"Charwoman" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... does it show Scrooge? A vision of his death—how he is plundered by laundress, charwoman, and undertaker; the phantom of Death; Scrooge's creditors; ...
— Ontario Teachers' Manuals: Literature • Ontario Ministry of Education
... old lady, though she was but a charwoman depending for professional engagements rather on the goodwill—for auld lang syne—of one or two families in Chiswick, of prodigious opulence in her eyes, yet was regarded by Sapps Court, when she visited her niece, Mrs. Rackstraw, or Ragstroar, ...
— When Ghost Meets Ghost • William Frend De Morgan
... put her mite in the poor-box, Mr. Horatio Bottomley, Shakespear, Mr. Jack Johnson, Sir Isaac Newton, Palestrina, Offenbach, Sir Thomas Lipton, Mr. Paul Cinquevalli, your family doctor, Florence Nightingale, Mrs. Siddons, your charwoman, the Archbishop of Canterbury, and the common hangman." Or "The late Mr. Barney Barnato received as his lawful income three thousand times as much money as an English agricultural laborer of good general character. Name the principal virtues in which ...
— Preface to Androcles and the Lion - On the Prospects of Christianity • George Bernard Shaw
... said Louis, indicating the tray which Rachel had drawn from concealment under the Chesterfield, and which was now loaded. Mrs. Maldon employed an old and valued charwoman in the mornings. Rachel accomplished all the rest of the housework herself, including cookery, and she accomplished it with the stylistic smartness of a ...
— The Price of Love • Arnold Bennett
... stronger by frequent confinements; and the fare is bound to get less nourishing as the mouths round the domestic board increase—always simple, it often becomes insufficient. The mother, working hard already, has to work harder still and to do laundry work at home or go out as a charwoman, in order to increase the modest income. In industrial centres women frequently work in the factories as well, though the law does at least protect them against too long hours and ...
— Dutch Life in Town and Country • P. M. Hough
... sell, and I often got enough in the week to buy us a hearty meal; the last served to boil our kettle when we had any food to cook in it. Few rich people know how the poor live; our way was a strange one. My poor mother used to work with her needle, and go out as a charwoman, and to wash, when she could get any one to wash for, but that was seldom; and toil as hard as she might, a difficult matter she had to pay the rent of the little room in which we lived. She felt sorely the struggle she ...
— Peter Biddulph - The Story of an Australian Settler • W.H.G. Kingston
... acceptable. After the revolution of July, Fougeres sent about ten pictures a year to the Salon, of which the jury admitted four or five. He lived with the most rigid economy, his household being managed solely by an old charwoman. For all amusement he visited his friends, he went to see works of art, he allowed himself a few little trips about France, and he planned to go to Switzerland in search of inspiration. This detestable artist was an excellent citizen; ...
— Pierre Grassou • Honore de Balzac
... was a certain Madame Joseph, a widow of forty and a charwoman by calling, whom Benard, the husband, had at first engaged to come two hours every morning to attend to the housework, his wife not having strength enough to put on a child's shoes or to set a pot on the fire. At first Euphrasie had offered furious resistance to this intrusion of ...
— Fruitfulness - Fecondite • Emile Zola
... the last charwoman at the Mansion," she answered. "She said that if you wanted a pleasure, and a pleasure cheap, there was nothing in all the world like a penny boat. You sit in it, and there you are, as snug as snug; plenty of room and plenty of company, and plenty of sights. Mrs. Jones ...
— The Palace Beautiful - A Story for Girls • L. T. Meade
... as a brilliant inspiration that there was no possible hurry, and that sitting under the trees reading a book, and drinking lemon squash, was a much more agreeable method of spending a hot summer's day than working like a charwoman. She carried her latest book into the garden forthwith, ordered the "squash," and spent an hour of contented ...
— Tom and Some Other Girls - A Public School Story • Mrs. George de Horne Vaizey
... and was clearing away, when there came a knock at the door. His charwoman, whose duty it was to clean his brushes every week, came in ...
