"Workhouse" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... Cipriani, the engraver, a foundation member of the Royal Academy, is buried here, and there is a monument erected to his memory by his friend and contemporary, Bartolozzi. When the Sydney Street burial-ground was opened in 1810, this was used for interment no more. Chelsea Workhouse stands just behind it, and the old women use the burial-ground for exercise. It is a quaint sight to see them through the tall iron railings wandering about dressed in their bright red-and-black check shawls, blue cotton dresses, and white frilled caps. The workhouse was begun ...
— Chelsea - The Fascination of London • G. E. (Geraldine Edith) Mitton
... to the site and the absence of playing 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 ...
— A History of Giggleswick School - From its Foundation 1499 to 1912 • Edward Allen Bell
... fortunate: it was suffered to continue unappropriated, till, upon the institution of the Legion of Honor, Napoleon applied it to some purposes connected with that body, by whom it was a few years ago ceded for its present object, that of a workhouse for the department. The choir alone is now used as a church: the nave serves for work-rooms; and, to render it the better applicable to this purpose, a floor has been thrown across, which divides it into ...
— Architectural Antiquities of Normandy • John Sell Cotman
... and weep, For pauper, dolt, and slave; Hark! from wasted moor and fen, Feverous alley, workhouse den, Swells the wail of Englishmen: "Work! ...
— Alton Locke, Tailor And Poet • Rev. Charles Kingsley et al
... penance in Uttoxeter market years after their father's death for a long-passed act of disobedience? Most of us, again, would have a temporary emotion of pity for an outcast lying helplessly in the street. We should call the police, or send her in a cab to the workhouse, or, at least, write to the Times to denounce the defective arrangements of public charity. But it is perhaps better not to ask how many good Samaritans would take her on their shoulders to their own homes, care for her wants, and put her into a ...
— Hours in a Library - New Edition, with Additions. Vol. II (of 3) • Leslie Stephen
... sudden good humour, her eyes bright. "It will all come right—you'll see! Tell old Christopher that his little sweetheart of the old days—Doris, I mean; he never loved me!—is in danger of the workhouse and so forth, and ask ...
— Till the Clock Stops • John Joy Bell
... information for stealing the child. They are both magistrates and could do it. So at last the fellow growled out that he wasn't going to be troubled with another man's brat, and just before embarking, he had laid it down asleep at the door of Liverpool Workhouse! So no doubt poor little Michael is there! I would have telegraphed at once; but I don't know where my uncle is, or whether he knows about it, but you can find out and send him this letter at once. I have asked him ...
— That Stick • Charlotte M. Yonge
... it, and that there was no use in keeping it shut up in a box. Very possibly it might be stolen by the dishonesty of a servant. That's safe anyhow, and it is my only worldly possession, except the books, and I would rather go into the workhouse than part with ...
— By Sheer Pluck - A Tale of the Ashanti War • G. A. Henty
... as 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
... out to see him. To the 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, ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. CCCXXXII. - June, 1843.,Vol. LIII. • Various
... to read Professor Huxley's letters. The existence of hunger, nakedness, misery, 'death from insufficient food,' even of starvation, is certain, and no agency as yet reaches it. How can any man hinder or discourage the giving of food or help? Why is the house called a workhouse? Because it is for those who cannot work? No, because it was the house to give work or bread. The very name is an argument. I am very sure what Our Lord and His Apostles would do if they were in London. Let us be thankful even to have a will ...
— Evolution and Ethics and Other Essays • Thomas H. Huxley
... 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. Miss Foote ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Volume 2, No. 12, May, 1851. • Various
... guileful heart 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 set out. That ...
— The Epistles of St. Peter and St. Jude Preached and Explained • Martin Luther
... the Workhouse were dressed in white, trimmed with coloured ribbons, and went in a procession headed by the Workhouse Master and the tallest girl who wore a crown of gilt paper and carried a sceptre and distaff. They ...
— Weather and Folk Lore of Peterborough and District • Charles Dack
... could 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, no ...
— Questionable Amusements and Worthy Substitutes • J. M. Judy
... "With your Majesty," he assented, "the hereditary principle must naturally be strong: it is implanted in your blood. I have no such impulse in mine. My father was born in a workhouse." ...
