"Workhouse" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... voices of the land of his childhood called him 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 people prefer the woodlands to those neglected clearings, from which ...
— Sketches And Tales Illustrative Of Life In The Backwoods Of New Brunswick • Mrs. F. Beavan
... from a lady at Leamington, asking Arnold to keep an appointment with her, to "read her destiny." The astrologer formerly lived in Coventry, and carried on an extensive trade until he was sent to Warwick gaol, which he left for the workhouse. He was cautioned by the Board. "Old Zadkiel," taking offence, left the workhouse, saying he "should resume his astrology" and the ...
— The Mysteries of All Nations • James Grant
... 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
... parish is a very small one: it scarce contains fifty people: but that next to it, Bredfield, has more than four hundred: and some very poor indeed. We hope to be of some use: but the new Poor Laws have begun to be set afoot, and we don't know who is to stop in his cottage, or who is to go to the Workhouse. How much depends upon the issue of this measure! I am no politician: but I fear that no political measure will ever adjust matters well between rich and ...
— Letters of Edward FitzGerald - in two volumes, Vol. 1 • Edward FitzGerald
... little capital ought to be driven out of farming, and the sooner he went to the wall the better. Now, how would all the grocers and other tradesmen whom he had just enumerated like to be told that if they had not got 10,000l. each they ought to go at once to the workhouse! That would be a fine remedy for the ...
— Hodge and His Masters • Richard Jefferies
... 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
... 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 ...
— Alps and Sanctuaries of Piedmont and the Canton Ticino • Samuel Butler
... him, and they talked about distraining, and selling up, and draining and subsoiling, and a great deal about tenants and farming—much more than I could understand. Sam Miles had been caught poaching, and Peter Bailey had gone to the workhouse at last. "Serve him right," said Sir Pitt; "him and his family has been cheating me on that farm these hundred and fifty years." Some old tenant, I suppose, who could not pay his rent. Sir Pitt might ...
— Vanity Fair • William Makepeace Thackeray
... outlying parishes, promising, however, to be responsible for their maintenance should they become a public charge. Several instances are recorded of children being sent to join their parents. A certain number were confined in the workhouse and in the provincial hospital. But on December 6, 1760, the authorities gave instructions for the hospital to be cleared to make room for the colonial troops who were returning home, many of them suffering from contagious diseases; and the ...
— The Acadian Exiles - A Chronicle of the Land of Evangeline • Arthur G. Doughty
... 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
... unquestionably on his way to the Gauntlet. Silcox was a chattering foolish creature who had lost his own and his widowed mother's savings in a ridiculous commercial enterprise—a promptly bankrupt theater company over at Rodhaven—and it was thought that the workhouse would be the end for him and Mrs. Silcox. But early this summer people had been startled by hearing that the Courier had appointed Silcox as their reporter; and local critics were of opinion that Silcox had taken very kindly to literature, ...
— The Devil's Garden • W. B. Maxwell
... afraid—though of course she might: she went because you had promised her Mr. Longdon. But I should have no more feeling about her going to you—and should expect her to have no more—than about her taking a pound of tea, as she sometimes does, to her old nurse, or her going to read to the old women at the workhouse. May you never ...
— The Awkward Age • Henry James
... 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
... the time when they can escape their galling yoke. The parental rod destroys the filial love and confidence. Hence the obedience of the latter is servile; and home loses its tender affections and sympathies, and becomes to them a workhouse, a confinement; its restrictions are a yoke; its interests are repulsive, and all its natural affinities give way to complete alienation. The children of such homes, when grown up, are the most lawless and reckless, ready at once to pass over ...
— The Christian Home • Samuel Philips
... Nine-tenths of the crimes of the country, and of the expenses of litigation for crime, would be prevented by arresting it. Of 653 who were in one year committed to the house of correction in Boston, 453 were drunkards. Of 3,000 persons admitted to the workhouse in Salem, Mass., 2,900 were brought there directly or indirectly by intemperance. Of 592 male adults in the almshouse in New York, not 20, says the superintendent, can be called sober; and of 601 women, not as many as 50. Only three instances of murder in the space of fifteen years, in New York, ...
