"Slum" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... Hampstead Heath; not like the people in all those disgruntled suburbs that led out for miles where London ought to have stopped but had not; not like the thousands and thousands of those poor creatures in Bethnal Green, where her slum work lay. The natives here must surely be happy. Only, were there any natives? She had not seen any. Away to the right below her window were the first trees of the fruit garden; for many of them Spring was over, but the apple-trees had just come into blossom, and the low sun shining ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... the novelist, 'is what you call a London slum invading the country? You tell me that only a part of the bourgeoisie cares for flats, and that among the lower middle class and the working class each family prefers to rent its own little house. Is this for the sake of privacy? If so, I see no privacy here. Leaving out the question ...
— With Zola in England • Ernest Alfred Vizetelly
... the cages of wild animals and birds, where at a ramshackle counter, amid the yells of monkeys, and a poignant atmosphere of menagerie, forty-rod whiskey was administered by a proprietor as dirty as his beasts. Nor did I even neglect Nob Hill, which is itself a kind of slum, being the habitat of the mere millionnaire. There they dwell upon the hill-top, high raised above man's clamour, and the trade-wind blows between ...
— The Wrecker • Robert Louis Stevenson and Lloyd Osbourne
... bravely assisted, as did one or two others, Mark Constantine and his sister sitting in the windows to watch the procedure while Beatrice in a gown of turquoise velvet with a coronet of frosted leaves played Lady Bountiful and dismissed the slum brigade as soon as possible, sending them home with the confused knowledge that a beautiful lady in angel clothes and a wild animal sometimes meant plenty of ham sandwiches and ice cream, as well as the opportunity to slip a fork ...
— The Gorgeous Girl • Nalbro Bartley
... acceptance, but heard nothing. At last a word from Meyerbeer seemed to have settled the matter. One Dumersau, who translated the words into French, was very enthusiastic about the music and made Joly enthusiastic too; everything looked bright for the moment, and Wagner moved from the slum where he had been living to an abode a little less slum-like, in the Rue du Helder. On the day he moved the Renaissance went bankrupt again. I say again, because Joly became bankrupt punctually every three months—a fact which explains Meyerbeer's readiness to help him in that ...
— Richard Wagner - Composer of Operas • John F. Runciman
... David, in the tone that he might have said "Helen of Troy." ... "But seriously, Jean, I think you are using your money in a very dull way. You see, you're so dashed helpful. What makes you want to think all the time about slum children?... I think you'd better present your money all in a lump to the Government as a drop in the ocean of the ...
— Penny Plain • Anna Buchan (writing as O. Douglas)
... were married and had a dependent wife and children he might get architectural work in a government slum ...
— Class of '29 • Orrie Lashin and Milo Hastings
... The refectory of the convent, being preserved, afterwards became the Whitefriars Theatre. The mischievous right of sanctuary was preserved to the district, and confirmed by James I., in whose reign the slum became jocosely known as Alsatia—from Alsace, that unhappy frontier then, and later, contended for by French and Germans—just as Chandos Street and that shy neighbourhood at the north-west side of the Strand used to be called the Caribbee Islands, from ...
— Old and New London - Volume I • Walter Thornbury
... is always working and planning for the good of others, but she is constantly meeting with ingratitude and misunderstanding. She had just brought me here when she was telegraphed for to turn about and go home. You see she had sent two ailing slum children to be taken care of at her house, and it proved to be scarlet fever, and, of course, her stepmother took it the first thing—she's a hateful person and takes everything she can get—and then the cook followed suit. Now they blame Laura and ...
— Ladies-In-Waiting • Kate Douglas Wiggin
... was hardly to be feared, for as in this gang's case, they invariably have their headquarters in the building above a slum saloon, whose proprietor would and could not be in business very long unless he knew how to protect his lodgers against police interference, as a gang's quarters needed to be raided only one time, and ...
— The Trail of the Tramp • A-No. 1 (AKA Leon Ray Livingston)
... street, almost a slum," I said. "I daresay you have lived in the country always, and just at first it does not seem possible that there should be anything beautiful about a great city. When you get a little older I think that you will see things differently. The beauty of a great city thronged ...
— The Master Mummer • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... a companion, a devoted creature but colourless, whom she could be said rather to suffer gladly than enjoy, and her interests, were divided between the little slum church she lived near in London, her friends at Cloom, and the rare visits of Lissa, of whom she was very fond, and who sometimes went and poured out to her enthusiasms about Futurist paintings, which Judy, who had remained ...
— Secret Bread • F. Tennyson Jesse
... was one little shop that was never neglected or overlooked; this was situated in a narrow slum, a long way from the great artery of traffic and fashion. After negotiating various tortuous windings and encountering horrible gusts of stale napie and the ever-odorous dorian, the car halted at ...
— The Road to Mandalay - A Tale of Burma • B. M. Croker
... Paterson Park from Elwood avenue, the street on which Susan Self and her father had resided. That didn't necessarily hold significance, the park was a large one and the Professor's section a well-to-do neighborhood, while Self's was just short of a slum these days. ...
— Status Quo • Dallas McCord Reynolds
... thence to the office of Semple and Binch, the coal-merchants, reappeared as the stenographer of the Police Court, and finally edged his way into the power-house of the Apex Water-Works. He boarded with old Mrs. Flynn, down in North Fifth Street, on the edge of the red-light slum, he never went to church or attended lectures, or showed any desire to improve or refine himself; but he managed to get himself invited to all the picnics and lodge sociables, and at a supper of the Phi Upsilon Society, to which he had contrived to affiliate himself, he made the best ...
— The Custom of the Country • Edith Wharton
... the Spiritual Department was taking place in this manner, the Social Work was assuming large proportions, and differentiating itself. Visitation in the lower parts of the cities was organized into a regular department of Slum Work, called the Slum Department, with a specialized corps of officers. Work among fallen women was instituted as the Rescue Department, with its rescue homes and trained workers. The establishment of hotels and lunch counters ...
— The Social Work of the Salvation Army • Edwin Gifford Lamb
... far too crowded to provide us work for all, Acres spread their untilled bosoms, while the nations rise and fall. Nature's storehouse, made for all men, is monopolized by some, Robbing labor of its produce, making almshouse, jail, and slum. ...
— The Arena - Volume 18, No. 92, July, 1897 • Various
... privy, jakes; toilet, john, head; cess[obs3], cesspool; sump, sough, cloaca, latrines, drain, sewer, common sewer; Cloacina; dust hole. sty, pigsty, lair, den, Augean stable[obs3], sink of corruption; slum, rookery. V. be unclean, become unclean &c. Adj.; rot, putrefy, ferment, fester, rankle, reek; stink &c. 401; mold, molder; go bad &c. adj. render unclean &c. adj.; dirt, dirty; daub, blot, blur, ...
— Roget's Thesaurus • Peter Mark Roget
... graduated with high honors three years before? After her graduation, a year's work as interne in the women's hospital had heightened the expectations of her friends; and the success with which she had then served as physician and superintendent of a branch dispensary and hospital in the slum district had made all who were watching her progress predict ...
