"Workhouse" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... he said with sudden bluster, "the fool that owns the carriage is a ruined man. Mark my words. Extravagant, idle young woman. Die in the workhouse—that's what Bessie Day will do. Look here, Gibbon; you know how things are; you know all I've done for them. I could put up the shutters of the shop to-morrow, and they could not help theirselves. Bessie knows it too. ...
— Mrs. Day's Daughters • Mary E. Mann
... at right angles to St. Clement's Road, and in this there is a supplementary workhouse. It contains the relief office, large casual wards, the able-bodied workhouse, and a Poor Law Dispensary. Opposite are large Board Schools; the Roman Catholic Schools in the Silchester Road have been already mentioned in connection with the Catholic Schools of St. Francis. ...
— The Kensington District - The Fascination of London • Geraldine Edith Mitton
... there will remain hands sufficient for trade and manufactures, which do always indeed deserve the best encouragement, but not to a degree of sending every living soul into the warehouse or the workhouse. ...
— The Prose Works of Jonathan Swift, D. D., Volume IX; • Jonathan Swift
... who have never known it, or by those who have failed to fulfil it. Numberless modern women have rebelled against domesticity in theory because they have never known it in practice. Hosts of the poor are driven to the workhouse without ever having known the house. Generally speaking, the cultured class is shrieking to be let out of the decent home, just as the working class is shouting to be let ...
— What's Wrong With The World • G.K. Chesterton
... forty-seventh proposition; they do a better thing than that, they practically demonstrate the great Theorem of the Liveableness of Life. Consequently, if a 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. He sows hurry and ...
— Virginibus Puerisque • Robert Louis Stevenson
... 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 ...
— The Pickwick Papers • Charles Dickens
... thus antecedently plagiarizing an American millionaire. The parish accepts the Baby under protest, and a formal written protest addressed to the Baby, name unknown, is pinned on the potato sack. The two parishes go to law about the child. Neither wishes to take care of it. At Saint Bartemeus's workhouse, a notice was posted forbidding the officials, assistants and servants to enter the Baby's room, pendente lite, or to render it any service or assistance on pain of dismissal. The Baby was nigh starvation. The master ...
— Volume 10 of Brann The Iconoclast • William Cowper Brann
... Pedgift will speak for me, if you wish to inquire into my conduct in his service. I'm very much indebted to Mr. Pedgift; he's a little rough with me sometimes, but, if he hadn't taken me into his office, I think I should have gone to the workhouse when I left Sir John, I was so broken down." He picked up his dingy old hat from the floor. "I won't intrude any longer, sir. I shall be happy to call again if you wish to have time to consider before ...
— Armadale • Wilkie Collins
... says Mr. Crabbe, in his journal for 1817, "had better have rested as a shoemaker, or even a farmer's boy; for he would have been a farmer perhaps in time, and now he is an unfortunate poet." Poor John Clare, it will be recollected, died in a workhouse.-E. ...
— Letters of Horace Walpole, V4 • Horace Walpole
... comes the news that an inmate of a workhouse has received an income-tax form to fill in. This is considered to be but a foretaste of the time when all income-tax papers will have to be addressed ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 153, Aug. 22, 1917 • Various
... too sweet on women. There is a happy medium in all things, as our King has told us. And then his vanity is implicated! He is a handsome man!—He would bring you all to ruin for his pleasure; in fact, you are already on the highroad to the workhouse. Why, look, never since I set foot in your house have you been able to do up your drawing-room furniture. 'Hard up' is the word shouted by every slit in the stuff. Where will you find a son-in-law who would not turn his back in horror of the ill-concealed evidence of the most cruel misery ...
— Poor Relations • Honore de Balzac
... followed the disaster in San Francisco? Surely there were homeless, starved, despaired, wretched beings in San Francisco before the earthquake and the fire, yet the public's pity and sympathy haughtily passed them by; and official sympathy and compassion had nothing but the police station and the workhouse to give them. ...
— Mother Earth, Vol. 1 No. 3, May 1906 - Monthly Magazine Devoted to Social Science and Literature • Various
... dependent on the whims of editors and publishers, the prudent man keeps something up his sleeve against a sudden slump in his particular wares. I did not wish to have to make a hurried choice between matrimony and the workhouse. ...
— Love Among the Chickens - A Story of the Haps and Mishaps on an English Chicken Farm • P. G. Wodehouse
... performers on an instrument. Blindness, too, is often accompanied with some other disability, which disqualifies its victims for learning such trades as they might otherwise be taught. Hence many, rather than remain in the workhouse, take to grinding music in the streets. Here we are struck with one remarkable fact: the Irishman, the Frenchman, the Italian, or the Savoyard, at least so soon as he is a man, and able to lug it about, is provided with an instrument with which he can make a noise in the world, ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 430 - Volume 17, New Series, March 27, 1852 • Various
... hold on me, and made me too take my place in the vast bedlam, and go through my part under the great task-master. People tell you that death cures all; others again look forward to being transported from one workhouse to another, where they shall keep on playing the fool through all eternity and evaporating in an endless succession of illusions. With a little money—it would be ridiculous were I to mention the sum; many ...
— The Old Man of the Mountain, The Lovecharm and Pietro of Abano - Tales from the German of Tieck • Ludwig Tieck
... such cases, this bill, which obtained the royal assent in 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 should ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.II. - From William and Mary to George II. • Tobias Smollett
... fields made it impossible. There was a further choice. Near Craven Bank was a certain amount of land belonging to Mr. Robinson and also a field of five acres. Other sites were suggested including one between the Workhouse and the Station but finally in January, 1866, the plot of land near Craven Bank was bought for L375. Mr. Ingram's house—at the present time occupied by the Headmaster—was offered to the Governors for L2,600 ...