— Select Temperance Tracts • American Tract Society
... 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 ...
— Historical Sketch of the Cathedral of Strasburg • Anonymous
... either stump) was appointed, in an evil hour, to the Cornish coast-guard; and he never rested until he had caught all the best county families smuggling. Through this he lost his situation, and had to go to the workhouse; nevertheless, such a stir had been roused that (to satisfy public opinion) they made a large sacrifice of inferior people, and among them this Solomon Gundry. Now the Gundries had long been a thickset race, and had furnished some champion wrestlers; ...
— Erema - My Father's Sin • R. D. Blackmore
... smugglers, and the "Star" was often frequented by Stanton Collins and his gang, who struck terror into their neighbours, daringly carried on their trade, and drank deep at the inn when the kegs were safely housed. Only fourteen years ago the last of his gang died in Eastbourne Workhouse. Smuggling is a vanished profession nowadays, a feature of vanished England that no one would seek to revive. Who can tell whether it may not be as prevalent as ever it was, if tariff reform and the imposition of heavy taxes on imports become ...
— Vanishing England • P. H. Ditchfield
... floor is uninhabitable, and therefore without windows or doors. Here the background embraces the pauper burial-ground, the station of the Liverpool and Leeds railway, and, in the rear of this, the Workhouse, the "Poor-Law Bastille" of Manchester, which, like a citadel, looks threateningly down from behind its high walls and parapets on the hilltop, upon ...
— The Condition of the Working-Class in England in 1844 - with a Preface written in 1892 • Frederick Engels
... 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 ...
— Hours in a Library - New Edition, with Additions. Vol. II (of 3) • Leslie Stephen
... and she's nine come next November. And now her 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 ...
— The Story of the Amulet • E. Nesbit
... before me but the workhouse. Year by year the public grows more impatient of literature dealing merely with the middle- classes. I know nothing about any other class. What am I ...
— The Angel and the Author - and Others • Jerome K. Jerome
... to keep body and soul together after all—often not so much. There was people of pretty well all sorts of trades you could name, all wanting to work, and yet not able to get it. There was old people, after working all their lives, going and being shut up in the workhouse, much worse fed and lodged and treated altogether, than—Mr Plornish said manufacturers, but appeared to mean malefactors. Why, a man didn't know where to turn himself for a crumb of comfort. As to who was to blame for it, Mr Plornish didn't ...
— Little Dorrit • Charles Dickens
... 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
... go to 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 you'd ...
— The Hampstead Mystery • John R. Watson
... but own the wisdom of the decision, and Emmie, after grumbling at Aunt Cherry, took herself off. She had visited the Infirmary and the Convalescent Home, and even persuaded Mrs. Hablot to show her the Union Workhouse, but she never sent her contribution ...
— The Long Vacation • Charlotte M. Yonge
... particular. It will create a fruitful soil for many powers which now wither uselessly away. Whoever shows a genuine desire to work will be suitably employed. Beggars will not be endured. Whoever refuses to do anything as a free man will be sent to the workhouse. ...
— The Jewish State • Theodor Herzl
... to be guilty, and it could not be right that a man held in such slight esteem could exercise the functions of a parish priest, let his own opinion of himself be what it might. He would submit himself, and go anywhere,—to the galleys or the workhouse, if they wished it. As for his wife and children, they would, he said to himself, be better without him than with him. The world would never be so hard to a woman or to children as it had been ...
— The Last Chronicle of Barset • Anthony Trollope
... 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
... the man who proposed to conjugate the verb "to love" in Armenian was master of his intentions in plain English. It was even so. The man of tongues lacked speech wherewith to make manifest his passion; the vocabulary of the word-master was insufficient to convince the workhouse girl of one of the plainest meanings a man can well have. When the distracted Borrow had reached the decision that it was high time to give over his "mocking and scoffing," and returned with this resolve to the dingle, Isopel Berners had quitted it, never to ...
— George Borrow - Times Literary Supplement, 10th July 1903 • Thomas Seccombe
... 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
... only at the point of sheer destitution. It failed to help those who had helped themselves. Indeed, to many it held out little inducement to help themselves if they could not hope to lay by so much as would enable them to live more comfortably on their means than they would live in the workhouse. The pension system throws over the test of destitution. It provides a certain minimum, a basis to go upon, a foundation upon which independent thrift may hope to build up a sufficiency. It is not a narcotic but a stimulus to self help and to friendly aid or filial ...