— Emerson's Wife and Other Western Stories • Florence Finch Kelly
... chooses, but I can't imagine why she should take up her abode here. It is not a question of charity.' Here she noticed my entrance, but calmly went on talking to Constance as if I were not there. 'Let her take herself off to some nursing Sisterhood or slum work in the East of London. I hate a half-and-half kind of person. If they are too good to live our life and mingle in our society, let them take up a religious vocation, instead of being a perpetual source of annoyance and aggravation to those they ...
— Dwell Deep - or Hilda Thorn's Life Story • Amy Le Feuvre
... Warm Lane, and occasionally falling, with awful smashes of the crockery they carried, in the deep, slippery, scarce passable mire of the first slants into the valley. Duck Square had witnessed the slow declension of these roads into mere streets, and slum streets at that, and the death of all mules, and the disappearance of all coaches and all neighing and prancing and whipcracking romance; while Trafalgar Road, simply because it was straight and broad and easily graded, flourished with toll-bars and a couple of pair-horsed ...
— Clayhanger • Arnold Bennett
... back room of an all-night saloon in the slum quarter beyond the bridge. It was warm, stiflingly warm and close, after the outdoor blast and chill, and it reeked like a sty. Kellow kicked out a chair for me and drew up one for himself on the opposite side ...
— Branded • Francis Lynde
... that crazy nut has pulled off now? Wants me to go to church with him! Of all things! And down in some queer slum place, too! If I get into a scrape you'll have to promise to help me out, or mamma'll never let me free from a chaperon again. And I had to make Artley Guelpin, and Turner Bailey sore, too, by telling them I was sick and they couldn't come and try over those ...
— The Witness • Grace Livingston Hill Lutz
... "It's a regular slum," said Billy, and the three boys started to retrace their steps. But suddenly Jack stopped and jerked his companions into a doorway. Two figures had just come in sight round the corner. They were headed down the street on the ...
— The Ocean Wireless Boys And The Naval Code • John Henry Goldfrap, AKA Captain Wilbur Lawton
... Hectors slaying our thousands. Now of course we are grown up to self-respect, and must needs be a little disingenuous about it. But as the story unfolds there is no mistaking the likeness, in spite of the transfiguration. This bold, decided man who performs such deeds of derring-do in the noisome slum, knocks down the burly wife-beater, rescues an unmistakable Miss Clapton from the knife of a Lascar, and is all the while cultivating a virtuous consumption that stretches him on an edifying, pathetic, and altogether beautiful deathbed in the last ...
— Certain Personal Matters • H. G. Wells
... for further information. He noticed that the slum district of the town pressed closely on to the office quarters, and he saw some sights even that first afternoon which shocked him: dirty, ragged children, playing in the gutters; boys and girls and women going in to dram shops and bringing ...
— Story of Chester Lawrence • Nephi Anderson
... men, in his own example, that the simplest kind of life was compatible with the highest intellectual aims; would he, in the long-run, have served the world half as well had he forced himself to live amid the squalor of a New York slum? Are not we so much the wiser and stronger by the lessons taught in the hut beside Walden Pond, that it would be the poorest compensation for their loss to know that Thoreau by dint of effort made himself a fairly efficient city missionary, or pleased the pundits of a Charity Organisation Society? ...
— The Quest of the Simple Life • William J. Dawson
... difference. Here and there were the same places to her, and him and him were the same person. A girl of that type comes to a bad end: he had seen it often, the type and the end, and never separate. Can one not prophesy from facts? He saw a slut in a slum, a drab hovering by a dark entry, and the vision cheered him mightily for one glowing minute and left him unoccupied for the next, into which she thronged with the flutter of wings and the sound ...
— Mary, Mary • James Stephens
... these minute vessels too long, there is naturally a double evil: first, the food and oxygen supplies fail—they have been used up already—and, secondly, the waste products accumulate in the tissue cells, so that there is a combination of starvation and poisoning—a sort of physiological slum life, with corresponding degradation; so that it is not at all difficult to understand why tight collars, neckbands, corsets, etc., must be unmixed evils, apart altogether from the fact that they so greatly hamper the very movements the voice-user ...
— Voice Production in Singing and Speaking - Based on Scientific Principles (Fourth Edition, Revised and Enlarged) • Wesley Mills
... who had given her shelter on the previous evening returned at five o'clock from her work, she found Fan in Dudley Grove, for that was the beautiful name of the slum she lived in, standing, as before, beside the lamp-post; and after a few words of greeting took her to her room. While preparing the tea she noticed the girl's weak and starved condition, for Fan had eaten nothing all day, and went out and presently returned with ...
— Fan • Henry Harford
... part, and where—a doctor informs me—a nerve-center, known as the solar plexus, is situated. He revolved, too, with considerable agility, round his opponent, and gradually drew the battle nearer and nearer to the side lane outside. He knew enough of slum-chivalry by now to be aware that if a sympathizer, or sycophant, of the young man happened to be present, he himself would quite possibly (if the friend happened to possess sufficient courage) suddenly collapse ...
— None Other Gods • Robert Hugh Benson
... in another connexion. Later on I heard much more about the exploits of this champion bird-destroyer of the village from (strange to say) a bird-catcher by trade, a man of a rather low type of countenance, and who lived, when at home, in a London slum. On the common where he spread his nets he had found, he told me, about thirty nests containing eggs or fledglings; but this boy had gone over the ground after him, and not many of the nests had ...
— Birds in Town and Village • W. H. Hudson
... essentially local or municipal in their character. The Government should see to it, for instance, that the hygienic and sanitary legislation affecting Washington is of a high character. The evils of slum dwellings, whether in the shape of crowded and congested tenement-house districts or of the back-alley type, should never be permitted to grow up in Washington. The city should be a model in every respect for all the cities of the country. The charitable and correctional ...
— Complete State of the Union Addresses from 1790 to the Present • Various
... the new armies have gathered into their rank and file a mixed crowd transcending the dreams of Democracy. At one end of the social scale are men of refined minds and gentle nurture, at the other creatures from the slums, with slum minds and morals, and between them the whole social gamut is run. Experience seems to show that neither of the extreme elements tend, in the one case to elevate, or in the other to debase the battalion. Leading the common life, ...
— The Rough Road • William John Locke
... suggestion that prosperous people should pay for sending gospel missions to the poor. If sin is selfishness, the poor had better missionise the rich. Imagine how it would be if things were reversed in this way, and a mission band of earnest slum dwellers took their stand in Belgravia and began a house-to-house visitation, with all the theological terms carefully eliminated from the mission leaflets they thrust under the doors or handed to the powdered footmen. ...
— The New Theology • R. J. Campbell
... with bartenders and red-lighters, pass unnoticed through a slum, join casually in a stuss game, or loaf unmarked about a street corner. He was fond of pool and billiards, and many were the unconsidered trifles he picked up with a cue in his hand. His face, even in those early days, was heavy and inoffensive. ...