— King John of Jingalo - The Story of a Monarch in Difficulties • Laurence Housman
... 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
... of dying out. Profusion of food at this season is traditional, and has been handed down from generation to generation. A Christmas dinner must, if possible, be every one's portion, down to the pauper in the workhouse, and even the prisoner in the gaol. Tusser, who, though ...
— A Righte Merrie Christmasse - The Story of Christ-Tide • John Ashton
... individual of his flock—teaching in the school, catechising in the church, most carefully preparing for Confirmation, watching over the homes, and, however otherwise busied, always at the beck and call of every one in the parish. To the old men and women of the workhouse he paid special attention, bringing them little dainties, trying to brighten their dull minds as a means of reaching their souls, and endeavouring to raise their spirits to higher things. One who had been removed to another Union, when asked how he liked Hursley, said, "It seemed ...
— John Keble's Parishes • Charlotte M Yonge
... who have been well off come to the workhouse, they may be called poor:—but that's neither here nor there; only, if the boy does come to us, we must look ...
— Night and Morning, Volume 1 • Edward Bulwer Lytton
... 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 ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, May 6, 1914 • Various
... Honor, not the workhouse. Oh, God, not the workhouse," and she is borne out screaming and fighting and invoking Christ to her aid. The judge turns and says in explanation, "an old case, an example of what ...
— The Man in Court • Frederic DeWitt Wells
... the truth must have come to him soon. But it never did: for when he was just five, the woman took a chill and died in a week. She had left a little money; and the Vicar, rather than let Kit go to the workhouse, spent it to buy the child admission to an Orphanage in the ...
— Noughts and Crosses • Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... extinguished in her heart. The festal robes of enraptured feeling fell from her consciousness and were replaced by the rags of unwelcome recollections. She thought of the poor delicate little French girl lying by the wayside exhausted, and longed to know if she were at that moment sheltering in the workhouse, and rested, and restored. She wondered what it was like to be in the workhouse—alone—without a single friend to speak kindly to her; but the bare thought of such a position made her shudder. If only she could have befriended that poor creature and her little ...
— The Heavenly Twins • Madame Sarah Grand
... him to Bloomsbury; and after a descent into a grocer's shop, and an adventure which ended in an angry altercation in a servants' registry office, he was driven to a large building which adjoined the parish infirmary and workhouse. ...
— Mike Fletcher - A Novel • George (George Augustus) Moore
... leaned a tall youth with fair curling hair, a weak tremulous mouth, and an almost girlish physiognomy. This youth had been drummed out of the army, the discipline of which he had found too severe, for feigning illness, since when he had passed his time between the bosom of his family, the workhouse, and the Anarchist party. He paid very little attention to the proceedings of the meeting, but discoursed eloquently, in a low voice, of the brutality of his parents who refused to keep him any longer unless he ...
— A Girl Among the Anarchists • Isabel Meredith
... with a question about the food of an infant. We might, if you had taken the subject up at all warmly, have got on to the endowment of motherhood, nature study, medical examination of schools, the boarding-out of workhouse children, religious education, boy scouts, eugenics, and a lot of other perfectly fascinating topics. But what do you do? You say frankly and shamelessly that you know nothing at all about ...
— The Simpkins Plot • George A. Birmingham
... suffering, which makes him truly the type of Christ, the Man of sorrows; which makes his Psalms to this day the text-book of the afflicted, of tens of thousands who have not a particle of his beauty, courage, genius; but yet can feel, in mean hovels and workhouse sick-beds, that the warrior-poet speaks to their human hearts, and for their human hearts, as none other can speak, save Christ himself, the Son of David and the ...
— David • Charles Kingsley
... the way he hands the law out to 'em. They can cut and fight as long as it is in a whisky dive and no indictment returned; but let one of 'em sidestep an inch in any other ignorant pitiful way and it's the workhouse and the ...