— The Holiday Round • A. A. Milne
... might mean final parting—not without a farewell meeting. He sent Pedro with a note to the physician's lodgings, begging to be allowed the privilege of returning his hospitality that same evening; and the physician accepting for himself and daughter, a charwoman was sent for, the great cobwebbed house was scrubbed and furbished in the living chambers, the ancient silver was exhumed from mildewed cupboards, the heavy oil-paintings were dusted, a lively canary in a bright ...
— Dreamers of the Ghetto • I. Zangwill
... cannot you wash, replied my sister, or get up linen? she answered in the negative, and said, she would undertake neither, nor would she go into a family that did not put out their linen to wash, and hire a charwoman to scour. She desired to see the house, and having carefully surveyed it, said, the work was too hard for her, nor could she undertake it. This put my sister beyond all patience, and me into the greatest admiration. Young woman, said she, you have made a mistake, ...
— Everybody's Business is Nobody's Business • Daniel Defoe
... distinguished, and mock at old-time sanctities with coarse burlesque. We see it constantly in the fortunes of old streets and squares, once graced with the beau and the sedan-chair, the very cynosure of the polite and elegant world, but now vocal with the clamorous wrongs of the charwoman and the melancholy appeal of the coster. We see it, too, in the ups and downs of words once aristocratic or tender, words once the very signet of polite conversation, now tossed about amid the very offal of language. We see it when some noble house, ...
— Prose Fancies • Richard Le Gallienne
... coolness and colour. But Beatrice was angry. She moved rapidly and determinedly about the dining-room, thrusting old newspapers and magazines between the cupboard and the wall, throwing the litter in the grate, which was clear, Friday having been charwoman's day, passing swiftly, lightly over the front of the furniture with the duster. It was Saturday, when she did not spend much time over the work. In the afternoon she was going out with Vera. That was ...
— The Trespasser • D.H. Lawrence
... last the lady of Paddy Green, personally attended to the laundry; a fortnight's wash took place, when Mrs. Briggs, the charwoman, was in waiting. Mrs. P. Green, with her accustomed liberality, sent out for a quartern of gin and a quarter of an ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 1, Complete • Various
... study and entertaining. "Scouts" are a kind of servant attached to one student or a small number of students. They run errands, bring meals from the kitchen, and take care of clothing. A bootblack called the "boots" takes care of footwear. A charwoman called the "char" cleaned ...
— Tom Brown at Oxford • Thomas Hughes
... continued by every Indian mail after his receipt of her guarded refusal; he Quixotic, devoted, no matter how she had changed. He loved the mere scent of her letter paper. Was she only a governess? Had she been a charwoman, he would have kissed her cheeks white. The boyish extravagance of his passion worked upon her, troubling her to her sincerest core. She would hide nothing from him. She wrote a full account of her stage career, morbidly exaggerating the vulgarity of her performance and the degradation ...
— The Grey Wig: Stories and Novelettes • Israel Zangwill
... no work, and at last came to scrub out the shop and rooms for Virginie. She came on Saturday morning with a pail and a scrubbing brush, without appearing to suffer in the least at having to perform a dirty, humble duty, a charwoman's work, in the home where she had reigned as the beautiful, fair-haired mistress—for thirty sous. It was a last humiliation, the end of her pride. Virginie must have enjoyed herself, for a yellowish flame darted from her cat's eyes. At last she was revenged ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol VIII • Arthur Mee and J.A. Hammerton, Eds.
... the middy, looking round at the pictures and other decorations of the place and addressing them as if they were sentient, listening creatures. "Here's a big six-foot strongly-built British sailor talking to his officer like an old charwoman about mysteries! You, Tom May, if ever you dare to talk such nonsense to me again, I'll ...
— Hunting the Skipper - The Cruise of the "Seafowl" Sloop • George Manville Fenn
... cottage-girl afforded. It had been his almost invariable custom to dine at one of his clubs. Now he sat at home over the miserable chop or steak to which he limited himself in dread lest she should complain of there being too much work for one person, and demand to be sent home. A charwoman came every two or three days, effecting an extraordinary consumption of food and alcoholic liquids: yet it was not for this that Pierston dreaded her presence, but lest, in conversing with Avice, she should open the ...
— The Well-Beloved • Thomas Hardy
... to protest, but the words stuck in her throat and she was forced to accept the sturdy charwoman whom Rosamond's ...