— Never-Fail Blake • Arthur Stringer
... eighteenth century. But by reason of poverty, geographical isolation, caste feeling, or "pathos," individuals, communities, and races may be excluded from some of the stimulations and copies which enter into a high grade of mind. The savage, the Negro, the peasant, the slum dwellers, and the white woman ...
— Introduction to the Science of Sociology • Robert E. Park
... wouldn't give her one; said she was too independent. High-spirited girl with twenty-two shillings between her and starvation, wanders about from one registry office to another for a couple of weeks, living in a room in a Miller's Point slum; money all gone; pestered by brutes in the usual way, jumps into the water to end her ...
— In The Far North - 1901 • Louis Becke
... opera and the theatre and subscription concerts. Then we have balls nearly every night in the season and dinner-parties and luncheons and lectures and musical parties, and we study a good deal and 'slum' a little. Last winter I belonged to a Greek class and a fencing class, and a quartette club, and two private dancing classes, and a girls' working club, and an amateur theatrical society. We gave two private concerts for charities, you know, and ...
— In the High Valley - Being the fifth and last volume of the Katy Did series • Susan Coolidge
... her if he might accompany her a certain distance. With her placid permission he went as far as a house in the neighbourhood at which she had business: she let him know it was not where she lived. She lived, as she said, in a mere slum, with an old aunt, a person in connexion with whom she spoke of the engrossment of humdrum duties and regular occupations. She wasn't, the mourning niece, in her first youth, and her vanished freshness had left something behind that, for Stransom, represented ...
— The Altar of the Dead • Henry James
... incessant hum — Frail figures, gaunt and dumb, Of overlabored girls and children, bowed Above their slavish toil: "O God! — A bomb, A bomb!" he cried, "and with one fiery cloud Expunge the horrible Caesars of this slum!" ...
— The Little Book of Modern Verse • Jessie B. Rittenhouse
... shirts and underpay their washerwomen without the slightest misgiving as to the elevation of their private characters, the purity of their private atmospheres, and their right to repudiate as foreign to themselves the coarse depravity of the garret and the slum. Not that they mean any harm: they only desire to be, in their little private way, what they call gentlemen. They do not understand Barbara's lesson because they have not, like her, learnt it by taking their part in the larger life ...
— Bernard Shaw's Preface to Major Barbara • George Bernard Shaw
... it is not the province of Old Joe's humble historian to speculate—let us be content with the picture of these two old pensioners from the high seas, living together in the evening of their days in a narrow court in a London slum, the one paralysed and the other blind; the one a most brilliant and imaginative story-teller, the other a most cautious, modest, tentative, and genial critic. And let us sit between their two chairs for ...
— The Bed-Book of Happiness • Harold Begbie
... All Right" is heard, "all over the place," as light sleepers and studious dwellers in quiet streets are too well aware. Why should it not be enlisted in the service of Apollo and Momus as well as of the Back Slum Bacchus? ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 102, Jan. 9, 1892 • Various
... that point to the summit a grade of sixty degrees, and laid heavy steel segment rails six feet apart bolted to the solid rock, by this means dispensing with ties and permitting a free flow of water and slum. We found it necessary to build a chamber within the mouth of the tunnel sixty feet long, with automatic doors opening and shutting, to secure an abundance of air in the tunnel, and also in the observatory. The tunnel required no timbering, ...
— Eurasia • Christopher Evans
... that when he returned he took every imaginable pains to obtain a safe place of concealment before he began his work; my own opinion is that I am more likely to find him living quietly in a suburban cottage than in a London slum." ...
— Colonel Thorndyke's Secret • G. A. Henty
... bursts the bounds of Dis; Mad Murder raves and Horror holds her hell. Hades up-heaves her whelps. In human forms Up-flare the Furies, serpent-haired and grin Horrid with bloody jaws. Scaled reptiles crawl From slum and sewer, slimy, coil on coil— Danton, dark beast, that builded for himself A monument of quicksand limed with blood; Horse-leech Marat, blear-eyed, vile vulture born; Fair Charlotte's dagger robbed the guillotine! Black-biled, green-visaged, traitorous Robespierre, ...
— The Feast of the Virgins and Other Poems • H. L. Gordon
... brother had his points, but they were few, the chief one being that he was fairly good at games, which, after all, is but a negative quality. But the younger, who was as useless as he was generally officious, was entirely devoid of any redeeming feature. His ways were the ways of a slum child playing in the gutter, and his sense of humour was limited to shouting rude remarks after other people, knocking off hats, and then running away. His language was foul enough to disgust even a Public School's taste. ...
— The Loom of Youth • Alec Waugh
... the city slum, an oppressive system of ill-paid labor, these are evils which a gradually developing social conscience must one day eliminate. Their tenure will not be disturbed to-day, to-morrow, or next day. Their evil influence can be ...
— What eight million women want • Rheta Childe Dorr
... meal might be prolonged to cover another hour; but the evening still stretched onward, seeming interminable to his restless fancy. It was a relief when Brady came in and suggested that they drop in at a meeting of the Salvation Army to be held at a slum post in a region of the city known ...
— Flint - His Faults, His Friendships and His Fortunes • Maud Wilder Goodwin
... there's Price,' Alick lifted his head to say presently. 'Oh, I can't tell you what he has done for me! He nursed me all through in that slum of a Whitechapel—me, of all people! And when I begged his pardon for all my bad conduct you should have seen his face! Theo, if you'll give me your word never to tell it to any one, I cried like ...
— The Captain's Bunk - A Story for Boys • M. B. Manwell
... history and psychology condemn. But it does seem to me a good thing to envisage clearly, if we can, the ideal towards which our changes should lead. A garden city is not Utopia. Still, it is an advance upon the Victorian type of suburb and slum; and we should not have got it if some men had not believed in Utopia, and tried to make a beginning here and now. Already in education some few have tried to make such a beginning and have proved that it is possible if ...
— The Life of the Spirit and the Life of To-day • Evelyn Underhill
... in Tuscany is much better than the railway. And Rodney was an interesting and rather attractive person. Since he left Cambridge he had been pursuing abstruse chemical research in a laboratory he had in a Westminster slum. Peter never saw him in London, because the Ignorant Rich do not live in slums, and because Rodney was not fond of the more respectable quarters of ...
— The Lee Shore • Rose Macaulay
... up the gang-plank to the village, and with no more prelude than a Salvation Army picket in a Portsmouth slum, cried: "Oh, ...
— Actions and Reactions • Rudyard Kipling
... Town Children playing, O my brothers, With their bats and leathern spheres? They are herding where the slum-reek fumes and smothers, And that isn't play, one fears. The young rustics bat in verdant meadows, The young swells are "scrummaging" out west; They are forming future GRACES, STODDARTS, HADOWS; They are having larks, which, ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 98, March 15, 1890 • Various
... the end of the salle-a-manger behind a high wooden screen, across the huge kitchen, and then through a long stone corridor at the end of which sat a gruff old doorkeeper. My guide spoke a word to him, and then the door opened and I found myself in a narrow back slum with the ...