— Liberalism • L. T. Hobhouse
... strong to be ousted at any vestry that ever was called. As to the elected officials, the same curate records in a pamphlet which he published in his indignation, that "on Christmas Day, during divine service, the churchwardens entered the workhouse with constables and bailiffs, and a multitude of men equally pious with themselves, and turned the governor and his wife into the snow-covered streets." Another measure of iniquity laid to their charge was their "cruelty to Mr. Foster," the master of the charity school held in the old Market Cross, ...
— The Parish Clerk (1907) • Peter Hampson Ditchfield
... firm temper, some pride, and a horror of accepting parochial relief—that surest safeguard to the sturdy independence of the English character. So when her father talked of giving up their comfortable cottage and removing to the workhouse, while she and her brothers must move to service, Hannah formed a bold resolution, and proceeded to act at once on her own ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol VI. • Various
... partial recovery of the stunned or stupefied man, his inability to speak plainly, the unsuccessful search in his pockets for something to identify him, and the final decision to put him in a cab and take him to the workhouse infirmary, pending discovery of his identity. The end of her story has a note of relief ...
— Somehow Good • William de Morgan
... child murder has just been committed at Nottingham. A girl named Wragg left the workhouse there on Saturday morning with her young illegitimate child. The child was soon afterwards found dead on Mapperly Hills, having been strangled. Wragg ...
— Selections from the Prose Works of Matthew Arnold • Matthew Arnold
... 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
... Kathleen-Ni-Houlihan, though a dream-play, always appeals to an audience of Irish people. Perhaps his one-act Deirdre is the nearest approach to real drama he has done. Some of Lady Gregory's earlier one-act farces, such as The Workhouse-Ward, are very amusing; The Rising of the Moon is a little dramatic gem, and The Gaol Gate is touched with genuine tragedy. Synge wrote only one play—Riders to the Sea—that acts well. The others are admired by critics for the strangeness of their diction and the beauty of the nature-pictures ...
— The Glories of Ireland • Edited by Joseph Dunn and P.J. Lennox
... scraps. Some of these, they told me, were very pathetic. In one, for instance, a poor old woman had apparently sent her son a packet of chocolate, bought with her last shilling, (she was just going into the Workhouse), and she hoped that it would taste as sweet as if she had paid a sovereign for it. Had they had any mails? No, not since they had been here. They thought all their people must be dead, and "it does cheer one up to get ...
— A Yeoman's Letters - Third Edition • P. T. Ross
... I done? Ain't I been on de level wid yez? Say, I ain't never even seen yez for de fourteen months I've been yer gobetween. I've been beat up by de cops, pinched and sent to de workhouse 'cause I wouldn't squeal, and now ye t'reatens me. Did I ever fall down on a trick ontil dis week? You'se ain't goin' ter welch on me, are you'se? I ain't no welcher meself, an' ...
— The Voice on the Wire • Eustace Hale Ball
... children—seeing her fall to the floor as if 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 ...
— Honey-Sweet • Edna Turpin
... to make tea by the camp fire. While we were taking the repast, she told me the story of her life. Her name was Isopel Berners, and though she believed that she had come of a good stock, she was born in a workhouse. When old enough, she had entered the service of a kind widow, who travelled with small merchandise. After the death of her mistress, Isopel carried on the same avocation. Being friendless, and falling in with the Flaming ...
— The Worlds Greatest Books - Vol. II: Fiction • Arthur Mee, J. A. Hammerton, Eds.
... workshop, 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; kitchen; mint, forge, ...
— Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases: Body • Roget
... taught reading, spelling, and the Catechism, and instruction in writing and arithmetic might be added. The training might also be coupled with that of the "schools of industry" (workhouse schools, as described by Locke [R. 217]) to augment the economic efficiency of the boy. Girls seem to have been provided for almost equally with boys, and, in addition to being taught to read and spell, were taught "to knit their Stockings ...