— Miss Pat at Artemis Lodge • Pemberton Ginther
... innumerable, and one above the rest, shouting them down, until there fell a lull. And another, as it were, from afar said quite clearly and distinctly, 'But surely, my dear, you have heard the story of the poor old charwoman who talked Greek in her delirium? A little school French need not alarm us.' And Lawford opened his eyes again on Mr ...
— The Return • Walter de la Mare
... extravagance, or a significant stride toward gentility. The wife of the English joiner or mason or small farmer, if brisk, notable and healthy, may dispense with the stated service of a maid of all work, but she calls in a charwoman on certain days, and is content to live as becomes the station of a housewife who must be her own ...
— The Secret of a Happy Home (1896) • Marion Harland
... this same barracks, our charwoman told Amenda, who told Ethelbertha, who told me a story, which I now told ...
— The Idler, Volume III., Issue XIII., February 1893 - An Illustrated Monthly. Edited By Jerome K. Jerome & Robert Barr • Various
... establishment were irregular and fragmentary. They depended chiefly on tea, pickles, and biscuit, as he had suspected from the beginning. The girls were supposed to market week and week about, but they lived, with the help of a charwoman, as casually as the young ravens. Maisie spent most of her income on models, and the other girl revelled in apparatus as refined as her work was rough. Armed with knowledge, dear- bought from the Docks, Dick warned Maisie that ...
— The Works of Rudyard Kipling One Volume Edition • Rudyard Kipling
... little wanting in good taste. Cummings followed it up by saying, if it had been said by anyone else but myself, he shouldn't have entered the house again. This rather unpleasantly terminated what might have been a cheerful evening. However, it was as well they went, for the charwoman had finished up the remains ...
— The Diary of a Nobody • George Grossmith and Weedon Grossmith
... like a man of stone, standing before them, gaze averted, as a detected criminal. One might have supposed that a bloody secret gnawed at the bosom of Fawkes; but his private life was blameless and his past above reproach. His wife acted as charwoman at the church built by ...
— The Orchard of Tears • Sax Rohmer
... should do more wisely to spread the money over making ourselves more comfortable generally. When she came to go into it in detail, I found that on the whole hers was the preferable course. New curtains for the drawing-room are to be put in hand at once. The charwoman is to come regularly once a week. We raised the girl's wages a pound, and she went into hysterics. Eliza has insisted that I am to have a first-class season-ticket in future. There is much can be done ...
— Eliza • Barry Pain
... spring up and begin to dress herself, pondering in her mind as she did so whether to go first to the pawnbroker's or to the baker, to ask him to recommend her as a charwoman. She would tell him just the truth—that she must in future work for her daily bread. Then ...
— Far Above Rubies • George MacDonald
... public company was down for upwards of 50,000 pounds. There were several more cases of the same kind, but he trusted he had stated enough to establish the necessity of referring the matter to a Committee. There were, also, two brothers, sons of a charwoman, living in a garret, one of whom had signed for 12,500 pounds, and the other for 25,000 pounds; these two brothers, excellent persons, no doubt, but who were receiving about a guinea and a half between them, were ...
— Gossip in the First Decade of Victoria's Reign • John Ashton
... Superstitions," which happened to a farmer's wife residing in the neighbourhood of Arundel. It appears that she was in the habit of making a large quantity of blackberry jam, and finding that less fruit had been brought to her than she required, she said to the charwoman, "I wish you would send some of your children to gather me three or four pints more." "Ma'am," exclaimed the woman in astonishment, "don't you know this is the 11th October?" "Yes," she replied. "Bless me, ma'am! And you ask me to let my children go out blackberrying! ...
— The Folk-lore of Plants • T. F. Thiselton-Dyer
... usually very difficult of solution by the homemaker of small means. If she has but few persons to cater for, and is not the mother of a young family, she is often very much better off without hired help, except for a periodical charwoman. But it is not always indispensable to the woman who ...
— The Healthy Life, Vol. V, Nos. 24-28 - The Independent Health Magazine • Various
... fate to be a woman who is perfectly well born, and who is as penniless as a charwoman, and works like one. She is at the beck and call of any one who will give her an odd job to earn a meal with. That is one of the new ways women have ...