— The Czar's Spy - The Mystery of a Silent Love • William Le Queux
... was concerned—the disreputable characters of the community, familiar in the local jail for frequent bursts of intoxication. They slouched, they smoked, they lounged, they leered. The churches knew them not. They were the slum element, the Bowery ...
— Prudence Says So • Ethel Hueston
... tenement district, and tired as she was, she took a bus and went down at seven o'clock. She was uneasy and nervous. She had not spoken in the evening before, and in all her sheltered life she had never seen the milling of a night crowd in a slum district. ...
— Dangerous Days • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... garrets and hovels and will say to them simply: "It is a real Revolution this time, comrades, and no mistake about it. Come to such a place this evening; all the neighbourhood will be there; we are going to redistribute the dwelling-houses. If you are tired of your slum-garret, come and choose one of the flats of five rooms that are to be disposed of, and when you have once moved in you shall stay, never fear. The people are up in arms, and he who would venture to evict you will ...
— The Conquest of Bread • Peter Kropotkin
... extraordinary procession; tall, bearded men with the high cheek-bones and sad, wide-apart eyes of the Slav: a blond, round-cheeked boy whose shy yet stolid face could only have been bred in Germany, or Alsace; sharp-featured, rat-eyed fellows who might have been collected at Montmartre or in a Marseilles slum; others who were nondescripts of no complexion and no expression; waifs from anywhere; a brown-skinned Spaniard and an Italian or two; a Negro with the sophisticated look of a New York "darkee"; a melancholy, hooded Arab, and a fierce-faced Moor; types utterly at variance, ...
— A Soldier of the Legion • C. N. Williamson
... man, and the end of my life proves to be as unfortunate as the beginning. I was born in London some fifty and more years ago, in a Whitechapel slum, of drunken and profligate parents, so it is little to be wondered at that my career has been anything but virtuous or respectable. In my early childhood—if it may be called so—I was beaten and starved, set to beg, forced to thieve, and never had a kind word said to me or a kind deed done to me. ...
— The Silent House • Fergus Hume
... life, it seemed to her a slum of human relationships, airless, over-crowded, a dusty arena where psychological acrobats perform by artificial light. And always that dragging of the general down to the particular, that circumscribing of everything by the personal, every rose a token, ...
— Balloons • Elizabeth Bibesco
... that your lot shall laugh amain, Wryly, as he who, like a fool, Thrust o'er the cliff his restive mule. Nay! there is worse behind. In age They e'en may take your babbling page In some remotest "slum" to teach Mere boys ...
— Collected Poems - In Two Volumes, Vol. II • Austin Dobson
... Chicago, we were not just sure what God wanted us to do. The first winter I helped hold meetings for homeless men in the slum district. As a class, these people were so deep in sin that it was hard to reach them. A few, however, did get a real experience of salvation; but it was difficult for them to keep saved, and when they would give up, they would ...
— Trials and Triumphs of Faith • Mary Cole
... hunger-killing shop Whither I hie thrice daily for my stew, I dream I'm Mr. Waldorf as I chew My prunes or lay my Boston-baked on top. Growley and sinkers, slum and mutton sop, India-rubber jelly known as "glue," A soup-bone goulash with a spud or two, Clatter below until ...
— The Love Sonnets of a Car Conductor • Wallace Irwin
... in the matter would appear to be like many other rules—a paradox. Drink because you are happy, but never because you are miserable. Never drink when you are wretched without it, or you will be like the grey-faced gin-drinker in the slum; but drink when you would be happy without it, and you will be like the laughing peasants of Italy. Never drink because you need it, for this is rational drinking, and the way to death and hell. But drink because you ...
— Gilbert Keith Chesterton • Maisie Ward
... turn, on the instant, into a vast camera obscura, and he saw arrayed around his consciousness endless pictures from his life, of stoke-holes and forecastles, camps and beaches, jails and boozing-kens, fever-hospitals and slum streets, wherein the thread of association was the fashion in which he had been addressed ...
— Martin Eden • Jack London
... I had been in New Haven before. In 1892 I addressed the students of Yale University on the subject of city mission work and, as a result of that address, had been invited to make some investigations and outline a plan for city mission work for the students. I spent ten days in the slum region there, making a report and recommendations. On these the students began the work anew. I was asked at that time to attach myself to the university as leader and instructor in city missions, but work in New York ...
— From the Bottom Up - The Life Story of Alexander Irvine • Alexander Irvine
... the costermonger, the racecourse swindler, the thriftless labourer, is now practically emancipated through the action of sentimental persons. He may go to school or not, as he likes; and, while the decent and orderly poor are harried by School Board regulations, the rough of the slum snaps his fingers without fear at all regulations. If one of the bad boys from the "rookeries" does go to school, he soon learns that he may take his own way. If he is foul-mouthed, thievish, indecent, ...
— The Ethics of Drink and Other Social Questions - Joints In Our Social Armour • James Runciman
... replied; "she drinks, sir. I got letters from fr'en's——" He thrust his hand inside the breast of his jumper and produced his sad evidence—a letter from a clergyman, one or two from lay-workers in some north-country slum, and one from his mother herself, an incoherent, abusive scrawl, with liquor stains still upon the ...
— A Tall Ship - On Other Naval Occasions • Sir Lewis Anselm da Costa Ritchie
... four inquests, all upon the bodies of air-raid victims: a road-man, his wife, an orphan baby—all belonging to the thick central mass of the proletariat, for a West End slum had received a bomb full in the face—and Lady Queenie Paulle. The policemen were stolid; the reporters were stolid; the proletariat was stolid; the majority of the witnesses were stolid, and in particular the representatives of various philanthropic agencies who gave the most minute ...
— The Pretty Lady • Arnold E. Bennett
... my face, it's crimped and gouged—one of them death-mask things; Don't seem the sort of man, do I, as might be the pal of kings? Slouching along in smelly rags, a bleary-eyed, no-good bum; A knight of the hollow needle, pard, spewed from the sodden slum. Look me all over from head to foot; how much would you think I was worth? A dollar? a dime? a nickel? Why, I'M THE ...
— Ballads of a Cheechako • Robert W. Service
... but on his level, to no more than tolerate him. He finally humiliates himself to the extent of exclaiming, 'You don't know what it means to be a cripple!' The pathos of it plumbs the depths. The death of Fannie Price, of the sixteen-year-old mother in the slum, of Cronshaw, and the rambling agonies of old Ducroz and of Philip himself, are ...
— When Winter Comes to Main Street • Grant Martin Overton
... dreary months, in that dismal slum-grown town, we learnt all the tricks of barrack-life. We knew how to "come the old soldier"; we knew how and when to "wangle out" of doing this or that fatigue; we practised the ancient art of "going sick" when we knew a long route march was ...
— At Suvla Bay • John Hargrave
... panic was indescribable. This old tree plaza, about which the early city was built, is now in the centre of Chinatown, of the Italian district and of the "Barbary Coast," the "Tenderloin" of the Western metropolis. It is the chief slum district of the city. The tremor here ran up the Chinatown hill and shook down part of the crazy buildings on its southern edge. It brought ruin also to some of the Italian tenements. Portsmouth Square became the refuge of the terrified inhabitants. Out from ...