— A History of Giggleswick School - From its Foundation 1499 to 1912 • Edward Allen Bell
... Empire his employer saved his place, And his mates (that's you and me) looked out for her. He's an absent-minded beggar, and he may forget it all, But we do not want his kiddies to remind him, That we sent 'em to the workhouse while their daddy hammered Paul, So we'll help the home our Tommy's left ...
— Successful Recitations • Various
... yesterday, so to speak, since the Old Square, with its sedate looking houses disappeared, including that of Edmund Hector, the friend of Dr. Johnson, and many of us can readily recall to mind the old-fashioned Birmingham Workhouse standing in Lichfield Street—that poor, dirty thoroughfare which doubtless furnished a fair number of occupants for the afore-mentioned institution. Looking forward as I do—at least in my sombre moments—to the "Union" as being my ultimate home, I feel a sense of satisfaction that the Birmingham ...
— A Tale of One City: The New Birmingham - Papers Reprinted from the "Midland Counties Herald" • Thomas Anderton
... determined upon—neat little iron beds for the dormitories, and all that could serve for comfort and even pleasure, for both Mr. Mauleverer and Rachel were strong against making the place bare and workhouse-like, insulting poverty and dulling ...
— The Clever Woman of the Family • Charlotte M. Yonge
... the Swansea workhouse, having been told that margarine was to be served out instead of butter, returned their portions, only to discover that it was butter after all. As similar incidents have occurred in many other establishments it is suggested that margarine should in future ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 150, January 12, 1916 • Various
... proposed to constitute a third kingdom—the Regnum Protisticum—between the animal and the plant worlds, for the reception of the host of doubtful organisms. This third kingdom would resemble the casual ward of a workhouse, in that it would receive the waifs and strays of life which could not find a refuge ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 787, January 31, 1891 • Various
... my way," he proceeded, "to save my poor Charles from shame, had even the workhouse been my only refuge at the close of my days. Alas! as he told in his dream, I fear he had forfeited his life by that fatal act, forgery, for which there is no pardon with man. If so, the present dispensation is one of mercy, for which ...
— Wilson's Tales of the Borders and of Scotland, Volume 2 - Historical, Traditional, and Imaginative • Alexander Leighton
... that as most of the Sisters were French, there might be some skill shewn in putting these morsels into new and palatable forms. We did not, however, find that the dishes were superior to what might have been expected in a workhouse. The principal article was a pudding, composed of pounded scraps and crusts of bread, and bearing much the appearance of the oatmeal porridge of Scotland. Ladies attend the old women at table, acting entirely ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 433 - Volume 17, New Series, April 17, 1852 • Various
... deal. In all the German political treatises there is an immeasurable dreariness. They lay down rules for life, and if they be asked what makes such a life worth living they are without any hint of an answer. Their world is a workhouse, tyrannically ordered, and ...
— England and the War • Walter Raleigh
... receive a body without a medical certificate and a warrant from the inspector of anatomy, and, when the bodies are buried, a proper religious service, according to the creed professed during life, is provided. The great majority of bodies are those of unclaimed poor in the workhouse infirmaries, but a few are obtained each year from the general hospitals. Occasionally a well-to-do person, following the example of Jeremy Bentham, leaves his body for the advancement of science, but even then, if his relatives object, it is ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... mother's dead, and she's to stay tonight with Mrs Shrobsall—that's a landlady that's been kind—and tomorrow the Relieving Officer is coming for her, and she's going into the Union; that means the Workhouse. It's too terrible. What ...
— The Story of the Amulet • E. Nesbit
... their own minds had always been subordinate to the constant and multifarious demands of their duties towards their workpeople. One of the curious features of that not very distant time was the Apprentice House. The employer procured children from the workhouse and undertook the entire charge of them. The Gregs usually had a hundred boys and girls between the ages of ten and twenty-one in their apprentice house, and the care of them was one of the main occupations of the family. They came from the refuse of the towns, ...
— Critical Miscellanies (Vol. 3 of 3) - Essay 7: A Sketch • John Morley
... no Christ to convince anybody today that our system of distribution is wildly and monstrously wrong. We have million-dollar babies side by side with paupers worn out by a long life of unremitted drudgery. One person in every five dies in a workhouse, a public hospital, or a madhouse. In cities like London the proportion is very nearly one in two. Naturally so outrageous a distribution has to be effected by violence pure and simple. If you demur, you are sold up. If you resist the selling up you are bludgeoned and imprisoned, the process being ...
— Preface to Androcles and the Lion - On the Prospects of Christianity • George Bernard Shaw
... noisily Into the seething wave. And as for me, I railed at him and at ingratitude, While rifling of the basket he had slung Across his shoulders; then with right good will We fell to work, and feasted like the gods, Like laborers, or like eager workhouse folk At Yuletide dinner; or, to say the whole At once, like tired, hungry, healthy youth, Until the meal being o'er, the tilted flask Drained of its latest drop, the meat and bread And ruddy cherries eaten, and the dogs Mumbling the bones, this elder brother ...
— Poems by Jean Ingelow, In Two Volumes, Volume I. • Jean Ingelow
... 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 checked it? No, indeed! ...
— Father Payne • Arthur Christopher Benson
... the toiling slave. They, too, have lost all faith of life being 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 pioneers ...
— "In Darkest England and The Way Out" • General William Booth
... who crossed his path; as, calling to a full-grown coal-heaver in a wagon, who for a moment blocked the way, 'Now, young 'un, who trusted YOU with a cart?' inquiring of elderly ladies who wanted to cross, and ran back again, 'Why they didn't go to the workhouse and get an order to be buried?' tempting boys, with friendly words, to get up behind, and immediately afterwards cutting them down; and the like flashes of a cheerful humour, which he would occasionally relieve by going round St. James's Square at a hand gallop, and ...