— Emily Fox-Seton - Being The Making of a Marchioness and The Methods of Lady Walderhurst • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... donna, looked at the stranger—a quiet, respectably-dressed woman who united a natural shyness with an evident determination to go through with the business that had brought her there. She was just the sort of woman who can be seen by the hundred—laundress, seamstress, charwoman, caretaker, got up in her Sunday best. Odd, indeed, it would be, thought Allerdyke, if this quiet, humble-looking creature should give information which would place fifty thousand pounds ...
— The Rayner-Slade Amalgamation • J. S. Fletcher
... servant; they were going to do the cooking themselves and employ an old charwoman in the mornings and evenings. It was all very well thought out and excellent ...
— Married • August Strindberg
... chapter I should like to give one striking instance of his tender sympathy and respect for the poor and lonely. A poor charwoman had died at Weston-super-Mare who had, I believe, often worked in Newman's house. He found that she had no friends to follow her body to the grave, and so he himself, his wife and servants, walked to the funeral as ...
— Memoir and Letters of Francis W. Newman • Giberne Sieveking
... of time they waste in this Sisyphean task would, even at charwoman's wages, buy socks and stockings for ...
— The Forerunner, Volume 1 (1909-1910) • Charlotte Perkins Gilman
... brought under the notice of the House of Lords, in 1845, that one Charles Guernsey, the son of a charwoman, and a clerk in a broker's office, at 12s. a week, had his name down as a subscriber for shares in the London and York line, for 52,000 pounds. Doubtless he had been made useful for the purpose by the ...
— Lives of the Engineers - The Locomotive. George and Robert Stephenson • Samuel Smiles
... unaffected by this, for in the days when she had lived in the dreadful fear that she and the Lump might be driven by necessity into the workhouse, she had gone shabby herself. She knew that Millicent's mother, who had once been a dancer, was now a charwoman, often out of work, and in feeble health. It was Millicent's perpetual complaint that she herself was so slow growing up to the age at which she would be earning money and supporting her ailing mother. Down ...
— Happy Pollyooly - The Rich Little Poor Girl • Edgar Jepson
... one. There could be no question as to that; for, besides being possessed of wealth, which, in the opinion of some minds, constitutes greatness, he was chairman of a railway company, and might have changed situations with the charwoman who attended the head office of the same without much difference being felt. He was also a director of several other companies, which, fortunately for them, did not appear to require much direction in ...
— Fighting the Flames • R.M. Ballantyne
... same to the markets, fetch the daily supply of water from the stream, cultivate the plantation, etc., etc. Perhaps I should say it is impossible for the dilatory African woman, for I once had an Irish charwoman, who drank, who would have done the whole week's work of an African village in an afternoon, and then been quite fresh enough to knock some of the nonsense out of her husband's head with that of the broom, and throw a kettle ...
— Travels in West Africa • Mary H. Kingsley
... on him, the feeling that he had rescued something, which gave him sense of anchorage. That, and his buried life in the retreat of these two rooms. Just for an hour in the morning, from nine to ten, the charwoman would come, but not another soul all day. They never went out together. He would stay in bed late, while Wanda bought what they needed for the day's meals; lying on his back, hands clasped behind his head, recalling her face, the movements of her slim, rounded, ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... the time of the murder; she was evidently an accomplice of the murderer. My cook had left on the same day, having conceived a not unnatural horror of the house. Since then I had made shift with a charwoman. But I should want a housemaid and a cook, and if I acted judiciously in the matter of references, I might get the sort of persons who would help my plans. For there are female rats as well ...
— The Uttermost Farthing - A Savant's Vendetta • R. Austin Freeman
... of the charwoman species replied to her summons. Upon Mavis saying that she wanted to see Mr Poulter immediately, she was shown into the "Ladies' Waiting Room," from which Mavis gathered ...
— Sparrows - The Story of an Unprotected Girl • Horace W. C. Newte
... acquiesced in her wish to go in, and they entered by the western door. The only person inside the gloomy building was a charwoman cleaning. Sue still held Jude's arm, almost as if she loved him. Cruelly sweet, indeed, she had been to him that morning; but his thoughts of a penance in store for her were tempered by ...