— The San Francisco Calamity • Various
... it. But you ought to have seen him go for the bread and tincture of formaldehyde. Half-starved, I guess. Then she prayed some. Don't get stuck up, tenner. We one-spots hear ten prayers, where you hear one. She said something about 'who giveth to the poor.' Oh, let's cut out the slum talk. I'm certainly tired of the company that keeps me. I wish I was big enough to move in society with you ...
— The Trimmed Lamp and Others • O Henry
... cried, aghast, "you don't mean to say that you are going to turn your beautiful little house into a fresh-air place for Boston's slum children!" ...
— Miss Billy • Eleanor H. Porter
... the square crumbled apart, a wrecked rainbow, and melted away in radiant streams, and in the turn of a wrist the three dirtiest and raggedest and cheerfulest little slum-girls in Austria were capering about in the spacious vacancy. It was a day ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... he states simply what must be the moving impulse of a democratic government if it is to survive. Here is the spirit that is to-day growing among us, the spirit that forbids child labor, cares for orphans, enacts model tenement laws, strives to regenerate the slum districts, and is increasing the altruistic activities of clubs and churches throughout the country. But these verses will not submit to iambic or trochaic scansion, and their form is as strange as a democratic ...
— History of American Literature • Reuben Post Halleck
... boys to-day in the city slum and the home of wealth and pride Who'll have one home when the storm is come, and fight for it side by side, Who'll hold the cliffs 'gainst the armoured hells that batter a coastal town, Or grimly die in a hail of shells when the walls come ...
— An Anthology of Australian Verse • Bertram Stevens
... to get to the booking-office amongst the rest of the crowd, and there was far more pushing and struggling than was at all necessary for that purpose. Presently a burly ruffian, with a low East End face of the slum pattern and complexion, rolled out a volley of oaths at me. He asked where the —— I was pushing and what game I was up to, as though I were a professional pickpocket like himself. He had the advantage ...
— The Reminiscences Of Sir Henry Hawkins (Baron Brampton) • Henry Hawkins Brampton
... was due in the bar-room at eight o'clock in the morning; the bar-room was in a slum in the Bowery; and he had only been able to keep himself in health by getting up at five o'clock and going for long walks in ...
— The Untilled Field • George Moore
... display of multifarious shreds and patches of colour. Then the houses themselves are often brightly, not to say loudly, painted; so that in the clear, sparkling atmosphere characteristic of New York, the most squalid slum puts on a many-coloured Southern aspect, which suggests Naples or Marseilles rather than the back streets of any English city. Add to this that the inhabitants are largely of Southern origin, and are apt, whenever the temperature will ...
— America To-day, Observations and Reflections • William Archer
... Redwood City depot-agent. It quite disconcerted him for a moment; but, upon learning my object, he referred me to a Salvation Army woman, whom I immediately looked up and fortunately found at home. She was pleased to receive one on such an errand, and agreed to accompany me to the dance-hall and slum district that night. ...
— Fifteen Years With The Outcast • Mrs. Florence (Mother) Roberts
... smile underwent a rich variety of hazards, each threatening a terrible death. Through them all she came unscathed, leaving behind her a trail of infuriated scoundrels whom she had thwarted. She escaped from an underworld den in a Chicago slum just in the nick of time, cleverly concealing herself in the branches of the great eucalyptus tree that grew hard by, while her maddened pursuers scattered in their search for the prize. Again she was captured, this time to be conveyed by aeroplane, a helpless prisoner and subject to the most ...
— Merton of the Movies • Harry Leon Wilson
... a slum area. Each tumble-down tenement is rated and taxed on the assessment based upon its annual rental value. In many places in the central parts of towns the total of these assessments is less than the sum for which the whole site ...
— Essays in Liberalism - Being the Lectures and Papers Which Were Delivered at the - Liberal Summer School at Oxford, 1922 • Various
... as the down noon express was leaving H—— yesterday a lady! (God save the mark) attempted to force herself into the already full palatial car. Conductor Slum, who is too old a bird to be caught with chaff, courteously informed her that the car was full, and when she insisted on remaining, he persuaded her to go into the car where she belonged. Thereupon a young sprig, from the East, blustered like ...
— The Gilded Age, Part 4. • Mark Twain (Samuel Clemens) and Charles Dudley Warner
... was marked. There was no cheating him of his due. "Slum" was his sobriquet by the courtesy of prairie custom. "Ranks" was purely a paternal heirloom and of ...
— The Night Riders - A Romance of Early Montana • Ridgwell Cullum
... had the good, or ill, fortune to strike on a rich vein of so-called life in a London slum. Shrieks of fury, terror, pain were coming out of an archway that led, said an inscription, into Livermore's Rents, 1808. Public opinion, outside those Rents, ascribed them to the fact that Salter had been drinking. He was on to that pore wife of his again, like last week. Half killed ...
— Somehow Good • William de Morgan
... at once that Mrs. Clemm found him. She had sought him diligently in what would to-day be known as the slum districts of the city, descending the scale of respectability lower and lower until she thought she had reached the ...
— The Dreamer - A Romantic Rendering of the Life-Story of Edgar Allan Poe • Mary Newton Stanard
... attractive," said Aneta. "But, now, the thing is this: if we don't help her she will be absolutely lost, all her chance taken from her, and her character ruined for ever. We do a lot at our school for those poor slum-girls, but we never do anything for girls in our class. Now, I mean my girl in future to be ...
— The School Queens • L. T. Meade
... deplorable a spectacle of ruin and inefficiency. The South-Eastern Company's estate at Seabrook presents the dreariest spectacle of incompetent development conceivable; one can see its failure three miles away; it is a waste with an embryo slum in one corner protected by an extravagant sea-wall, already partly shattered, ...
— New Worlds For Old - A Plain Account of Modern Socialism • Herbert George Wells
... how many do you think remain in New York? Most of them go up country and out westwards. Some improve their position and then repair to other fields of work. But many also stay here and increase the slum population. The immigrants who are destitute on landing take work in factories at any wage they can get. The wages they receive seem very high compared to those in their own country, but they are low for America. Accordingly the immigrant Europeans thrust out the Americans, and ...
— From Pole to Pole - A Book for Young People • Sven Anders Hedin
... melancholy cries. Along one side lay the Cathedral with its great central tower, and Philip, who knew as yet nothing of beauty, felt when he looked at it a troubling delight which he could not understand. When he had a study (it was a little square room looking on a slum, and four boys shared it), he bought a photograph of that view of the Cathedral, and pinned it up over his desk. And he found himself taking a new interest in what he saw from the window of the Fourth Form room. It looked on to old lawns, carefully tended, and fine trees ...
— Of Human Bondage • W. Somerset Maugham
... Mattei and Montanara and back by 'bus; again this morning tramm'd to Lateran in showers. The squalor of this Rome and of its people! The absence of all trace of any decent past, ancient barbarism as down at heel and unkempt as any modern slum! The starved galled horses, broken harness, unmended clothes and wide-mouthed sluttishness under the mound on which stand the Cenci's houses, a foul mound of demolition and rag-pickers, only a stone's-throw from the brand-new ...
