niche above the main door. ...
— Hyacinth - 1906 • George A. Birmingham
... do it, Joe. I've been a good wife to you—I've been a good mother: and I love you, though I'm ragged and have pawned all my clothes; and I'll strangle myself rather than go to the workhouse and be shut away ...
— Five Little Plays • Alfred Sutro
... as during war time the difficulties of communication with foreign countries were so great, he must not entertain much hope of success. "However, you can in the meantime relieve yourself of the care of the child by sending her to the workhouse, or if you choose to take care of her, her friends, when they are found, will undoubtedly repay you, though I warn you they are very likely, after all, not to ...
— Won from the Waves • W.H.G. Kingston
... wages, and in proportion to the number of children in the family, legitimate or illegitimate. The excuse was that it was better to eke out scanty earnings by doles than to break up households, and bring all their inmates into the workhouse. The inevitable effect of such action was that wages fell as doles increased, that paupers so pensioned were preferred by the farmers to independent labourers because their labour was cheaper, and that independent labourers, failing to get work except at wages forced down to a ...
— The Political History of England - Vol XI - From Addington's Administration to the close of William - IV.'s Reign (1801-1837) • George Brodrick
... considered as infamous may be affected by the changes of public opinion from one age to another."[2] Imprisonment in a State prison or penitentiary, with or without hard labor,[3] or imprisonment at hard labor in the workhouse of the District of Columbia,[4] falls within this category. The pivotal question is whether the offense is one for which the Court is authorized to award such punishment; the sentence actually imposed is immaterial. When an accused is in danger of being subjected to an infamous punishment ...
— The Constitution of the United States of America: Analysis and Interpretation • Edward Corwin
... places or on sun-nurtured plains, to merge himself once more in the fiery soul hidden within. But the mocking voice would not be stifled, showing him how absurd and ridiculous it was "to become a vagabond," so the voice said, and finally to die in the workhouse. So the eternal spirit in him, God's essence, conscious of its past brotherhood, with the morning stars, the White Aeons, in its prisonhouse writhed with the meanness, till at last he cried, "I will struggle no longer; it is only agony ...
— AE in the Irish Theosophist • George William Russell
... palace in Oxford, built by Henry First, who styled it le Beau Mont; it stood in Stockwell Street, nearly on the site of the present workhouse. It had not been visited by royalty since 1157, when a baby was born in it, destined to become a mighty man of valour, and to be known to all ages as King Richard Coeur-de-Lion. In 1317 King Edward Second bestowed it on the White Friars, and ...
— One Snowy Night - Long ago at Oxford • Emily Sarah Holt
... Micawber, aged about three. These, and a dark-complexioned young woman, with a habit of snorting, who was servant to the family, and informed me, before half an hour had expired, that she was 'a Orfling', and came from St. Luke's workhouse, in the neighbourhood, completed the establishment. My room was at the top of the house, at the back: a close chamber; stencilled all over with an ornament which my young imagination represented as a blue muffin; and very ...
— David Copperfield • Charles Dickens
... redeeming point of the people of Goyaz was that they were extremely charitable. They had erected a huge building as a workhouse. It was entirely supported by charity. A small library had also ...
— Across Unknown South America • Arnold Henry Savage Landor
... person cannot be happy without remaining idle, idle he should remain. It is a revolutionary precept; but thanks to hunger and the workhouse, one not easily to be abused; and within practical limits, it is one of the most incontestable truths in the whole Body of Morality. Look at one of your industrious fellows for a moment, I beseech you. ...
— The Pocket R.L.S. - Being Favourite Passages from the Works of Stevenson • Robert Louis Stevenson
... frequently found, on medical examination, to be, in more than fifty per cent cases, mentally defective, equally so whether they are men or women. Tramps, by nature and profession, who overlap the workhouse population, and are estimated to number 20,000 to 30,000 in England and Wales, when the genuine unemployed are eliminated, are everywhere found to be a very degenerate class, among whom the most mischievous kinds of feeble-mindedness and mental perversion ...
— The Task of Social Hygiene • Havelock Ellis
... pain. At the same time, the girl had the sense to realise that Mrs Gowler had her use in life, inasmuch as she provided a refuge for the women, which salved their pride (no small matter) by enabling them to forego entering the workhouse infirmary, which otherwise ...