— Andrew the Glad • Maria Thompson Daviess
... are the same. They're of the sort that keep to themselves, and don't drink. They all of them do well enough, as long as they don't let the liquor overcome them. Half the time it's the men's fault when they do drink. Perhaps the workhouse might take her in for the night. What's this you've got girl, in your ...
— The Fallen Leaves • Wilkie Collins
... 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 ...
— The Grey Wig: Stories and Novelettes • Israel Zangwill
... 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 ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 150, January 12, 1916 • Various
... man's table, and having some idea, 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 as servants do in a gentleman's dining-room, though ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 433 - Volume 17, New Series, April 17, 1852 • Various
... she went on, "there were a home, an institution, a girl like me could go to and obtain employment, it wouldn't be a life one would care for; it would be a sort of workhouse at the ...
— The Wharf by the Docks - A Novel • Florence Warden
... 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 ...
— Forgotten Tales of Long Ago • E. V. Lucas
... workhouse, workplace, shop, place of business; manufactory, mill, plant, works, factory; cabinet, studio; office, branch office bureau, atelier. [specific types of workplace: list], hive, hive of industry; nursery; hothouse, hotbed; ...
— Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases: Body • Roget
... 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 may be called an extension of one of ...
— Appreciations and Criticisms of the Works of Charles Dickens • G. K. Chesterton
... violence which—if not of the mobular party—he may be subject to; his family depend on his exertions for their daily bread—a broken limb, or any such accident happening to him, may bring the whole family to deep distress, if not to the workhouse. It appears by the Edinburgh Review of October, 1852, that at a previous general election, 40 per cent, of those possessing the privilege did not poll their votes. A hasty lowering of the franchise would certainly increase that number, and thus ...
— Lands of the Slave and the Free - Cuba, The United States, and Canada • Henry A. Murray
... sat by the fire in a ward of Gort Workhouse, I listened to two old women arguing about the merits of two rival poets they had seen and heard ...
— Poets and Dreamers - Studies and translations from the Irish • Lady Augusta Gregory and Others
... restraints upon Free Competition as the penalties for infringing the Postal monopoly, and the withdrawal of workhouse and prison labour from ...
— The History of the Fabian Society • Edward R. Pease
... 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 ...
— Father Payne • Arthur Christopher Benson
... peculiar brand of justice; he hadn't much respect for law, and once when a lawyer cited him the criminal code he said, "Tut, tut, that was made a hundred years ago!" Then he fined the man five shillings, and paid the fine himself, when he should have sent him to the workhouse ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great - Volume 12 - Little Journeys to the Homes of Great Scientists • Elbert Hubbard
... 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
... in a God so great and universal that he did not care to keep her and Derek alive and loving forever, and was not interested enough to see that the poor old cab-driver should not be haunted day and night with fear of the workhouse for himself and an old wife, perhaps? Nedda's tears fell fast, and how far THIS was Chardonnet no ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... 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 her in her ...
— The Shuttle • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... were inmates of workhouses gave a mean specific gravity of 1,052.8 and on schoolboys a mean of 1,056, while among the undergraduate students of Cambridge University he found a mean of 1,059.5. Several men of very high specific gravity in the last group had distinguished themselves in athletics. "Workhouse boys are in most cases of poor physique, and one can hardly find a better antithesis than the general type of physique common among the athletic members of such a university as Cambridge."[65] There is no more conclusive evidence of an organic ...
— Sex and Society • William I. Thomas
... the fashion nowadays to discredit the home, and it has been jestingly alluded to by Mr Bernard Shaw as 'the girl's prison and the woman's workhouse;' but what a wonderful sanctuary it really is!—and exactly how much it means to a woman, only those who have felt the need of it can tell. In our youth, home is the place where hampers come from, where string and stamps and magazines grow on ...
— Modern marriage and how to bear it • Maud Churton Braby
... 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
... that teach a man prudence, and make him bank against the storm. "At Walden no one bothered me but the State," said Thoreau. If Thoreau had had a family and treated his household as he treated himself, that scorned thing, the State, would have stepped in and sent him to the workhouse, and his children to ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great Philosophers, Volume 8 • Elbert Hubbard
... a small ketch which he owned entirely himself. For some years he did well, then sold the little vessel and commenced business ashore. I had not heard of or seen him for many years, when one afternoon a friend of mine called at my office and intimated that my old friend was in the workhouse, and had desired him to call and inform me of it, feeling sure that I would not allow him to remain there. I asked my friend to have him taken out and put into respectable lodgings until I could get him some relief from a philanthropic institution, and the odd easy jobs I saw put in his way kept ...