— Life And Adventures Of Martin Chuzzlewit • Charles Dickens
... take him for but a ne'er-do-weel, whose 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 ...
— Warlock o' Glenwarlock • George MacDonald
... him upon his feet to assist him to the watch-house; he walked a few yards, and from weakness fell upon his knees. They got him upon their shoulders to carry him to the watch-house, but before they arrived with him he appeared to be dead. The watchman took him to the workhouse, and called up the house surgeon, who examined the body, and said it was useless to bleed him, or use any method to restore him, as he was quite dead. The deceased is apparently about fifty years of age, the most complete picture ...
— Memoirs of Henry Hunt, Esq. Volume 3 • Henry Hunt
... This is seldom for more than 6d., for the sweater will not give them victuals if he has no work for them to do. Many who live and work at the sweater's are married men, and are obliged to keep their wives and children in lodgings by themselves. Some send them to the workhouse, others to their friends in the country. Besides the profit of the board and lodging, the sweater takes 6d. out of the price paid for every garment under 10s.; some take 1s., and I do know of one who takes as much as 2s. This man works for a large show-shop at the West End. The usual profit ...
— Alton Locke, Tailor And Poet • Rev. Charles Kingsley et al
... It doesn't mean, as you might think, the Workhouse, or the White House, or the Station House, or the Bon Marche. It is the name given by people of Lady Cicely's class to ...
— Behind the Beyond - and Other Contributions to Human Knowledge • Stephen Leacock
... into a passion when he received such a message, declared it was just such a mean, shabby trick as might have been expected from a Scotchman—called himself a booby, a dupe, and a blockhead, for ever having trusted to the civil speeches of a Scotchman—swore that he would die in the parish workhouse before he would ever ask another favour, be it ever so small, from a Scotchman; related to his wife, for the hundredth time, the way in which he had been taken in by the Scotch peddler ten years ago, and concluded by forswearing ...
— The Parent's Assistant • Maria Edgeworth
... 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 in the stocks, and his Muse, like ...
— Lectures on the English Poets - Delivered at the Surrey Institution • William Hazlitt
... 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
... ill and weak she do look, don't she?' says Emmy. Before I could say as much as 'Yes,' she stares up at us, and asks in a wild voice, though it wasn't very loud either, if we can tell her the way to Bangbury workhouse. Having pretty sharp eyes of our own, we both of us knew that a workhouse was no fit place for her. Her gown was very dusty, and one of her boots was burst, and her hair was draggled all over her face, and her eyes was sunk in her head, like; but we saw somehow that ...
— Hide and Seek • Wilkie Collins
... to the house I was born in, which was the workhouse. You were educated at Eton and Christchurch, and all ...
— The Squire's Daughter - Being the First Book in the Chronicles of the Clintons • Archibald Marshall
... swarms with problems yet unsolved; the worst, as it may be found in many a remote district of the Continent and even in England itself, is appalling in both daily fact and final result. It would seem at times as if the workshop meant only a form of preparation for the hospital, the workhouse, and the prison, since the workers therein become inoculated with trade diseases, mutilated by trade appliances, and corrupted by trade associates, till no healthy fibre, mental, moral, or ...
— Women Wage-Earners - Their Past, Their Present, and Their Future • Helen Campbell
... she said; "a mean, close, discontented creature, who can see no pleasure in life except money-making. I hate the very sight of his pale pinched face, father, and the sound of his hard shrill voice. If I had to choose between the workhouse and marrying Stephen Whitelaw, I'd choose the workhouse; yes, and scrub, and wash, and drudge, and toil there all my days, rather than be mistress ...
— Fenton's Quest • M. E. Braddon
... apparent. From all parts came reports of the evil quality of the immigrants. The Immigration Minister, writing to the Agent-General in June, 1874, says: "I have already called your attention to the fact that the shipment by the ... included a number of girls out of the Cork Workhouse, and I took the opportunity of remarking on the very undesirable character of such immigration. A perusal of the report of the Immigration Officer at Dunedin will, I think, convince you how very disastrous it is likely to prove to the cause of immigration if ...
— Mental Defectives and Sexual Offenders • W. H. Triggs, Donald McGavin, Frederick Truby King, J. Sands Elliot, Ada G. Patterson, C.E. Matthews
... any rate, Mary, we shall have between us enough to keep us out of the workhouse even if I turn out an ...
— A Girl of the Commune • George Alfred Henty
... nigger,—I like to see old Stiffneck obliged to bow down his head and swallow his infernal pride, and drink the cup of humiliation poured out by Pump and Aldgate's butler. 'Pump and Aldgate, says he, 'your grandfather was a bricklayer, and his hod is still kept in the bank. Your pedigree begins in a workhouse; mine can be dated from all the royal palaces of Europe. I came over with the Conqueror; I am own cousin to Charles Martel, Orlando Furioso, Philip Augustus, Peter the Cruel, and Frederick Barbarossa. I quarter the Royal Arms of Brentford in my coat. I despise you, but I want money; and ...
— The Book of Snobs • William Makepeace Thackeray
... such restraints upon Free Competition as the penalties for infringing the Postal monopoly, and the withdrawal of workhouse and prison labour from the markets, should ...
— The History of the Fabian Society • Edward R. Pease
... Englishman and German like an Englishman. He could paint, model in clay, and play three musical instruments, including the organ. His one failing was that he could never earn enough to live on. It seemed as if he was always being drawn by an invisible string towards the workhouse door. Now and then he made half a sovereign extra by deputizing on the organ. In such manner had he been introduced to the Ebag ladies. His romantic and gloomy appearance had attracted them, with the result that they had asked him ...