— Sparrows - The Story of an Unprotected Girl • Horace W. C. Newte
... sir, they are petty villains, mere pick-pockets. They are a miserable set. Their trade never produces a man of genius; 'tis confined to the whip and workhouse—and at most can lead ...
— The Works of Frederich Schiller in English • Frederich Schiller
... talking between her sobs. "It was not true, not one word of it, she just said it all to be disagreeable. She likes me to be miserable; I don't believe she ever had any parents of her own—I mean, not what you call parents. Some say she was born in a workhouse, a caravan, or an East-end doss. Though how she managed to be what she is they can't explain. I thought she was nice, mammy. I called her my friend. I tried to be like her," shuddering at the recollection. "Oh! don't go away," taking them ...
— When the Birds Begin to Sing • Winifred Graham
... of the prominent members of the community were haled in to court ... and, to the surprise of everyone, sentenced to forty-eight hours hard labour on the rock-pile, in the workhouse.... ...
— Tramping on Life - An Autobiographical Narrative • Harry Kemp
... took to drinking, and Flame, his wife, ain't a bit better; and neither one of them have been worth anything since I sold their two children-which I had to do, or let the dignity of the family suffer. I don't like to do it, but I must. I must send Zeff to the workhouse-have him nicely whipped, I only charge him eighteen dollars a month for himself, and yet he will drink, and won't pay over his wages. Yes!—he shall have it. The extent of the law, well laid on, will ...
— Justice in the By-Ways - A Tale of Life • F. Colburn Adams
... on we go, fast, fast! down the road, across the lea, past the workhouse, along by the great pond, till we slide into the deep narrow lane, whose hedges seem to meet over the water, and win our way to the little farmhouse at the end. "Through the farmyard, Lizzie; over the gate; ...
— Afoot in England • W.H. Hudson
... Workhouse Characters, by Margaret Wynne Nevinson (The Macmillan Company). This collection of newspaper sketches written during the past fifteen years have no pretensions to art, and were written with a frankly propagandist intention. ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1920 - and the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various
... we got there," said Gallagher, "but at the first go off I took him along the road past the workhouse." ...
— General John Regan - 1913 • George A. Birmingham
... principle holds good: 'To him that hath shall be given.' And it holds eminently in reference to our grasp of Christian principles. Use them and they grow; neglect them and they perish. Sometimes a man dies in a workhouse who has a store of guineas and notes wrapped up in rags somewhere about him; and so they have been of no use to him. If you want your capital to increase, trade with it. As the Lord said when He gave the servants their talents: 'Trade with them ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... object too sacred. It will condescend with equal readiness upon torturing a pauper, fleecing the farmer, robbing a church, or undertaking "the command of the Channel fleet at a moment's notice." With Mr Secretary Chadwick, schooled in police courts, it will metamorphose workhouse asylums for the destitute into parish prisons, with "locks, bolts, and bars," for the safe keeping of unfortunate outcasts found guilty of the felony of pauperism. With Dr Kay Shuttleworth and the privy council, ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 54, No. 334, August 1843 • Various
... principles common to Smith and Eden. The law, too, might be used oppressively by the niggardly and narrow-minded. The overseer, as Burn complained,[80] was often a petty tyrant: his aim was to depopulate his parish; to prevent the poor from obtaining a settlement; to make the workhouse a terror by placing it under the management of a bully; and by all kinds of chicanery to keep down the rates at whatever cost to the comfort and morality of the poor. This explains the view taken by Arthur Young, and generally accepted at the period, that the poor-law meant depopulation. ...
— The English Utilitarians, Volume I. • Leslie Stephen
... was delightful to her; action, energy, influence, were delightful to her; she could only breathe freely in the very thick of the stirring, many-coloured tumult of existence. Whether it was a pauper in the workhouse, or boys from the school, or a girl caught in the tangle of a love-affair, it was all the same to Mrs. Elsmere. Everything moved her, everything appealed to her. Her life was a perpetual giving forth, ...
— Robert Elsmere • Mrs. Humphry Ward |