— The Shellback's Progress - In the Nineteenth Century • Walter Runciman
... an evening's carouse. They walked very contentedly to be registered before Doctor Dobbs, who was also justice of the peace, and went in search of their slender bundles, and took leave of their few acquaintances without much regret: for the gentlemen had been bred in the workhouse, and had not, therefore, a large ...
— Catherine: A Story • William Makepeace Thackeray
... Hargreaves invented the spinnin'-jenny, and landlords gave way to mill-owners." He stopped for a second or two and then continued as if an idea had only just come into his head. "An' it was proper punishment for Hargreaves," he said, "that the English let him die in the workhouse. Proper punishment. What the hell did he want to ...
— Changing Winds - A Novel • St. John G. Ervine
... half-past four o'clock when she trudged through Madron to see the gray church and the little gray houses all sleeping under the gray sky. She plodded on up the hill past the gaunt workhouse which stands at the top of it; and what had seemed soft, sweet repose among the cottage homes, felt like cold death beneath these ashy walls. To Joan, the workhouse was a word of shame unutterable. Those among whom she lived would hurl the word against ...
— Lying Prophets • Eden Phillpotts
... a real right down lord," cried a third eagerly, "he won't rack-rent the tenants, and grind down the poor. Why, he saved us and our little ones from the workhouse last winter, though he is poor—that is quite poor for a gentleman—I ...
— The Young Lord and Other Tales - to which is added Victorine Durocher • Camilla Toulmin
... for that privilege whatever he might be inclined to ask. "Sir," said Mr. J——, with great courtesy, "the house is at your service, for as short or as long a time as you please. Rent is out of the question. 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 ...
— The Boy Scouts Book of Stories • Various
... was nowise to be blamed upon the tardiness of the newspapers; it was occasioned by the fact that the person referred to was for the moment well out of contact with the active currents of world affairs, he being confined in a workhouse ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1917 - and the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various
... the house of commons, upon which occasion Mr P— observed he had never heard such a sensible evidence given at that bar. I was also introduced to Dr John Gordon, a patriot of a truly Roman spirit, who is the father of the linen manufacture in this place, and was the great promoter of the city workhouse, infirmary, and other works of public utility. Had he lived in ancient Rome, he would have been honoured with a statue at the public expence. I moreover conversed with one Mr G—ssf—d, whom I take to be one of the greatest merchants in Europe. In the last war, he ...
— The Expedition of Humphry Clinker • Tobias Smollett
... boys have found that there will be dinner every 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, and brewing his coffee on ...
— Uppingham by the Sea - a Narrative of the Year at Borth • John Henry Skrine
... service of his awl! Stitch away, thou noble Fox: every prick of that little instrument is pricking into the heart of Slavery, and World-worship, and the Mammon-god. Thy elbows jerk, and in strong swimmer-strokes, and every stroke is bearing thee across the Prison-ditch, within which Vanity holds her Workhouse and Ragfair, into lands of true Liberty; were the work done, there is in broad Europe one Free Man, and thou ...
— Sartor Resartus, and On Heroes, Hero-Worship, and the Heroic in History • Thomas Carlyle
... . in the man or woman who had written this letter he had an enemy who indeed wished him worse off than he was, and not only worse but much worse; who would take from him not only the roof over his head, but even the dreadful refuge of the Workhouse; who would hunt him down even into jail. That talk about his not going to the War was all nonsense. How could all the Coastguard or Custom-house Officers in Christendom force a man to go to the War with a growth under his thigh as big as your fist? Damn the War!—he'd ...
— Nicky-Nan, Reservist • Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch (Q)
... these remote islands of Scotland Christmas is not forgotten. But a writer in a well-known Scotch journal says the surest sign of the general joy is "Christmas in the Workhouse":— ...