— THE HISTORY OF EDUCATION • ELLWOOD P. CUBBERLEY
... 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 ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine - Volume 54, No. 338, December 1843 • Various
... Speaker's chair from 1789 to 1806. All was canaille. Fox could scarcely have been more shabby, had he been the representative of a population of bankrupts. The remainder of the party might have been supposed, without any remarkable stretch of imagination, to have emerged from the workhouse. All was sincere squalidness, patriotic pauperism—the unwashing principle. One of the cleverest caricatures of that cleverest of caricaturists, the Scotchman Gilray, was his sketch of the Whigs preparing for their first ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine - Volume 55, No. 344, June, 1844 • Various
... 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
... 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 • P. G. Wodehouse
... 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 ...
— Wilson's Tales of the Borders and of Scotland, Volume 2 - Historical, Traditional, and Imaginative • Alexander Leighton
... people, books were to be suited to popular tastes, and then that trade was opened that leads to the workhouse. A new race sprang up, that, like Ascham, "spoke as the common people;" but would not, like Ascham, "think as wise men." The founders of "Authors by Profession" appear as far back as in the Elizabethan age. Then there were some roguish ...
— Calamities and Quarrels of Authors • Isaac D'Israeli
... deference to her sex] That's the tragedy of it, ma'am. It's easy to say chuck it; but I haven't the nerve. Which one of us has? We're all intimidated. Intimidated, ma'am: that's what we are. What is there for me if I chuck it but the workhouse in my old age? I have to dye my hair already to keep my job as a dustman. If I was one of the deserving poor, and had put by a bit, I could chuck it; but then why should I, acause the deserving poor might as well be millionaires ...
— Pygmalion • George Bernard Shaw
... before dinner to see his lions, and introduced me to scenes very different from those which I am used to see. We went to different manufactories, a saw-mill, a pottery, to the lunatic asylum, to the workhouse, and we visited several poor people at their cottages, when he enquired into the circumstances of the sick or the indigent; but what struck me most forcibly was the school (upon Bell's system) and the extraordinary acquirements of the boys. ...
— The Greville Memoirs (Second Part) - A Journal of the Reign of Queen Victoria from 1837 to 1852 - (Volume 1 of 3) • Charles C. F. Greville
... common, and part of it may now be said to be common property, nearly 100 acres of it being covered with public buildings for the use of such as need a common home. There is not, however, anything commonplace in the style of these erections for sheltering our common infirmities, as the Workhouse, Gaol, and Asylum combined have cost "the Commons" something like L350,000. The Volunteers in 1798 made use of part of the Heath as a practice and ...
— Showell's Dictionary of Birmingham - A History And Guide Arranged Alphabetically • Thomas T. Harman and Walter Showell
... take it to the workhouse. At any rate they're all poor people there, and they mayn't go out without leave, so they can't run after us to do anything to us after the pudding. No one would give them leave to go out to pursue people who had brought them pudding, and wreck ...
— New Treasure Seekers - or, The Bastable Children in Search of a Fortune • E. (Edith) Nesbit
... 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
... celibate or married, rich or poor,—every person in our commonwealth should equitably, it may well be conceded, have his or her single vote in the government of the country. Poverty is no crime, therefore the Workhouse should not disfranchise; sex is no just disqualification, therefore the woman should have her vote as freely as the man, for surely marriage ought not to suffer derogation and disgrace by denial of the common ...
— My Life as an Author • Martin Farquhar Tupper
... 1795, not without outbreaks on their part and depredations on the settlements. In the year named two of them were caught stealing pigs, and were sent to the workhouse and given thirty-nine lashes on the bare back. When set free they went home in a fury, and told a pitiful tale of the disgrace they had suffered, being whipped by the black driver of the workhouse in the presence of felon ...
— Historical Tales - The Romance of Reality - Volume III • Charles Morris
... well six months after admission to the hospital. Soon after that, she left the husband, once had him arrested in 1908 and sent to the workhouse. She was again examined in 1913, and was found to be perfectly well, and she stated she had been ...
— Benign Stupors - A Study of a New Manic-Depressive Reaction Type • August Hoch
... 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 ...