— Jude the Obscure • Thomas Hardy
... to the subject of this chapter. Mrs. G. Kelly, a lady well known in musical circles in Dublin, sends as her own personal experience the following tale of a most quiet haunting, in which the spectral charwoman (!) does not seem to have entirely laid aside all ...
— True Irish Ghost Stories • St John D Seymour
... the landlord were renewed with such vigour that I called a council of war to discuss the situation. Retreat being out of the question, Mabel suggested a levy of our last reserves, and the charwoman (who is a discreet person of considerable experience in such matters) was mobilised. In this way we secured a sufficient force to rout the ...
— Punch or the London Charivari, Vol. 147, December 16, 1914 • Various
... Nayland Smith briskly, holding the gate open; "there should be a fire in the library, and refreshments, if the charwoman has followed instructions." ...
— The Devil Doctor • Sax Rohmer
... away, and had a long talk with a charwoman whom he discovered in the desert of the chairs. She thought the office was situated somewhere in a region unknown to Frank, which she called St. George-of-the-Fields; her daughter, who had been shamefully deserted, had been married ...
— Mike Fletcher - A Novel • George (George Augustus) Moore
... years ago looked the same as ever; it might have been kept under a glass case. Gobseck's faithful old portress, with her husband, a pensioner, who sat in the entry while she was upstairs, was still his housekeeper and charwoman, and now in addition his sick-nurse. In spite of his feebleness, Gobseck saw his clients himself as heretofore, and received sums of money; his affairs had been so simplified, that he only needed to send his pensioner out now and again on an errand, and could carry ...
— Gobseck • Honore de Balzac
... captured. Her wandering away had been caused by a sudden and complete loss of memory. She usually dressed rather in the style of a superior kind of charwoman, and it was not so very surprising that she should have imagined that she was one; and still less that people should accept her statement and help her to get work. She had wandered as far afield as Birmingham, and found fairly steady employment ...
— The Toys of Peace • Saki
... the cottage, opened the outer door, was astonished to hear neither voice nor movement, to see nothing of the charwoman Louie had spoken of—rushed to the ...
— The History of David Grieve • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... some glistening black material, and at its center there bloomed a fearful red cabbage rose, a rose all vulgarity, ostentation and importance. This monstrosity had been given to Rosamund as a thank-offering by a poor charwoman to whom she had been kind. It had been in constant use now for over three years. The charwoman knew this ...
— In the Wilderness • Robert Hichens
... our ancestors live in us. Well, I can't bother. If Maurice were a crossing-sweeper, and his grandmother had been an evilly disposed charwoman, who could never get any one to trust her to char, I'd marry him to-morrow if ...
— The Call of the Blood • Robert Smythe Hichens
... sometimes other men, sometimes shop-boys, now and then a shop-girl on some errand, and once a week a charwoman who cleaned, and swept, and dusted, and piled the papers neatly up on ...
— Kristy's Rainy Day Picnic • Olive Thorne Miller
... economy. But sometimes he was detained by lectures, or he would take advantage of being in the neighborhood of a library to go and work there. Lucile Arnaud would be left alone in the empty flat. Except for the charwoman who came from eight to ten to do the cleaning, and the tradesmen who came to fetch and bring orders, no one ever rang the bell. She knew nobody in the house now. Christophe had removed, and there were newcomers in the lilac garden. Celine Chabran had married Andre Elsberger. Elie Elsberger ...
— Jean-Christophe Journey's End • Romain Rolland
... took them. They gave her nearly three knots an hour, and what better could men ask? But if she had been forlorn before, this new purchase made her horrible to see. Imagine a respectable charwoman in the tights of a ballet-dancer rolling drunk along the streets, and you will come to some faint notion of the appearance of that nine-hundred-ton, well-decked, once schooner-rigged cargo-boat as she staggered under her new help, shouting and raving across ...
— The Day's Work, Volume 1 • Rudyard Kipling
... of buses have changed, too. All classes travel side by side, the perspiring flower girl, with her heavy basket of roses, the charwoman clutching her morning purchase of fish, the daintily dressed lady going out to ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 153, Aug 8, 1917 • Various |