— The Matador of the Five Towns and Other Stories • Arnold Bennett
... way to Mr. Brisk's workhouse. "What I've to show you is in here," he said. The girls followed him somewhat timidly, but were reassured when Rock drew out a box of shavings where, cuddled up, they saw a cat and three little bits ...
— A Sweet Little Maid • Amy E. Blanchard
... the erection of a vast combined county workhouse, prison, and infirmary; where the unemployed should find, not only work but skilled instruction, the poor relief, and the sick a hospital; where discipline and good order should be stringently enforced; and where two chaplains ...
— Henry Fielding: A Memoir • G. M. Godden
... and we must bolster him up in his kingdom, or else there will be trouble with the powers." Powers—what's powers to me?—or Greenland? when there's Slingsby, a man I've smoked a pipe with every market evening of my life, in the workhouse? And there's hundreds of Slingsbys all ...
— The Inheritors • Joseph Conrad
... money, and orchard—all had disappeared during a lingering illness,—and the poor old woman's inevitable fate was now to await the fast approaching death of a good husband, and then retire, for her few remaining and widowed years, to the workhouse of ...
— Confessions of an Etonian • I. E. M.
... Waterhouse. "I spent three months in camp in County Tipperary. I know those dirty little Irish towns. Twenty public-houses. Two churches, a workhouse ...
— Our Casualty And Other Stories - 1918 • James Owen Hannay, AKA George A. Birmingham
... Giles, bursting 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 ...
— Young Folks Treasury, Volume 3 (of 12) - Classic Tales And Old-Fashioned Stories • Various
... the workhouse," retorted Inspector Chippenfield brutally. "We'd have something to do if Scotland Yard undertook to trace all the absconding husbands in London. We can do nothing in the matter, and ...
— The Hampstead Mystery • John R. Watson
... 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 ...
— Alps and Sanctuaries of Piedmont and the Canton Ticino • Samuel Butler
... hopeless love. "What does it matter?" she asked herself. "I'm nothing but the ignorant object of his kindness—the poor fool who could see no difference between gratitude and love. Where is the harm of having him with me when I am starving in the streets, or dying in the workhouse?" The fervid spirit in her that had never known a mother's loving discipline, never thrilled to the sympathy of a sister-friend, rose in revolt against the evil destiny which had imbittered her life. Her eyes still ...
— The Evil Genius • Wilkie Collins
... Workhouse hirelings from the Union Bore him to his last, lone bed, "Dust to dust," that sad communion Woke no grief, no tear was shed. Worn by woes and life's denials, Only rest he now would crave: Quiet haven from all trials To the pauper ...
— Welsh Lyrics of the Nineteenth Century • Edmund O. Jones
... England in times when noblemen were destitute of comforts the want of which would be intolerable to a modern footman; when farmers and shopkeepers breakfasted on loaves the very sight of which would raise a riot in a modern workhouse, when men died faster in the purest country air than they now die in the most pestilential lanes of our towns; and when men died faster in the lanes of our towns than they now die on the coast of Guinea. But we too shall, in our turn, be outstripped, and, in ...
— A Modern History, From the Time of Luther to the Fall of Napoleon - For the Use of Schools and Colleges • John Lord
... 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 ...
— Lay Morals • Robert Louis Stevenson
... 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 Fires in Houses, and on Female Dress The Telegraph ...
— A Morning's Walk from London to Kew • Richard Phillips
... can't say,' answered Knight carelessly; 'but it is without doubt a misfortune for a man who has a living to get, to be born of a truly noble nature. A high soul will bring a man to the workhouse; so you may be right in sticking ...
— A Pair of Blue Eyes • Thomas Hardy
... 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
... newspaper, a duty of threepence on every pound of paper, and a heavy tax upon advertisements. The new Poor Laws aroused bitter discontent. Instead of receiving payment of money for relief of poverty, as had formerly been the case, the poor and needy were now sent to the 'Union' workhouse. ...
— Queen Victoria • E. Gordon Browne
... Hal to the mother on our reaching the Workhouse gate. "Ring modestly, as becomes the poor ringing at the gate of Charity." ...
— Paul Kelver • Jerome Klapka, AKA Jerome K. Jerome
... others 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
... still. The next time he opened his eyes the woman had left him. It was true he was in the workhouse, and a workhouse then was not what it is now. Who can possibly describe what it was? Who can possibly convey to anybody who has not known what it was by actual imprisonment in it any adequate sense of its gloom; of the utter, callous, brutal indifference of the so-called nurses; of the ...
— The Revolution in Tanner's Lane • Mark Rutherford
... together with ambiguous medical announcements of the tribe of quacks and empirics who prey upon all seafaring men. Not content with thus publicly giving notice of their whereabouts, these indefatigable Sangrados and pretended Samaritans hire a parcel of shabby workhouse-looking knaves, whose business consists in haunting the dock walls about meal times, and silently thrusting mysterious little billets—duodecimo editions of the larger advertisements—into the astonished hands ...
— Redburn. His First Voyage • Herman Melville
... into 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 road ...
— My Neighbors - Stories of the Welsh People • Caradoc Evans
... 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 ...
— An Old Town By The Sea • Thomas Bailey Aldrich
... must be ready to adorn heartless rank and fashion at to-morrow's pageant,—of the pale governess, grudgingly paid her pittance of salary without a kind word to sweeten the bitterness of a lonely lot. He is the friend even of the workhouse juveniles, and, as their champion, castigates with cutting sarcasm and stinging scorn the reverend and honorable guardians, who, just as, full of hope, they had reached the door of the theatre, prohibited a band of these wretched orphans from availing of a kind-hearted manager's ...
