"Workhouse" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... once or twice. Has he not brought his father to the verge of a workhouse by low dissipation ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 440 - Volume 17, New Series, June 5, 1852 • Various
... and in his stead I saw a withered old pauper with the Victoria Cross on his breast. "I went to the mouth of hell for thee," he said, with large reproachful eyes; "and thou leavest me to rot in the workhouse." ...
— Without Prejudice • Israel Zangwill
... heart-piercing light into the hell around me. Still the frenzy of life had laid fast hold on me, and made me too take my place in the vast bedlam, and go through my part under the great task-master. People tell you that death cures all; others again look forward to being transported from one workhouse to another, where they shall keep on playing the fool through all eternity and evaporating in an endless succession of illusions. With a little money—it would be ridiculous were I to mention the sum; many take so much merely to ...
— The Old Man of the Mountain, The Lovecharm and Pietro of Abano - Tales from the German of Tieck • Ludwig Tieck
... its scutcheons, Than in the common ground." So, graciously, The boon was granted, and he died content. And now the pauper's funeral had set forth, And the bell toll'd—not many strokes, nor long— Pauper's allowance. He was coming home. But while the train was yet a good way off— The workhouse burial train—I stopp'd to look Upon the scene before me; and methought Oh! that some gifted painter could behold And give duration to that living picture, So rich in moral and pictorial beauty, If seen arightly by the spiritual eye As with the ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 56, Number 350, December 1844 • Various
... indicted for a criminal offence he would be denominated a "laborer." Serjeant Talfourd's sweeping theory, of the term "gentleman" being legally applicable to every man who has nothing to do and is out of the workhouse, cannot be accepted, as it would of necessity include thieves, mendicants and out-door paupers. The American police have been compelled, to defend the border-line of gentility against the encroachments of their ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 17, - No. 97, January, 1876 • Various
... invariable answer. "William, you are a fool," his partner would rejoin for the hundredth time. "Will you never understand that, if we get a little more than the customary profit upon one thing, we get less upon another? You must make the thing even, or come to the workhouse." Thereto, for the hundredth time also, William Marston would reply: "That might hold, I daresay, Mr. Turnbull—I am not sure—if every customer always bought an article of each of the two sorts together; ...
— Mary Marston • George MacDonald
... Youth goes clad in gold; In a wretched workhouse Age's limbs are cold: There they sit, the old men by a shivering fire, Still close and closer cowering, warmth is ...
— The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb IV - Poems and Plays • Charles and Mary Lamb
... poor indicated that the individualistic battle had been fought and lost. No one ever dreamed, apparently, that a time for old-age pensions and honorable retiring funds was coming. The feeling against any form of community assistance was like the bitter hatred of the workhouse among ...
— The American Mind - The E. T. Earl Lectures • Bliss Perry
... was discharged perfectly 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 well ...
— Benign Stupors - A Study of a New Manic-Depressive Reaction Type • August Hoch
... the 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 to find a better position. He was crossing the end of the shed when ...
— Mob Rule in New Orleans • Ida B. Wells-Barnett
... the ordinary symptomata of a funerall, those locularii which bare the body having on diversely coloured coats, and none black: (one of these reported the deceased to have been an almsman seven yeares, a pauper, harboured and fed in the workhouse of St. Giles-in-the-Fields, to whose proper burying-ground he was now going for interment.) All which when I behelde, hardly I refrained from weeping, and incontinently I fell to musing: "If this man ...
— The Works of Charles Lamb in Four Volumes, Volume 4 • Charles Lamb
... a good woman and was willing to keep the child until the new proprietor came; but when once affairs were settled, she would certainly go and make a declaration to the mayor, and take her to the workhouse. Madame Desvarennes listened in silence. One word only had struck her while the woman was speaking. The child was without support, without ties, and abandoned like a poor lost dog. The little one was pretty too; and when she ...
— Serge Panine, Complete • Georges Ohnet
... a sitting posture. His body was much bent, and his face was wrinkled and yellow. His dress denoted him an inmate of the workhouse: he had the appearance of being very old, but it looked more the effect of dissipation or disease, than the length of years. He was staring hard at the stranger, and though his eyes were lustreless and heavy ...