— The Spirit of Rome • Vernon Lee
... never dreamed that, going alone amongst his foes, they would use brutal and cowardly violence, and shame every Parliamentary tradition by personal outrage on a duly-elected member, outrage more worthy of a slum pot-house than of the great Commons House, the House of Hampden and of Vane, the House that had guarded its own from Royal violence, and had maintained its privileges ...
— Annie Besant - An Autobiography • Annie Besant
... I was never introduced to her. I have no idea of her strength of mind—wait!" Another minute went by in personal silence; Peter Hawley's concentration far too deep to be disturbed by the sounds of the city's spaceport slum by night. The dog backed away from the door and took an alert position to guard Peter while the man was immersed in his own mind. Finally Peter alerted and shook his head sadly. "I thought for a moment that she'd ...
— History Repeats • George Oliver Smith
... Salvationist, the work which makes him so noble and so useful a figure in the modern world, is not accomplished by pageantry and tub-thumping, but by the intimate, often most beautiful, and very little known work of its slum officers, ...
— Painted Windows - Studies in Religious Personality • Harold Begbie
... tale being the outrages inflicted upon American citizens by VILLA, and what seemed then the bewildering delay of Washington over the vindication of the flag. The "Alley" of its unfortunate name is the slum in Kansas City where Dave, stranded on his way westward, met the girl to whom the laws of fiction were inevitably to join him. I fancy that one of Mr. CULLEY'S difficulties may have lain in the fact that, when the tale, following Dave, had finally shaken itself from ...
— Punch, Volume 156, January 22, 1919. • Various
... Piso were a pleasant chum Compared with slangy laureates of the slum. Hist! There's a tenor twitter, A tremulous twangle of the minor strings. 'Tis SERAPHIN, sleek Amateur, who sings, ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 98, February 1, 1890 • Various
... the worst fringe of this question, the maltreated children, the children of the slum, the children of drunkards and criminals, and the illegitimate. But the bulk of the children of deficient growth, the bulk of the excessive mortality, lies above the level of such intervention, and the method of attack of the New Republican must be less direct. Happily there already ...
— Mankind in the Making • H. G. Wells
... a better chance than most slum boys, for he had rugged health and an unusually sturdy body. His very strength had been his ruin. Working decently for wages, he had been told by other petty gang leaders that he was a "sucker," when he could get many times ...
— The Ear in the Wall • Arthur B. Reeve
... the result of which was that he began to feel more afraid of her than of the locked door. About this strange, almost uncannily beautiful child of the riverside slum there was a fascination which appealed to him more and more. The longer he looked at the wide, light-blue eyes, listened to the hoarse but moving voice, the more valiantly he had to struggle against the spell which he felt her to ...
— The Wharf by the Docks - A Novel • Florence Warden
... taught household duties before being shipped in a famous colony to Canada. The colony went to pieces in a deplorable failure on facing its first year of difficulties, but she had married a Canadian frontiersman and remained. She wore all the slum marks—bad teeth, loose-feeble-will in the mouth, furtive whining eyes. She was clean personally and paraded her religion in unctuous phrase; but I need only to tell a Canadian that she had lived in her shanty three years ...
— The Canadian Commonwealth • Agnes C. Laut
... universally believed that the slum dwellers of London were mainly recruited by rural immigrants, and this error—disproved several years later by the painstaking statistical investigations of Mr. (now Sir) H. Llewelyn Smith—vitiates much of the reasoning of ...
— The History of the Fabian Society • Edward R. Pease
... forests; William Allen White to describe certain aspects of his favourite Kansas; E.L. Godkin to review the dangers and the hopes of American democracy; Jacob Rues to tell about the Battle with the Slum; and W.G. Frost to reveal for the first time the archaic civilization of the Kentucky mountaineers. The latter article illustrated Page's genius at rewriting titles. Mr. Frost's theme was that these Kentucky mountaineers were really Elizabethan survivals; that their ...
— The Life and Letters of Walter H. Page, Volume I • Burton J. Hendrick
... pitied, and the subject of many a jest, but entirely harmless. A large number of the feeble-minded are so nearly normal that they are considered merely shiftless or stupid. Nearly every rural community has one or more families, and not infrequently a small slum neighborhood, who are ne'er-do-wells, more or less delinquent and frequently requiring aid from the town. Thanks to modern psychology, we now know that many of these adults have the intelligence of only a seven or nine-year-old child and ...
— The Farmer and His Community • Dwight Sanderson
... the four members of the company on the stage and in the dressing-room lost their ease and contemptuous indifference. They had been talking sneeringly about "yokels" and "jays" and "slum bums." They dropped all that, as there spread over them the mysterious spell of the crowd. As individuals the provincials in those seats were ridiculous; as a mass they were an audience, an object of fear and awe. Mabel was almost in tears; Violet talked rapidly, with excited gestures ...
— Susan Lenox: Her Fall and Rise • David Graham Phillips
... I have been obliged to sleep in one of these hospitable igloos. On such occasions I have made the best of things, as a man would if compelled to sleep in a tenth-rate railroad hotel or a slum lodging-house, but I have tried to forget the experience as soon as possible. It is not well for an arctic explorer to be too fastidious. A night in one of these igloos, with the family at home, is an offense ...
— The North Pole - Its Discovery in 1909 under the auspices of the Peary Arctic Club • Robert E. Peary
... had been overcome, off they started to their beloved slum, Emilia looking as if she were setting forth for Elysium, and they were seen no more, even when five o'clock tea was spread, and Anna making it for her Uncle Lance and his wife, who had just returned, full of ...
— The Long Vacation • Charlotte M. Yonge
... cent of the children raised in the vast slum neighborhoods surrounding the segregated districts of prostitution are ruined before reaching the age of eighteen. This dreadful, appalling feature has been recently brought to light through close investigation ...
— Chicago's Black Traffic in White Girls • Jean Turner-Zimmermann
... as it is of Tolstoy or any of the Tolstoyan type of mind. The very title of this story strike the note of this sudden and simple vision. The philanthropist writing long letters to the Daily Telegraph says, of men living in a slum, that "their degeneration is of such a kind as almost to pass the limits of the semblance of humanity," and we read the whole thing with a tepid assent as we should read phrases about the virtues of Queen Victoria or the dignity of ...
— Creatures That Once Were Men • Maxim Gorky
... their souls, as it seemed, in that grinding-machine of military training, and cursed their fate. Only comradeship helped them—not always jolly, if they happened to be a class above their fellows, a moral peg above foul-mouthed slum-dwellers and men of filthy habits, but splendid if they were in their own crowd of decent, laughter-loving, companionable lads. Eleven months' training! Were they ever going to the front? The war would be over before they landed in France... ...