— My Neighbors - Stories of the Welsh People • Caradoc Evans
... the house I was born in, which was the workhouse. You were educated at Eton and Christchurch, and all that ...
— The Squire's Daughter - Being the First Book in the Chronicles of the Clintons • Archibald Marshall
... admirable, and it was not all head knowledge, for very little more than a really kind way of putting it was needed, to make him turn in his loneliness to rest in the thought of the ever-present Father. Hard as the discipline of his workhouse home had been, it had kept him from much outward harm; the little he had seen in his wanderings had shocked him, and he was more untaught in evil than many lads who thought themselves more respectable, so there was no habit of wickedness to ...
— Friarswood Post-Office • Charlotte M. Yonge
... workhouse if he stays here. It will be much better for him to be bought out while there is still something left for him to sell. Nothing can be worse than a man sticking on to land without a shilling ...
— Ralph the Heir • Anthony Trollope
... cross on the journey down to Scotland, and had almost driven the unfortunate Macnulty to think that Lady Linlithgow or the workhouse would be better than this young tyrant; but on her arrival at her own house she was for awhile all smiles and kindness. During the journey she had been angry without thought, but was almost entitled to be excused for her anger. ...
— The Eustace Diamonds • Anthony Trollope
... told was that the Volunteers had taken the South Dublin Union Workhouse, occupied it, and trenched the grounds. They were heavily attacked by the military, who, at a loss of 150 men, took the place. The tale went that towards the close the officer in command offered them terms of surrender, but ...
— The Insurrection in Dublin • James Stephens
... point of the people of Goyaz was that they were extremely charitable. They had erected a huge building as a workhouse. It was entirely supported by charity. A small library had ...
— Across Unknown South America • Arnold Henry Savage Landor
... affection of a poor person is more tried; we blame a poor man for letting his old mother go to the workhouse, without considering how many of us would do the same, if we had ...
— Scenes and Characters • Charlotte M. Yonge
... now chiefly assailed by those 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 ...
— What's Wrong With The World • G.K. Chesterton
... London began—that London of the Forsytes, with its wealth, its misery; its dirt and noise; its jumbled stone isles of beauty, its grey sea of hideous brick and stucco? That London which had seen Irene's early tragedy, and Jolyon's own hard days; that web; that princely workhouse of the ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... returned with 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 for ...
— Till the Clock Stops • John Joy Bell
... Surrey Labourer will perhaps not be very wrong if they fix on this sandy valley as the Surrey which Bettesworth knew best. Than the Memoirs, I think, no more discerning study of an old labourer's fight to keep on his own legs, out of the workhouse, earning his own money with his spade and hoe, belongs to ...
— Highways and Byways in Surrey • Eric Parker
... fellow-worker. It 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 ...
— Hilda Wade - A Woman With Tenacity Of Purpose • Grant Allen
... some time in coming. When it came, it told that pauper laborers could not be recommended; but a better sort of laborer might be sent, and his place in the parish would be filled, only too easily, by some of the young men from the workhouse. The proposal was to send the very best man of his class known to the parish officers. He and his wife had money enough in the savings' bank to pay their journey, and they were willing to make the venture. ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Volume 2, No. 12, May, 1851. • Various
... going to church. I don't want to give you the blues, but thought I'd better tell you, so that you could write to cheer them up, and also be more assiduous in your attentions to the old man. You must and shall get that fortune between you, or we shall be bivouacking in the workhouse before you can say Jack Robinson! My heart too truly knows ...
— The Fortunes of the Farrells • Mrs. George de Horne Vaizey
... t' gentry might clean it up an' put decent furnishin's into 't," said Thyrza defiantly. "Not a bit o' paperin' doon anywhere—juist two three rooms colour-washed, as yo' med do 'em at t' workhouse. An' that big hole in t' dinin'-room ceilin', juist as 'twas—and such shabby sticks o' things upstairs an' down as I nivver see! I'll have a good sight better when ...
— The Mating of Lydia • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... accomplishments of numberless university graduates, and it is small wonder that they often lead to the workhouse. The demand for the dressed-up ideas of the poets, philosophers, and scientists of a former generation is not great. Those who like their literature at second hand prefer snippets from the Newgate Calendar to the wise saws of Bacon; ...