— Christmas: Its Origin and Associations - Together with Its Historical Events and Festive Celebrations During Nineteen Centuries • William Francis Dawson
... manners, you young thief that we've kep' out of the workhouse and supported for nothing all ...
— Dick Lionheart • Mary Rowles Jarvis
... homes for indigent and friendless women; a foundling asylum; the rescue 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
... were near at hand, and he could inspect progress. The furniture was 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 ...
— The Clever Woman of the Family • Charlotte M. Yonge
... to a 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 of that ...
— Turns of Fortune - And Other Tales • Mrs. S. C. Hall
... 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, when the masses want bread, it will invite to the "whistle belly" feast ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 54, No. 334, August 1843 • Various
... 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 ...
— Selections from Previous Works - and Remarks on Romanes' Mental Evolution in Animals • Samuel Butler
... The workhouse commitments for Philadelphia, Washington, Cincinnati, Louisville, Chicago and St. Louis "show a similar tendency to decrease." Penitentiary commitments[27] for Baltimore and Chicago show, on the whole, a decreasing trend. "The rate of annual commitments to the ...
— The Negro at Work in New York City - A Study in Economic Progress • George Edmund Haynes
... back—he obeyed their spell, and just at the time his labours would have been repaid, he left, and, with all the money he could procure, paid his passage to England, where he soon after died in the workhouse of his parish. Yet even there the thought, perhaps, might soothe him, that though he filled a pauper's grave, it was in the soil where his fathers slept. The forsaken lot is still unclaimed, for ...
— Sketches And Tales Illustrative Of Life In The Backwoods Of New Brunswick • Mrs. F. Beavan
... 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
... 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 a manner that would not injure their self-respect. Of course that failed, too. It ...
— Dawn of All • Robert Hugh Benson
... officials are strangely skeptical of the possibilities of reform. Last year the courts of New York City sent three thousand delinquent women to the workhouse on Blackwell's Island,—a place notorious for the low state of its morale. They sent only seventeen women to Bedford Reformatory, where a healthy routine of outdoor work, and a most effective system administered by a scientific penologist does wonders with its inmates. Nothing but the will and ...
— What eight million women want • Rheta Childe Dorr
... and a walk with that—these were the incidents and occupations which filled her day. Life 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, and such was the inherent ...
— Robert Elsmere • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... 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. ...
— Alton Locke, Tailor And Poet • Rev. Charles Kingsley et al
... these cruel slanders. It was known that Mr. Bradlaugh was separated from his wife, and it was alleged that being an Atheist, and, (therefore!) an opponent of marriage, he had deserted his wife and children, and left them to the workhouse. The cause of the separation was known to very few, for Mr. Bradlaugh was chivalrously honourable to women, and he would not shield his own good name at the cost of that of the wife of his youth and the mother of his children. But since his death his only remaining child has, in devotion ...
— Annie Besant - An Autobiography • Annie Besant
... apathetically the names of streets and of public-houses, and then they jerked off again on an outward curve to the impatient double ting of the bell. To the east was a high defile of hospitals, and to the west the Workhouse tower faintly imprinted itself ...
— The Roll-Call • Arnold Bennett
... I was left a foundling in the parish workhouse, at Salthill, near Eton. Nobody knew anything about me, and as I made my appearance there one Montem day, the board ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, December, 1885 • Various
... the 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 ...
— The Golden Shoemaker - or 'Cobbler' Horn • J. W. Keyworth
... in talking to the workhouse folk in Ireland, was moved by the strange contrast between the poverty of the tellers and the splendors of ...
— The Art of the Story-Teller • Marie L. Shedlock
... 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
... persons better acquainted with the subject than myself, took a less gloomy view of it, though still so dark a one as to involve scanty consolation. They remarked that individuals of the male sex, picked up in the streets and nurtured in the workhouse, sometimes succeed tolerably well in life, because they are taught trades before being turned into the world, and, by dint of immaculate behavior and good luck, are not, unlikely to get employment and earn a livelihood. The case is different with the girls. They can only go to service, and ...