— The Atlantic Monthly , Volume 2, No. 14, December 1858 • Various
... the workhouse and the prison, Where, pale as corpses newly risen, Women, children, young and old, Groan for pain, ...
— Percy Bysshe Shelley as a Philosopher and Reformer • Charles Sotheran
... looked out; it was the same scene—forest on either side, with now and then a small lake, or pond, or creek. Jack was at his horses' heads, whistling away, as if he had nothing in the world to care for. He hadn't either. He had been a workhouse-boy in the old country, and would have ended his days as a labourer, and now he was laying by a good bit of money every trip, and expected to be able to buy a comfortable farm before long. So he did, and has brought ...
— The Log House by the Lake - A Tale of Canada • William H. G. Kingston
... applies immediately to the work, sorts and dyes his wool, mixes his colours to the patterns, puts the wool to the spinners, sends his yarn to the weavers, has the pieces brought home, then has them to the thicking or fulling-mill, dresses them in his own workhouse, and sends them up punctually by the time; perhaps by the middle of the month. Having sent up twenty pieces five weeks before, the warehouse-keeper, to oblige him, pays his bill of L50, and a month after the rest are sent in, he draws for the rest of the ...
— The Complete English Tradesman (1839 ed.) • Daniel Defoe
... must be a great life, yours, Miss Wade; such a sphere of usefulness! If we can only feel we are DOING GOOD—that is the main matter. For my own part, I like to be mixed up with every good work that's going on in my neighbourhood. I'm the soup-kitchen, you know, and I'm visitor at the workhouse; and I'm the Dorcas Society, and the Mutual Improvement Class; and the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals and to Children, and I'm sure I don't know how much else; so that, what with all that, and what with dear Hugo and the darling children"—she glanced affectionately at Maisie ...
— Hilda Wade - A Woman With Tenacity Of Purpose • Grant Allen
... Listen! you are probably the first lady with whom I have ever spoken. I do not want to deceive you. I never had a scrap of education. My father was a carpenter who drank himself to death, and my mother was a factory girl. I was in the workhouse when I was a boy. I have never been to school. I don't know how to talk properly, but I should be worse even than I am, if I had not had to mix up with a lot of men in the City who had been properly educated. I am utterly and miserably ignorant. I've got low ...
— A Millionaire of Yesterday • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... to theatrical applauses, and poetic prizes, and strifes for grassy garlands, and the follies of shows, and the intemperance of desires. There, desiring to be cleansed from these defilements, by carrying food to those who were called "elect" and "holy," out of which, in the workhouse of their stomachs, they should forge for us Angels and Gods, by whom we might be cleansed. These things did I follow, and practise with my friends, deceived by me, and with me. Let the arrogant mock me, and ...
— The Confessions of Saint Augustine • Saint Augustine
... wretched old man—that two beasts of women have put into the workhouse infirmary against his will. I only heard it to-night. I must go and ...
— Lady Rose's Daughter • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... of wild races, still keep a trace of the old customs of their ancestors. Who does not know the anxious look with which a well-fed pet dog will dig a hole and bury a bone that he does not happen to want, as if he had an old age in the workhouse to dread? I have seen a little Yorkshire terrier go the round of the dinner-table, sit up and beg piteously, pretending that 'the smallest trifle is most thankfully received,' look carefully round, and, thinking that ...
— Chatterbox, 1905. • Various
... 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 back to ...
— Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 6 (of 6) • Havelock Ellis
... be a broker's man in for the rent," continued the excitable lady, rapidly. "When Mr. Cox turns up after his spree, tell him what his doings have brought you to, and say you'll have to go to the workhouse." ...
— Light Freights • W. W. Jacobs
... 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
... the noted men of Savile Row dancing attendance round my bed, I dare say I should have died; but as I happen to be a penniless castaway, with only a lodging-house drudge and a half-starved apothecary to take care of me, and with nothing before me but a workhouse, I live. It is all very well for a man to take things easily when he is ill and helpless, too weak even to think. That is not the trying time. The real trial arrives when a little strength comes back to him, and his landlady begins to worry him for ...
— Charlotte's Inheritance • M. E. Braddon
... something. In our history lessons. I remember now. The Labour Company ousted the workhouse. It grew—partly—out of something—you, perhaps, may remember it—an emotional religious organisation called the Salvation Army—that became a business company. In the first place it was almost a charity. To save people from workhouse rigours. Now I come to think of it, it was one of the earliest ...
— When the Sleeper Wakes • Herbert George Wells
... ruined by their debts before I die. And for the rest, I read nothing but "The Edinburgh" and "The Agricultural Gazette." My talk is of bullocks. I just know right from wrong enough to see that the farms are in good order, pay my labourers living wages, keep the old people out of the workhouse, and see that my cottages and schools are all right; for I suppose I was put here for some purpose of that kind-though what it is I can't very clearly define-And there's an end ...
— Phaethon • Charles Kingsley
... 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 ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume II • Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and Matilda Joslyn Gage
... a fisherman's cottage, reared in a workhouse, employed in a brothel, won at cards by a royal duke, mistress of that duke, married to a baron, received at Court by three kings (though not much in the way of kings), accused of cozenage and tacitly of murder, died full of piety, 'cutting up' for close on L150,000—there, ...
— She Stands Accused • Victor MacClure
... baillie, another the town-clerk depute. Those kidnapped were openly "driven in flocks through the town, like herds of sheep, under the care of a keeper armed with a whip."*[5] So open was the traffic that the public workhouse was used for their reception until the ships sailed, and when that was filled, the tolbooth or common prison was made use of. The vessels which sailed from the harbour for America in 1743 contained no fewer ...