— The Pickwick Papers • Charles Dickens
... her, shivering as I went, to a great empty room on the first floor. The holidays were not quite over, and none of the pupils had as yet returned. There was an almost painful neatness and bareness in place of the usual litter of books and papers, and I could not help thinking that an apartment in a workhouse would have looked quite as cheerful. Even the fire behind the high wire guard seemed to burn in a different manner from all home fires: a fact which I attributed then to some sympathetic property in the coal, but which I afterwards found to be caused by a plentiful admixture of coke; ...
— Milly Darrell and Other Tales • M. E. Braddon
... newspaper, a duty of threepence on every pound of paper, and a heavy tax upon advertisements. The new Poor Laws aroused bitter discontent. Instead of receiving payment of money for relief of poverty, as had formerly been the case, the poor and needy were now sent to the 'Union' workhouse. ...
— Queen Victoria • E. Gordon Browne
... do I find evidence for it. Washington was always a very careful, farseeing person, and no doubt had a clear idea of what constitutes desirable qualifications in marriage, but I believe he would have married a poor girl out of the workhouse if he had really loved her. However, he was ...
— George Washington • William Roscoe Thayer
... 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 ...
— Virginibus Puerisque • Robert Louis Stevenson
... said; "a mean, close, discontented creature, who can see no pleasure in life except money-making. I hate the very sight of his pale pinched face, father, and the sound of his hard shrill voice. If I had to choose between the workhouse and marrying Stephen Whitelaw, I'd choose the workhouse; yes, and scrub, and wash, and drudge, and toil there all my days, rather than be ...
— Fenton's Quest • M. E. Braddon
... "With your Majesty," he assented, "the hereditary principle must naturally be strong: it is implanted in your blood. I have no such impulse in mine. My father was born in a workhouse." ...
— King John of Jingalo - The Story of a Monarch in Difficulties • Laurence Housman
... pigeons is a true one, and happened to a flock at the old Hall farm near our home, which also once possessed a luxuriant garden, wherein Phoebe might have found all the requisites for her Sunday posy. A "tea" for the workhouse children used to be Madam Liberality's annual birthday feast; and the spot where the gaffers sat and watched the "new graft" strolling home across the fields was so faithfully described by Julie from ...
— Juliana Horatia Ewing And Her Books • Horatia K. F. Eden
... frequently bored in the blade, which gives the application a sort of percussive effect; The pain is much more acute than with the cowhide; and several instances are known where a master ordered an amount of strokes beyond the endurance of the slave, and it proved fatal at the workhouse. They tell a pretty good story about the old fellow. I don't know if it's true, but the old fellow's rich now, and he does just what he pleases. It was that somebody found one of those little occasional droppings of the aristocracy, very well known among ...
— Manuel Pereira • F. C. Adams
... deliver is, I fear, not quite what Mr. Blundell led you to hope for. His efforts on your behalf have—er—- unfortunately failed. He finds himself obliged to give up all hope of aiding you to a livelihood. In fact—er—I understand that the arrangements made for your removal to the workhouse this afternoon must be carried out. It seems there is no alternative. I am grieved to be the bearer of bad tidings, but I am sure you will find a comfortable home ...
— The Atlantic Book of Modern Plays • Various
... horrors of her situation! Sickness and grief had so debilitated her constitution, that she was unable to do any kind of work, whereby to procure a subsistence; and, after having passed her youth in ease and pleasure, she had no resources left in the evening of her life, but that of a workhouse, or ...
— The Looking-Glass for the Mind - or Intellectual Mirror • M. Berquin
... case, I shall certainly tell the master of your workhouse. To think that there should be a ...
— The Holiday Round • A. A. Milne
... other, and we must bolster him up in his kingdom, or else there will be trouble with the powers." Powers—what's powers to me?—or Greenland? when there's Slingsby, a man I've smoked a pipe with every market evening of my life, in the workhouse? And there's hundreds of Slingsbys all ...
— The Inheritors • Joseph Conrad
... the Congress a special message on January 11, 1909, accompanying the report of Commissioners theretofore appointed to investigate the jail, workhouse, etc., in the District of Columbia, in which he directed attention to the report as setting forth vividly, "the really outrageous conditions in the ...
— State of the Union Addresses of William H. Taft • William H. Taft
... 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 ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... Auld Licht communities in Scotland nowadays—perhaps because people are now so well off, for the most devout Auld Lichts were always poor, and their last years were generally a grim struggle with the workhouse. Many a heavy-eyed, back-bent weaver has won his Waterloo in Thrums fighting on his stumps. There are a score or two of them left still, for, though there are now two factories in the town, the clatter of the hand-loom can yet be heard, and ...