— Now It Can Be Told • Philip Gibbs
... attract every conceivable sort of person, to the prejudice of discipline. Zenana-mission ladies arrive, and beg that the Editor will instantly abandon all his duties to describe a Christian prize-giving in a back-slum of a perfectly inaccessible village; Colonels who have been overpassed for commands sit down and sketch the outline of a series of ten, twelve, or twenty-four leading articles on Seniority versus Selection; missionaries wish to know why they have not been permitted to escape from their regular ...
— The Man Who Would Be King • Rudyard Kipling
... composing the storm music of the 'Fliegende Hollander.' Jane was willing to take back some of her most libellous remarks if Dora would take back the hen, but Dora said that would be owning herself in the wrong, and you know she'd as soon think of owning slum property ...
— Beasts and Super-Beasts • Saki
... sheep, while Topinard led the way into one of the squalid districts which might be called the cancers of Paris—a spot known as the Cite Bordin. It is a slum out of the Rue de Bondy, a double row of houses run up by the speculative builder, under the shadow of the huge mass of the Porte Saint-Martin theatre. The pavement at the higher end lies below the level of the Rue de Bondy; at the lower it falls ...
— Poor Relations • Honore de Balzac
... upon—equally trivial in seeming, equally important in its essence—which is the selling of books by the great department stores, the big general shops, in America. Taking all classes of the British population together and both sexes—artisans and their wives, peasants in country districts, slum residents in London and other large cities,—what proportion of the population of the British Isles do of set purpose go into a bookseller's shop once a year or once in their lives? Is it ten per cent.—or five per cent.—or two per cent.? The exact proportion ...
— The Twentieth Century American - Being a Comparative Study of the Peoples of the Two Great - Anglo-Saxon Nations • H. Perry Robinson
... sergeant and fell out of the ranks. He laid his clumsy hand on the woman's arm; she set down on the pavement the parcel she had been carrying. There they stood for a full minute gazing at each other dumbly, oblivious to the passing crowds. She wasn't pleasing to look at—just a slum woman with draggled skirts, a shawl gathered tightly round her and a mildewed kind of bonnet. He was no more attractive—a hulking Samson, perhaps a day-labourer, who whilst he had loved her, had probably beaten her. They had come to the hour of parting, and there they stood in the London ...
— The Glory of the Trenches • Coningsby Dawson
... which, considering my youth and inexperience, must be pronounced remarkable. While recovering from this illness, which left me far from strong, I received a note from a companion, Will Sansom, asking me to make haste and get well again, and help him in a Mission he had started in a slum part of the town. No sooner was I able to get about than I gladly ...
— The Authoritative Life of General William Booth • George Scott Railton
... the vagaries of the Spirit of Beauty! From how many high places will she turn away, yet delight to waste herself upon a slum like this! How fantastic the accident that had brought such a face to flower in such a spot!—and yet hardly more fantastic, he reflected, than that which had sown his own family haphazard where they were. ...
— Young Lives • Richard Le Gallienne
... Kimberley; for this purpose, the population is demoralized, taxed, driven into revolt, and exposed to the contamination of European vice and disease. Healthy and vigorous races from Southern Europe are tempted to America, where sweating and slum life reduce their vitality if they do not actually cause their death. What damage is done to our own urban populations by the conditions under which they live, we all know. And what is true of the human riches of the world is no less true of the physical resources. The mines, forests, ...
— Political Ideals • Bertrand Russell
... Mr Clinton came to a narrow slum, down which he turned, and so filthy was it that the lady almost feared to follow. But indignation, curiosity, and a stern sense of duty prevailed. She went along with up-turned nose, making her way carefully between cabbages and ...
— Orientations • William Somerset Maugham
... itself in the family. Drunken, depraved, or feeble-minded parents usually produce children with the same inheritances or tendencies; family quarrelling and an utter absence of moral training do not foster the development of character. A slum environment in the city strengthens the evil tendencies of such a home, as it counterbalances the good effects of a wholesome home environment. Mental and moral degeneracy is always present in society, and if unchecked spreads widely; physical ...
— Society - Its Origin and Development • Henry Kalloch Rowe
... moments of the last meetin', which wuz one of sympathy with the police of Washington for their noble efforts to break up the Woman's Parade, and after their almost Herculaneum labor to teach wimmen her proper place, and all the help they got from the hoodlum and slum elements, they had failed in a measure, and the wimmen, though stunned, insulted, spit on, struck, broken boneded, maimed, and tore to pieces, had succeeded in ...
— Samantha on the Woman Question • Marietta Holley
... on the edge of a tawdry chair, looked about (like the charity visitor in a slum kitchen) without intending to express disgust; but it was a dismal room in which to be sick, and he pitied the woman the more profoundly as he remembered her in the days when "all out-doors" was none too wide ...
— Cavanaugh: Forest Ranger - A Romance of the Mountain West • Hamlin Garland
... authority of democracy. He points out the incompatibility of political democracy, for example, with the determinism to which Mr. Blatchford's logical atheism has brought him. If man is the creature of his heredity and his environment, as Mr. Blatchford asserts, and if a slum-bred heredity and a slum environment do not make for high intelligence, then obviously it is against the best interests of the State to allow the slum inhabitant to vote. On the other hand, it is entirely to the best interests of the State to entrust ...
— G. K. Chesterton, A Critical Study • Julius West
... sending for Jopp, the manager originally displaced by Farfrae's arrival. Henchard had frequently met this man about the streets, observed that his clothing spoke of neediness, heard that he lived in Mixen Lane—a back slum of the town, the pis aller of Casterbridge domiciliation—itself almost a proof that a man had reached a stage when he ...
— The Mayor of Casterbridge • Thomas Hardy
... movements were at their height, new centres of industrial population were allowed to grow up without the least regard for health or decency. Under the influence of laissez-faire philosophy, each wretched slum-dweller was supposed to be capable, after his ten or twelve hours in the factory, of looking after his own and his children's education, his main-drainage, his risks from infection, and the purity ...
— The History of England - A Study in Political Evolution • A. F. Pollard
... the few willow-trees left us by the Thames Conservancy looked doubtfully alive against the bleak sky and the row of wretched-looking blue-slated houses, although, by the way, the latter were the backs of a sort of street of "villas" and not a slum; the road in front of the house was sooty and muddy at once, and in the air was that sense of dirty discomfort which one is never quit of in London. The morning was harsh, too, and though the wind was from the south-west it ...
— A Dream of John Ball, A King's Lesson • William Morris
... forge. Blacksmiths, like other specialists, vary, and the difference may be expressed as that between the man who fits the shoe to the hoof, and the man who fits the hoof to the shoe—in other words, the workman and the sloven. Doubtless many a slum-housed artisan in the big town, driven from his country home by the flood of unfair foreign competition, looks back with longing to the bright old cottage garden of his youth and in his dreams hears the music ...
— Grain and Chaff from an English Manor • Arthur H. Savory
... morning sky bends or the stars cluster is sanctuary enough," she said; "a slum at noonday is as holy for us as daisied fields; the Name of the Lord walks with us. The Army is His Army, He is ...