— Our Old Home - A Series of English Sketches • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... copy of a 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
... alleged as a charge against him that "he had banished his son, a youth convicted of no improper conduct, from the city, home, household gods, forum, light, from the society of his equals, and consigned him in a manner to a prison or workhouse; where a youth of dictatorian rank, born of a very high family, should learn by his daily suffering that he was descended of a truly imperious father. And for what offence? because he was not eloquent, nor ready in discourse. Which defect of nature, whether ought ...
— The History of Rome, Books 01 to 08 • Titus Livius
... pretend to 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
... should like to give something good to the little grey workhouse boys," said Armine. "I should so hate always walking out along a straight road ...
— Magnum Bonum • Charlotte M. Yonge
... in the gutter? Because I always knew how to respect myself and control myself. Why is Liz looked up to in a cathedral town? The same reason. Where would we be now if we'd minded the clergyman's foolishness? Scrubbing floors for one and sixpence a day and nothing to look forward to but the workhouse infirmary. Don't you be led astray by people who don't know the world, my girl. The only way for a woman to provide for herself decently is for her to be good to some man that can afford to be good to her. If she's in his own station of life, let her make ...
— Mrs. Warren's Profession • George Bernard Shaw
... refuse to pay the reasonable cost of its keeping, shall upon conviction be guilty of felony and punished by imprisonment in the penitentiary for not more than three years nor less than one, or in a county jail or workhouse at hard labor for not more than one year ...
— The History of Woman Suffrage, Volume IV • Various
... notwithstanding. They so resolutely refrained from attending the markets that in less than four years the houses fell into complete disuse. One of the buildings was taken down, and the timber used in constructing a workhouse; one was turned into stores, and the third was torn to pieces by a mob, who carried off the ...
— Captains of Industry - or, Men of Business Who Did Something Besides Making Money • James Parton
... in a certain town, which for many reasons it will be prudent to refrain from mentioning, and to which I will assign no fictitious name, there is one anciently common to most towns, great or small: to wit, a workhouse; and in this workhouse was born; on a day and date which I need not trouble myself to repeat, inasmuch as it can be of no possible consequence to the reader, in this stage of the business at all events; the item of mortality whose name is prefixed to ...
— Oliver Twist • Charles Dickens
... I was going to tell you. A little after you were born in your English workhouse, your kind, honourable, brave country, England, sent an English gentleman, who could not tell a lie, to say that so long as the sun rose and the rivers ran in their courses the Transvaal would belong to England. Did you ever ...
— Traffics and Discoveries • Rudyard Kipling
... greater success; but after the middle of the eighteenth century the condition of the agricultural labourer got no better, and now the great mass of the rural population were mere labourers.... Pauperism became more and more a pressing evil, especially after 1782, when Gilbert's Act abolished the workhouse test (which compelled all who received relief from the rates to go into the half-imprisonment of a poor-house), and the system of poor law doles in aid of wages was encouraged by the high prices at the end of the century. In 1803 one-seventh ...
— The Rise of the Democracy • Joseph Clayton
... to it swallows up great part of what 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 their poor and ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine - Volume 54, No. 338, December 1843 • Various
... leave the culprit to whatever decision Mr. Grant might reach. For the present he was ordered to his room, to which he submissively went, attended by Bertha, though he was fully resolved not to be "taken care of;" for he understood this to mean a place in the workhouse or the penitentiary. ...
— Work and Win - or, Noddy Newman on a Cruise • Oliver Optic
... [south of Pearl St.]. D, Secretary's Office [near Fort George]. E, [Not Shown]. F, Soldiers' Barracks [at extreme right]. G, Ship Yards [lower right hand corner]. H, City Hall [Broad and Wall streets, site of present Sub-Treasury building]. I, Exchange. J, K, Jail and Workhouse [both situated on the "intended square or common," now City Hall Square]. L, College [Church and Murray streets; this was King's College, now Columbia University]. M, Trinity Church [the present Trinity was built on 1839-46, though it stands on the site ...