— The Curse of Education • Harold E. Gorst
... has grouped against her Dartmoor setting in Sareel (PHILIP ALLAN) just the characters to act out the well-worn story of the mutual infatuation of a young man of birth and an ignorant country maid. But though Sareel, the little workhouse-reared servant at the farm, falls in love in the accepted fashion with the best-looking of the three young men who lodge there on a reading tour, and though he duly falls in love with her, the innocence of her soul keeps their passion on the highest plane. What is more, when Alan, as ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 158, June 2, 1920 • Various
... there were such an one, verily it would 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 ...
— The Complete Plays of Gilbert and Sullivan - The 14 Gilbert And Sullivan Plays • William Schwenk Gilbert and Arthur Sullivan
... to have made me go and see the old woman in the workhouse. A body without a mind. That's what made the dream come. It was Mamma's face; but she was doing what the ...
— Mary Olivier: A Life • May Sinclair
... in troops, To feed on new eggs and fresh butter, To frolic with balls and with hoops; These three, with their eyes on the poster That hints unattainable joys, Must envy the son of the Coster, The waifs of the Workhouse. Poor boys! ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 99, July 12, 1890 • Various
... really never troubled themselves very much about the matter. They had their business affairs to attend to, their wives and families to keep out of the workhouse or to maintain in comfort or luxury, as the case might be, and a good many of them had certain social duties to perform; and so they had got into the way of letting the churches and chapels, the bishops, priests, deacons and so ...
— The Missionary • George Griffith
... not work. On behalf of these a deputation(1358) was appointed by the City to present a petition to the king that he would be pleased to grant the disused palace of Bridewell to the municipality for the purpose of turning it into a workhouse. The deputation was introduced by Ridley, who himself wrote in May of this year (1552) to secretary Cecil on the same subject.(1359) The efforts of the bishop and the deputation were rewarded with success. In the following spring (1553) the king not only consented ...
— London and the Kingdom - Volume I • Reginald R. Sharpe
... Rampart Street side of the house there are several sheds, commanding an excellent range of the upper story. Detective Littleton, Andrew Van Kuren of the Workhouse force and several others climbed upon one of these and opened fire on the upper windows, shooting whenever they could catch a glimpse of the assassin. Charles responded with his rifle, and presently Van Kuren climbed down ...
— Mob Rule in New Orleans • Ida B. Wells-Barnett
... east walk southwards beyond the south walk of the cloisters, led formerly to the infirmary; of which now only remain the three piers in the lower close; the greater part having been pulled down in 1804. During some time in the eighteenth century the infirmary was used as a workhouse. ...
— Bell's Cathedrals: The Cathedral Church of Norwich - A Description of Its Fabric and A Brief History of the Episcopal See • C. H. B. Quennell
... 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
... 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 reaps indigestion; he puts ...
— Virginibus Puerisque • Robert Louis Stevenson
... the remains of a coarse barbarism, which shows but little signs 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
... fallen ruined man to mar its perfectness—"the Lord God took Adam, and put him into the garden of Eden, to dress it and to keep it." As an old writer says—"What was man's storehouse was also man's workhouse; his pleasure with his task ... if happiness had consisted in doing nothing, ...
— Twilight And Dawn • Caroline Pridham
... 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 ...
— The Sign of the Four • Arthur Conan Doyle
... deserted. Far back in the barn dim figures moved, and from the workhouse in the rear came the clang of metal. One or two passengers were waiting for the next car, and Leigh spied a conductor coming to his work, finishing the last few puffs of his morning pipe. He was an elderly man, with a sweeping ...
— The Mayor of Warwick • Herbert M. Hopkins
... fit objects, in their own phrase, for the charity of all well-disposed Christians. The "long-remembered beggar," who for twenty years had made his regular rounds within the neighbourhood, received rather as an humble friend than as an object of charity, was sent to the neighbouring workhouse. The decrepit dame, who travelled round the parish upon a hand-barrow, circulating from house to house like a bad shilling, which every one is in haste to pass to his neighbour; she, who used to call for her bearers as loud, or louder, than a traveller demands ...