— The Path of a Star • Mrs. Everard Cotes (AKA Sara Jeannette Duncan)
... don't want to see us, let us alone. I don't bother my former friends.' But I need no charity calls, and no criticism disguised as good advice—" Then he added apologetically: "I'm sorry—but really, Muriel, you mustn't talk like a lady slum-worker even if you are visiting the lower middle classes." He turned his bloodshot eyes on her reproachfully—eyes that had once been a deep, clear blue, that were weak now, strained, and half-ruined from reading when ...
— The Beautiful and Damned • F. Scott Fitzgerald
... States nearly five million people who can neither read nor write. We have no statistics but we venture to say there are as many who eat with their knives. There are people among us—and they are not all immigrants in the slum districts or Negroes in the poorer sections of the South—who do not know what a napkin is, who think the proper way to eat an egg is to hold it in the hand like a piece of candy, and bite it, the egg having previously been fried on both sides until it is as stiff and as hard as a piece ...
— The Book of Business Etiquette • Nella Henney
... forts strengthen the land front, and the futility of an Arab attack at this time was evident. Halfa had now become the terminus of a railway, which was rapidly extending; and the continual arrival and despatch of tons of material, the building of sheds, workshops, and storehouses lent the African slum the bustle and activity of a ...
— The River War • Winston S. Churchill
... to us, Lady Anne," he said, stumbling over his words. "We had made up our minds to give up the big house and look for a slum practice. The children—I have two living—are not very strong, any more than Mildred. We put all we could into the venture of taking the house. It was ...
— Mary Gray • Katharine Tynan
... the slum and the gutter Are off "to the country" 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 ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 99, July 12, 1890 • Various
... it comes in!" said Mickey. "If you could read the papers, you'd know. 'Sterilized,' is what they do to the milk in hot weather to save the slum kids. That's us, Lily. 'Deodorized,' is taking the bad smell out of things. 'Vulcanized,' is something they do to stiffen things. I guess ...
— Michael O'Halloran • Gene Stratton-Porter
... out and fly it on a vacant lot in the rear of our lodgings, accompanied by a large portion of the unoccupied population of Manchester. The kite broke its string one day, and I saw it descend over the roofs of a remote slum region towards the south, and I never recaptured it. But my chief energies were devoted to acquiring the art of fencing with the small-sword from one Corporal Blair, of the Fourth Dragoon Guards—a regiment which had distinguished ...
— Hawthorne and His Circle • Julian Hawthorne
... is,' said the little boy who lived in a slum. 'Teacher says there ain't no bounds to the wonders of science. Blest if this ain't ...
— The Magic World • Edith Nesbit
... churches, schools and all organizations working for the uplift of humanity, women are a majority. In all American states and countries that have adopted equal suffrage the vote of the disreputable woman is practically negligible, the slum wards of cities invariably having the lightest woman vote and the respectable residence wards the heaviest. Woman suffrage would increase the number of native born voters as for every 100 foreign white women immigrants coming to this country there are 129 men, while among ...
— Woman Suffrage By Federal Constitutional Amendment • Various
... "Such a slum!" said Bob disgustedly. "But she would do it, in spite of all that I could say. And rushed there, too, when he had hardly been dead a week. It was not decent, as I told her, to be advertising the sale two days after the funeral. But she ...
— Sisters • Ada Cambridge
... throw that guilt on the British public itself. You may remember that when you produced my first play, Widowers' Houses, exactly the same misunderstanding arose. When the virtuous young gentleman rose up in wrath against the slum landlord, the slum landlord very effectively shewed him that slums are the product, not of individual Harpagons, but of the indifference of virtuous young gentlemen to the condition of the city they live in, provided they live at the west end of it on money earned ...
— Mrs. Warren's Profession • George Bernard Shaw
... of large cities means the growth of slum-life. Hear me, you who live out in the uncrowded part of the country. Maud Ballington Booth tells of finding five families, living in one attic room in New York City, with no partitions between. Here they "cook, eat, sleep, wash, live and die," in the one room. In our ...
— Wit, Humor, Reason, Rhetoric, Prose, Poetry and Story Woven into Eight Popular Lectures • George W. Bain
... God's earth to which Irene had so cunningly brought her. Her starved, city-ridden spirit had blossomed and become healthy out there in the country like a root of Creeping Jenny taken from a pot on the window-sill of a slum house and put back ...
— Who Cares? • Cosmo Hamilton
... broke away, she knew that it would be only to put himself under harsher constraint; she figured him toiling through sandy deserts under a tropical sun to find the source of some river or the haunt of some fly; she figured him living by the labor of his hands in some city slum, the victim of one of those terrible theories of right and wrong which were current at the time; she figured him prisoner for life in the house of a woman who had seduced him by her misfortunes. Half proudly, and wholly anxiously, she framed such thoughts, as they sat, late at night, ...
— Night and Day • Virginia Woolf
... know, it's this way. Just you fancy yerselves born In a back-slum like Ragman's Rents. 'Old 'ard, don't larf with scorn! Some on us is born there, yer know; it might ha' bin your luck, If yer mother'd bin a boozer, and yer father'd got ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, VOL. 103, November 26, 1892 • Various
... have money enough on your person to buy a bottle of gin your murderer is as well satisfied as though he got a roll. Some men in our country commit murders in order to get money to lay away so they can live a nice, respectable life and be good ever afterwards, but your slum murderer in London just kills because his stomach craves a drink, and when he gets it he is tame, like a tiger that has ...
— Peck's Bad Boy Abroad • George W. Peck
... abominable thing! Why, the grass would all be trampled down; and these dirty people, these slum folk, who seem to spring out of the earth when anything of a disagreeable or shameful nature is taking place,—a fire, for instance, or a brawl,—might easily bring infectious diseases on to those gravel paths where the ...
— McClure's Magazine, Vol 31, No 2, June 1908 • Various
... camp. Instinct places outhouses on our farms and then gradually removes them farther and farther from dwellings. In many school yards, more particularly in country districts and small towns, outhouses are a crying offense against animal instinct. In visiting slum districts in Irish and Scotch cities, and in London, Paris, Berlin, and New York, I never found conditions so offensive to crude animal instinct as those I knew when a boy in Minnesota school yards, or those I have since seen in a Boy Republic. But the evil is not corrected ...
— Civics and Health • William H. Allen
... thus compete keenly for rooms in the centres of industry; more important still, the value of central ground for factories, shops, and ware-houses raises to famine price the habitable premises. It is notorious that overcrowded, insanitary "slum" property is the most paying form of house property to its owners. The part played by rent in the problems of poverty can scarcely be over-estimated. Attempts to mitigate the evil by erecting model dwellings have scarcely touched the lower classes of wage-earners. The ...
— Problems of Poverty • John A. Hobson
... mansions old With stinking doors where women stood to scold And drunken waits at Christmas with their horn Droning the news, in snow, that Christ was born; And windy gas lamps and the wet roads shining And that old carol of the midnight whining, And that old room above the noisy slum Where there was wine and fire and talk with some Under strange pictures of the wakened soul To whom this earth was ...
— Georgian Poetry 1911-12 • Various |