— The Greatest Highway in the World • Anonymous
... Nickleby; 'Nicholas is so violent, and your uncle has so much composure, that I can only hear what he says, and not what Nicholas does. Never mind, don't let us talk any more about it. We can go to the Workhouse, or the Refuge for the Destitute, or the Magdalen Hospital, I dare say; and the sooner we go the better.' With this extraordinary jumble of charitable institutions, Mrs Nickleby again gave way to ...
— The Life And Adventures Of Nicholas Nickleby • Charles Dickens
... dead—ran out screaming, and that the frightened neighbors called a doctor and a policeman. She made the tale as favorable to 'pa' as she could. She went on to say that, having broken the pledge, he was sent to the workhouse for sixty days and she was left without money, with seven children ...
— Honey-Sweet • Edna Turpin
... 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 Delli, Morrison was walking along the street, his eyeglass tossed over his shoulder, his head down, with the hopeless aspect of those hardened tramps one sees on our roads trudging from workhouse to workhouse. Being hailed on the street he looked up with a wild worried expression. He was really in trouble. He had come the week before into Delli and the Portuguese authorities, on some pretence of irregularity in his papers, had inflicted ...
— Victory • Joseph Conrad
... door on the right of saint Catharine's chapel you enter the area of the workhouse of the stone-cutters of the Cathedral (Steinhuette). These workmen, even to this day form a particular corporation that seems to have originated in the days of Erwin of Steinbach; at all events it is a certain fact that the masons of the Cathedral ...
— Historical Sketch of the Cathedral of Strasburg • Anonymous
... The Barhams and Mansers were also great iron-men, officiating as high sheriffs of the county at different times, and occupying spacious mansions. One branch of these families terminated, Mr. Lower says, with Nicholas Barham, who died in the workhouse at Wadhurst in 1788; and another continues to be represented by a wheelwright at Wadhurst of ...
— Industrial Biography - Iron Workers and Tool Makers • Samuel Smiles
... the mean time various other experiments on the efficacy of the supposed magnetic power were tried in various parts of England; but the country did not furnish another epileptic girl so clever as Elizabeth Okey. An exhibition of the kind was performed on a girl named Sarah Overton, at the workhouse of the parish of St. Martin's-in-the-Fields. The magnetiser on this occasion was Mr. Bainbridge, the parish surgeon. It is but justice to him to state, that he conducted the experiments with the utmost fairness, and did not pretend to produce any ...
— Memoirs of Extraordinary Popular Delusions - Vol. I • Charles Mackay
... Eden tells us[372] that the diet of Bedford workhouse in 1730 was much better than that of the most industrious labourer in his own home, and this was the diet: bread and cheese or broth for breakfast, boiled beef hot or cold, sometimes with suet pudding for dinner, and bread and cheese or broth for supper. This must have been sufficiently monotonous, ...
— A Short History of English Agriculture • W. H. R. Curtler
... 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 ...
— Serge Panine, Complete • Georges Ohnet
... don't be offended—at the root mad! and though mad people, I have been told, sometimes make very good husbands, I was unwilling that your friends, if you had any, should say that Belle Berners, the workhouse girl, took advantage of your infirmity; for there is no concealing that I was born and bred up in a workhouse; notwithstanding that, my blood is better than your own, and as good as the best; you having yourself told me that ...
— The Romany Rye - A Sequel to 'Lavengro' • George Borrow
... 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 ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 210, November 5, 1853 • Various
... police records give a fragment of her life when the heyday of her youth and life has fled, and the man with whom she has eloped has taken to beating her in order to get up an appetite for breakfast. Here and there the workhouse or charitable home opens its doors to receive her, when she wearies of the life she gladly assumed, and is too proud to beg for forgiveness ...
— Donahoe's Magazine, Volume 15, No. 1, January 1886 • Various
... could she 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 illness had clouded ...
— Warlock o' Glenwarlock • George MacDonald
... Lady Tonbridge, with resignation, extending at the same time a hand of welcome—"the little maid, as you call her, only came from your workhouse yesterday, and I haven't yet discovered a grain of sense in her. But she gets plenty of exercise. If she isn't ...
— Delia Blanchflower • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... 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 guarded and ...