— The Life of Thomas Telford by Smiles • Samuel Smiles
... know, thoughtless, happy maiden, singing all the day, that one out of every five people who die in London, die in the workhouse or the hospital? ...
— Amaryllis at the Fair • Richard Jefferies
... universally distributed as oxygen, nor can every plant always get as much as it wants of it. I shall show by-and-by that a real struggle for food takes place between plants, exactly as it takes place between animals; and that certain plants, like Oliver Twist in the workhouse, never practically get enough to eat. Still, carbonic acid is present in very large quantities in the air in most situations, and is freely brought by the wind to all the open spaces which alone man uses for his crops and his gardening. ...
— Science in Arcady • Grant Allen
... sufficient to keep him from the parish, I think Guy, who was himself a bookseller, ought to have appropriated one wing or ward of his hospital to the use of decayed authors; though indeed, there is neither hospital, college, nor workhouse, within the bills of mortality, large enough to contain the poor of this society, composed, as it is, from the refuse of every ...
— The Expedition of Humphry Clinker • Tobias Smollett
... only words of warning to us—warning that we must be intensely orderly and intensely peaceable, and they have the workhouse just back of all ...
— The Nine-Tenths • James Oppenheim
... torture his heart by fancying her fate? Thomas, too, his own brave boy, whom utter poverty might drive to desperation? And the poor babes, his little playful pets, what on earth would become of them? There was the Union workhouse to be sure, but Acton shuddered at the thought; to be separated from every thing he loved, to give up his little all, and be made both a prisoner and a slave, all for the sake of what?—daily water-gruel, and a pauper's branded livery. Or they might perchance go beyond the seas, if some Prince ...
— The Complete Prose Works of Martin Farquhar Tupper • Martin Farquhar Tupper
... spleen (e'en worse than Burns' venom, when He dips in gall unmix'd his eager pen, And pours his vengeance in the burning line,)— Who christen'd thus Maria's lyre-divine The idiot strum of Vanity bemus'd, And even the abuse of Poesy abus'd?— Who called her verse a Parish Workhouse, made For motley foundling Fancies, stolen ...
— Poems And Songs Of Robert Burns • Robert Burns
... muslins. Its peculiarity is its tendency to "crinkle" or crumple in wearing, therefore it does not present a smooth flat surface, except by means of dressing, which unfits it for clinging effects but suits printed patterns. Such stuffs as workhouse sheeting, imitating certain fabrics of the sixteenth century, and which it has been the fashion of late to cover with embroidery, do not repay, by effective beauty, ...
— Needlework As Art • Marian Alford
... or garotter, or, indeed, a common thief Is very glad to batten on potatoes and on beef, Or anything, in short, that prison kitchens can afford,— A cut above the diet in a common workhouse ward. ...
— More Bab Ballads • W. S. Gilbert
... respectable old person—a widow, who had reared ten children. The children had all grown up, and scattered, and old Mrs. Welden had nothing whatever to live on. No one knew how she lived, and really she would be better off in the workhouse. She could be sent to Brexley Union, and comfortably taken care of, but she had that singular, obstinate dislike to going, which it was so difficult to manage. She had asked for a shilling a week from the parish, but that could not be allowed her, as it would merely uphold ...
— The Shuttle • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... for it, if you please. Why, they should ought to pay me. What's farming coming to, I'd like to know, if we've got to pay for bettering ourselves? The Government ud like to see all farmers in the workhouse—and there we'll soon be, if they go on at this rate. And it's the disrespectfulness to Poor Arthur, too—he left Donkey Street to me—not a bit to me and the rest to them. But there they go, wanting to take most of it in Death Duty. The best Death ...
— Joanna Godden • Sheila Kaye-Smith
... attached to a district, who might be known as a police officer, allowed to make inquiries when the mere fact of his calling might make things unpleasant for a licence-holder. A stranger from Scotland Yard is sent. This applies especially when a man is in a workhouse, a hospital, a Church Army labour home, ...
— Scotland Yard - The methods and organisation of the Metropolitan Police • George Dilnot
... answered that he can go to the workhouse, I reply that such an answer is founded on confused thinking. It is true that he is free to go to the workhouse, but only in the same sense in which he is free to go to jail, only in the same sense in which the serf under the gibbet ...
— Eugenics and Other Evils • G. K. Chesterton
... imagination of a boy, as I was then, nothing could be more startling than the aspect of the habitation which now held the haughty Earl of Mortimer. After passing through a variety of dungeon-like rooms, for the house had once been a workhouse, or something of the kind, I was ushered into the chamber where the patient lay. The village doctor, and one or two of the wise people of the neighbourhood, who thought it their duty to visit a stranger, that stranger being a man of rank, were standing by; and the long faces of those persons, seconded ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. CCCXXXII. - June, 1843.,Vol. LIII. • Various
... English principle that the indigent, by giving up their freedom, have a right to be supported. Society pays the cost, but shuts them up and sets them to work. As this condition is repugnant to them, they avoid the workhouse as much as possible." Similar institutions existed in France before the ...
— The Origins of Contemporary France, Volume 3 (of 6) - The French Revolution, Volume 2 (of 3) • Hippolyte A. Taine
... quite enough in these five days since this run of ill-luck set in for me. I would rather than ten crowns that the old gentlemen had moved out as you said. It sets the other lodgers against the house. It would not take much to make me send him to the workhouse. In short, just put yourself in my place. I have to think of my establishment first, for I have my own ...