— Guy Mannering • Sir Walter Scott
... March, 1870, Sir Roundell Palmer (Lord Selborne), who represented Charles Francis Howard, the other claimant, gave the whole case a new complexion by informing the court that he was in a position to prove that, in the month of August, 1864, Mrs. Howard and another lady visited a workhouse in Liverpool, and procured a newly-born child from its mother, Mary Best, a pauper, then an occupant of one of the lying-in wards of the workhouse hospital. In support of his assertion he was able to produce three witnesses—Mrs. ...
— Celebrated Claimants from Perkin Warbeck to Arthur Orton • Anonymous
... was gradually extended to almost all public works. In 1719 I find it was employed to build barracks. "Parishes are to send their best workmen," said the ordinance, "and all other works are to give way to this." The same forced service was used to escort convicts to the galleys and beggars to the workhouse; it had to cart the baggage of troops as often as they changed their quarters—a burthen which was very onerous at a time when each regiment carried heavy baggage after it. Many carts and oxen had to be collected for ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol XII. - Modern History • Arthur Mee
... being hand-nursed, and not breast-nursed, goes some way (according to the experience of the Foundling hospital and the Magdalene home) to explain the great mortality among them. Such children, when nursed by their mothers in the workhouse, generally live. The practical result of the committee of 1871 was the act of 1872, which provided for the compulsory registration of all houses in which more than one child under the age of one year were received for a longer period than twenty-four hours. No ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 3, Part 1, Slice 1 - "Austria, Lower" to "Bacon" • Various
... servants' carelessness. But if such fire happens through negligence of any servant (whose loss is commonly very little) such servant shall forfeit 100l, to be distributed among the sufferers; and, in default of payment, shall be committed to some workhouse and there kept to hard labour for eighteen months[k]. A master is, lastly, chargeable if any of his family layeth or casteth any thing out of his house into the street or common highway, to the damage of any individual, or the common nusance of his majesty's liege people[l]: ...
— Commentaries on the Laws of England - Book the First • William Blackstone
... over the deceased, and not forget the fees." It is said-the aristocracy, however, look upon the charge with contempt-that Brien Moon, Esq. makes a small per centage by selling those canine remains to the governor of the workhouse, which very humane gentleman pays from his own pocket the means of transferring them into giblet-pies for the inmates. It may be all scandal about Mr. Moon making so large an amount from his office; but it is nevertheless true that sad disclosures ...
— Our World, or, The Slaveholders Daughter • F. Colburn Adams
... heart-breaking silence, a sixpence and three half-pennies! Cows, 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 a ...
— Confessions of an Etonian • I. E. M.
... plutocrat and gentleman of landed estate. And also how I, who never did a stroke of work in my life, am overburdened with wealth; whilst the children of the men who made that wealth are slaving as their fathers slaved, or starving, or in the workhouse, or on the streets, or the deuce knows where. What do you ...
— An Unsocial Socialist • George Bernard Shaw
... correspondence; the diligent clothier 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 ...
— The Complete English Tradesman (1839 ed.) • Daniel Defoe
... 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 of the ...
— Volume 10 of Brann The Iconoclast • William Cowper Brann
... to-day regard, as a fundamental social truth was revealed to him; and right well he gave expression, by words and deeds, to his strong and well-grounded conviction of the equal claim of all to the use of Mother Earth, to the use of the nation's natural home, workhouse and storehouse, whence, by labour, everything necessary to life and comfort can alone be derived. Winstanley realised, as they to-day realise, that to admit in the abstract the Fatherhood of God and the Brotherhood of Man, to admit the equal claim of all to life, and yet to deny ...
— The Digger Movement in the Days of the Commonwealth • Lewis H. Berens
... Catherine's Day was formerly a festival for the lacemakers of Northamptonshire, Buckinghamshire, and Bedfordshire. She was the patroness of spinsters in the literal as well as the modern sense of the word, and at Peterborough the workhouse girls used to go in procession round the city on her day, dressed in white with coloured ribbons; the tallest was chosen as Queen and bore a crown and sceptre. As they went to beg money of the chief inhabitants they sang a quaint ...
— Christmas in Ritual and Tradition, Christian and Pagan • Clement A. Miles |