— A Day In Old Athens • William Stearns Davis
... circumstances: I have been courted by the great, and listened to by the aristocracy of England. I follow Mrs. Prigg wherever she goes: she is a lady; her connections are high, and she never yet associated with any but the best families. You could not diminish from her very high breeding: put her in the workhouse, and with me to accompany her, it would ...
— The Humourous Story of Farmer Bumpkin's Lawsuit • Richard Harris
... and flowers sent to him at once found their way to the hospital or to the workhouse. People saw that it was no use ever to give Gordon any presents, because they at once went to those who needed the things more than ...
— The Story of General Gordon • Jeanie Lang
... 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 ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 153, Aug. 22, 1917 • Various
... your husband's ears," said M. Blampignon; "he is a blackguard who will land you both in the workhouse unless we look out. He may be Prime Minister, ...
— Penguin Island • Anatole France
... beef-tea, and a drop o' wine wouldn't do you no harm,' says he. And it makes me smile, 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 have ...
— Verner's Pride • Mrs. Henry Wood
... came over after all; and Mrs Parkyn bore their advent with less misgiving, in the hope that directly Lord Blandamer heard of the honour that was done him, he would send a handsome donation for the ringers as he had already sent to the workhouse, and the old folk, and the school-children of Cullerne. The ropes and the cage, and the pins and the wheels, had all been carefully overhauled; and when the day came, the ringers stood to their work like men, and rang a full peal of grandsire ...
— The Nebuly Coat • John Meade Falkner
... philanthropy—L'Oeuvre de l'Hospitalite de Nuit— have only been in existence some fourteen or fifteen years. Before that time, and from the period of the great Revolution forward, there was absolutely no place, either refuge, asylum, or workhouse, in the whole of that great city of wealth and pleasure, where the houseless poor could crave a night's shelter. The various royalist, imperialist and republican governments and municipalities of modern France have often been described as 'paternal,' but no governments ...
— The Three Cities Trilogy, Complete - Lourdes, Rome and Paris • Emile Zola
... the Waits I 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
... till he was a pale, handsome boy of nine years, and then he was taken to the workhouse, where, with many other boys of his own age or older, he had to work hard all ...
— Tales from Dickens • Charles Dickens and Hallie Erminie Rives
... 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 ...
— Behind the Beyond - and Other Contributions to Human Knowledge • Stephen Leacock
... communities in Scotland nowadays—perhaps because people are now so well off, for the most devout Auld Lichts were always poor, and their last years were generally a grim struggle with the workhouse. Many a heavy-eyed, back-bent weaver has won his Waterloo in Thrums fighting on his stumps. There are a score or two of them left still, for, though there are now two factories in the town, the clatter of the hand-loom ...
— Auld Licht Idyls • J.M. Barrie
... thousand pounds per annum. [The sixth chapter of Mr. Rowland Dobie's "History of the United Parishes of St. Giles- in-the-Fields and St. George, Bloomsbury," (8vo. 1829) contains some curious and interesting "historical sketches of pauperism." Speaking of the parish workhouse, the author says, "It contains on an average from 800 to 900 inmates, which is however but a small proportion to the number constantly relieved, at an expense [annually] of nearly forty ...
— The Natural History of Wiltshire • John Aubrey
... authors for bread, some repining, others envying the blessed security of a Counting House, all agreeing they had rather have been Taylors, Weavers, what not? rather than the things they were. I have known some starved, some to go mad, one clear friend literally dying in a workhouse. You know not what a rapacious, dishonest set those booksellers are. Ask even Southey, who (a single case almost) has made a fortune by book drudgery, what he has found them. O you know not, may you never know! the miseries of subsisting by authorship. 'Tis a pretty appendage ...
— The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb (Vol. 6) - Letters 1821-1842 • Charles and Mary Lamb
... slouchy black one, went whirling by with the tonneau full of girls. Their veils were streaming and fluttering out behind, many-hued and flimsy. They were all gazing at the office windows as they passed. "One might think it was a reformatory or the county workhouse or something," he thought. He turned dully to the stack of reports and began to count ...
— Stubble • George Looms
... indeed, has struck some observers so forcibly that they have 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 ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 787, January 31, 1891 • Various |