— Father Goriot • Honore de Balzac
... From Workhouse to Westminster, a life of Will Crooks, Gilbert expressed a good deal of his own political philosophy. As a democrat he believed in the ideal of direct government by the people. But obviously this was only possible in a world that was also ...
— Gilbert Keith Chesterton • Maisie Ward
... London Workhouse, for the poor of the City of London, also stands in this ward, just without Bishopsgate, being a long brick edifice four hundred feet in length, consisting of several work-rooms and lodging rooms for the vagrants and parish ...
— London in 1731 • Don Manoel Gonzales
... they pay for the poor. They grudged the poor-rate before, even when their own overseer paid it away to poor old lame Davy or blind Gwinny; but now that it reaches them by a more circuitous route, and in the altered form of loaves or workhouse support, they seem to lose sight of it, and fancy that it stops by the way, in the pockets of these "strange" new middlemen, as we may call them, thrust in between the farmers and ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine - Volume 54, No. 338, December 1843 • Various
... 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 suicide as a philosopher by not committing it as a man. He claims kinship with Buddha, too; ...
— The Big Bow Mystery • I. Zangwill
... supported by flying buttresses. The supporting tower has been elaborately decorated, but much of the sculpture has fallen into decay, being made of the rich but friable red sandstone of this part of the country; the interior of the church has recently been restored. The Coventry workhouse is located in an old monastery, where a part of the cloisters remain, with the dormitory above; in it is an oriel window where Queen Elizabeth on visiting the town is reputed to have stood and answered a reception address in rhyme from the "Men of Coventrie" with some ...
— England, Picturesque and Descriptive - A Reminiscence of Foreign Travel • Joel Cook
... edifices at Boulogne, there is an hospital, or workhouse, which seems to be established upon a very good foundation. It maintains several hundreds of poor people, who are kept constantly at work, according to their age and abilities, in making thread, all sorts of lace, a kind of catgut, and in knitting ...
— Travels Through France and Italy • Tobias Smollett
... lately come into "the House" (the house that never was a home!), and the boy clung eagerly to his flannel sleeve, and plied him thick and fast with questions about the world without the workhouse-walls, and about the happy owner of those yet happier creatures who were free not only on the earth, ...
— Jackanapes, Daddy Darwin's Dovecot and Other Stories • Juliana Horatio Ewing
... Felix married to such a girl as she supposed Marie Melmotte to be, without any means of support for either of them but what she could supply. It would kill her. And for those young people there would be nothing before them, but beggary and the workhouse. As she thought of this she trembled with true maternal instincts. Her beautiful boy,—so glorious with his outward gifts, so fit, as she thought him, for all the graces of the grand world! Though the ambition was vilely ignoble, the mother's love was ...
— The Way We Live Now • Anthony Trollope
... is almost certain that they must have quarrelled occasionally. It is hard to believe that they could have been on good terms at this juncture, otherwise she would scarcely have allowed him to take his wife and child to what was then the public workhouse of the city;[60] but this place was his only refuge, and in October 1534 he was glad to shelter ...
— Jerome Cardan - A Biographical Study • William George Waters
... 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 ...
— The English Utilitarians, Volume I. • Leslie Stephen
... L1,000 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
... please go to the workhouse; they know that it is for them the door of heaven. For my part, I am worldly-minded; I fear God, but yet more I fear the hell of poverty. To be destitute is the last depth of misfortune in society as now constituted. I am a man of my ...
— Cousin Betty • Honore de Balzac
... and, for my part, I would sooner see a poor rogue soundly firked at the post, and then comforted with a bellyful of bread and cheese and beer by the constable, and so passed on to his belongings, than that he should be clapped up in a workhouse, to pick oakum and suck his paws like a bear, while Master Overseer gets tun-stomached over shoulder of veal and burnt brandy at vestry-dinners. For it is well-known, to the shame of Authority, that these things all come out of ...
— The Strange Adventures of Captain Dangerous, Vol. 1 of 3 • George Augustus Sala
... 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 ...
— Ireland as It Is - And as It Would be Under Home Rule • Robert John Buckley (AKA R.J.B.)
... chanced to be indicted for a criminal offence he would be denominated a "laborer." Serjeant Talfourd's sweeping theory, of the term "gentleman" being legally applicable to every man who has nothing to do and is out of the workhouse, cannot be accepted, as it would of necessity include thieves, mendicants and out-door paupers. The American police have been compelled, to defend the border-line of gentility against the encroachments of their vagabond gold-seekers, ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 17, - No. 97, January, 1876 • Various
... ill become me to tell him so. HAN. Nay, dear one, where true love is, there is little need of prim formality. ROSE. Hush, dear aunt, for thy words pain me sorely. Hung in a plated dish-cover to the knocker of the workhouse door, with naught that I could call mine own, save a change of baby-linen and a book of etiquette, little wonder if I have always regarded that work as a voice from a parent's tomb. This hallowed volume (producing a book of etiquette), composed, if I may ...
— The Complete Plays of Gilbert and Sullivan - The 14 Gilbert And Sullivan Plays • William Schwenk Gilbert and Arthur Sullivan
... England from a disease produced by eating pork containing a small internal parasite termed trichina spiralis. I have recently met with a case of trichiniasis in the human subject. The body of the unfortunate person—who had been an inmate of the South Dublin Union Workhouse—was found to contain thousands of the trichinae. In Iceland a large proportion of the population suffers from a parasitic disease traceable to the use of the flesh of sheep and ...
— The Stock-Feeder's Manual - the chemistry of food in relation to the breeding and - feeding of live stock • Charles Alexander Cameron
... out, last winter, if you will believe it, that he lived on bread and water, to give out of his own wages—which are barely twelve shillings a week- -five shillings a week for more than two months to a poor labouring man, to prevent his going to the workhouse, and being parted from his ...
— Yeast: A Problem • Charles Kingsley
... revolting from a Chitty, and no filial enthusiasm can induce me honestly to say that my father is a good landlord. He has preferred his affection for individuals to his duties to the community. It is not, my friends, a question whether a handful of farmers like yourselves go to the workhouse or not. It is a consumer's question. Do you produce the maximum ...
— Kenelm Chillingly, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... down the letter with a deep-drawn sigh. "Sey, my boy," he mused aloud, "no fortune on earth—not even mine—can go on standing it. These perpetual drains begin really to terrify me. I foresee the end. I shall die in a workhouse. What with the money he robs me of when he is Colonel Clay, and the money I waste upon him when he isn't Colonel Clay, the man is beginning to tell upon my nervous system. I shall withdraw altogether from this worrying life. I shall ...
— An African Millionaire - Episodes in the Life of the Illustrious Colonel Clay • Grant Allen
... yourself—one must think of oneself. "God helps those who help themselves." How are you going to exist when this little money of yours is gone? You'll simply have to go to the workhouse.... It's absurd, I ...
— Orientations • William Somerset Maugham
... 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 ...
— Historical and Political Essays • William Edward Hartpole Lecky
... tired. He only hung on to his berth so long in order to get his pension on the highest scale before he went home. It would be no better than poverty, anyhow; still, it was the only thing between him and the workhouse. And he had a family. Three girls, as Whalley knew. He gave "Harry, old boy," to understand that these three girls were a source of the greatest anxiety and worry to him. Enough to drive ...
— End of the Tether • Joseph Conrad
... died content. And now the pauper's funeral had set forth, And the bell toll'd—not many strokes, nor long— Pauper's allowance. He was coming home. But while the train was yet a good way off— The workhouse burial train—I stopp'd to look Upon the scene before me; and methought Oh! that some gifted painter could behold And give duration to that living picture, So rich in moral and pictorial beauty, If seen arightly by the spiritual eye As with ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 56, Number 350, December 1844 • Various
... population was in a state bordering on starvation—actually certain to die of famine, unless relieved by extraordinary exertions. In the woollen districts of Wiltshire, the allowance to the independent laborer was not two-thirds of the minimum in the workhouse, and the large existing population consumed only a fourth of the bread and meat required by the much smaller population of 1820. In Stockport, more than half the master spinners had failed before the close of 1842; dwelling houses to the number of ...
— Sophisms of the Protectionists • Frederic Bastiat
... cried Jones, highly delighted. "You would have made an actor, and a rare one. You had the proper workhouse cough, and those weak legs of yours are worth ten pound a week. I thought I knew the glint of your eye, though. You didn't get away from us so ...
— The Sign of the Four • Arthur Conan Doyle
... good woman and was willing to keep the child until the new proprietor came; but when once affairs were settled, she would certainly go and make a declaration to the mayor, and take her to the workhouse. Madame Desvarennes listened in silence. One word only had struck her while the woman was speaking. The child was without support, without ties, and abandoned like a poor lost dog. The little one was ...
— Serge Panine, Complete • Georges Ohnet
... him while he did so? He had a great many things to attend to that day.... We made our way along the street together, left the town behind us, and presently reached that sinister appendage of all Irish country towns, the workhouse. The priest turned in the wide gate, and the porter, old, official, ...
— Waysiders • Seumas O'Kelly
... There is not even the inhospitable shelter of a workhouse, to which the honest pauper may have recourse. Hence with tens of thousands it is literally a case of "steal or starve." I suppose that nine-tenths of the thefts and robberies, besides a large proposition of the other crimes committed in India, are prompted by sheer starvation, and until ...
— Darkest India - A Supplement to General Booth's "In Darkest England, and the Way Out" • Commissioner Booth-Tucker
... vast majority of cases where the deaf and dumb are allowed to grow up uneducated and uncared for they become inmates of Workhouses or Lunatic Asylums. Many years ago L—— K—— was taken from a workhouse in Derbyshire where he had been for a number of years, and educated and apprenticed to a suitable trade; he is now a steady, industrious man, married, and himself a ratepayer. This is only one of many similar instances ...
— Anecdotes & Incidents of the Deaf and Dumb • W. R. Roe
... living at Melford in 1805 and seduced either one or two sisters of the warden of the hospital or almshouse, and had two illegitimate children, one at any rate a girl. The Great House was one used, but not built, for a workhouse: it stood near the vicarage at Melford, but has now disappeared, and apparently its ...
— George Borrow - The Man and His Books • Edward Thomas
... this trouble, Sir! and had the child actually into the house! and—gracious me," added she in a half whisper, "hadn't I better call the butler, Sir; hadn't he" (nodding significantly towards the child) "better be taken to the workhouse at once, Sir?" ...
— The Fairy Godmothers and Other Tales • Mrs. Alfred Gatty
... the large number of tramps who leave the workhouses after the winter is over and roam the country in search of employment. Many of these wanderers, it is said, are arrested for vagrancy; in summer they swell the prison population just as they swell the workhouse population in winter. This explanation of the increase of crime in summer contains so many elements of probability, that it has come to be rather widely accepted by students of criminal phenomena. It has not, however, ...
— Crime and Its Causes • William Douglas Morrison
... two or three of the inmates were kneeling at prayers; and others whom we saw in the kitchen and about the offices had nothing of the "workhouse" look which is so painful in the ordinary inmates of ...
— Ireland Under Coercion (2nd ed.) (2 of 2) (1888) • William Henry Hurlbert |