— Auld Licht Idyls • J.M. Barrie
... tell him so. HAN. Nay, dear one, where true love is, there is little need of prim formality. ROSE. Hush, dear aunt, for thy words pain me sorely. Hung in a plated dish-cover to the knocker of the workhouse door, with naught that I could call mine own, save a change of baby-linen and a book of etiquette, little wonder if I have always regarded that work as a voice from a parent's tomb. This hallowed volume (producing a book of etiquette), ...
— The Complete Plays of Gilbert and Sullivan - The 14 Gilbert And Sullivan Plays • William Schwenk Gilbert and Arthur Sullivan
... appearance. 'Stuff and nonsense!' cried old Sam Rogers, grimly; 'I tell you there is no such thing as a fine old man.' In a humbler walk of life I remember to have heard a similar but more touching reply. It was upon the great centenarian question raised by Mr. Thorns. An old woman in a workhouse, said to be a hundred years of age, was sent for by the Board of Guardians, to decide the point by her personal testimony. One can imagine the half-dozen portly prosperous figures, and the contrast their ...
— Some Private Views • James Payn
... yours, Miss Wade; such a sphere of usefulness! If we can only feel we are DOING GOOD—that is the main matter. For my own part, I like to be mixed up with every good work that's going on in my neighbourhood. I'm the soup-kitchen, you know, and I'm visitor at the workhouse; and I'm the Dorcas Society, and the Mutual Improvement Class; and the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals and to Children, and I'm sure I don't know how much else; so that, what with all that, and what with dear Hugo and the darling children"—she glanced affectionately at Maisie and ...
— Hilda Wade - A Woman With Tenacity Of Purpose • Grant Allen
... normal as you or I, and his belief not only is making him poorer each day—the "spirit" firmly forbidding him either to sell or exhibit his pictures—but is gently, yet inevitably, leading him straight towards the workhouse. ...
— Over the Fireside with Silent Friends • Richard King
... the flats and fens of Cambridgeshire, driving tiny flakes of snow before it. But few people had been about all day, and those whose business compelled them to face the weather had hurried along, muffled up to the chin. It was ten at night; and the porter and his wife at the workhouse, at Ely, had just gone to bed, ...
— For Name and Fame - Or Through Afghan Passes • G. A. Henty
... disturbance of vested interests which every invention involves, and which will be found intolerable when men become millionaires and paupers alternately once a fortnight— living one week in a palace and the next in a workhouse, and having perpetually to be sold up, and then to buy a new house and refurnish, &c.—so that artificial means for stopping inventions will be adopted; and partly by the fact that though all inventions ...
— Alps and Sanctuaries of Piedmont and the Canton Ticino • Samuel Butler
... 2d. Went to see a poor woman at the Workhouse; she is full of joy in the hope of heaven, and possession of the present mind of Jesus. I said, "Many wish for it who have it not;" she said, "Perhaps they are not enough in earnest: it costs a ...
— A Brief Memoir with Portions of the Diary, Letters, and Other Remains, - of Eliza Southall, Late of Birmingham, England • Eliza Southall
... mad sometimes,' said Mrs Brindley to me. 'It lasts for a week or so, and pretty nearly lands us in the workhouse. This time it's the Hortulus Animoe. Do you know ...
— The Grim Smile of the Five Towns • Arnold Bennett
... Carlyle had passed on his countrymen. It was hardly safe for him to walk about the streets among the people who had begun to expect great things from him. It is a dreadful thing to say, but it is the simple truth, that our next move would have been to the workhouse. And just then his illness began. He was out all night and met with some accident; it was a pouring wet night, and he was brought home in the morning bruised and injured, soaking wet, and the result was a fever and cough, ...
— Fan • Henry Harford
... New York public officials are strangely skeptical of the possibilities of reform. Last year the courts of New York City sent three thousand delinquent women to the workhouse on Blackwell's Island,—a place notorious for the low state of its morale. They sent only seventeen women to Bedford Reformatory, where a healthy routine of outdoor work, and a most effective system administered by a scientific penologist does wonders with its inmates. ...
— What eight million women want • Rheta Childe Dorr
... house is haunted, if I may use that expression, not only by night, but by day; though at night the disturbances are of a more unpleasant and sometimes of a more alarming character. The poor old woman who died in it three weeks ago was a pauper whom I took out of a workhouse; for in her childhood she had been known to some of my family, and had once been in such good circumstances that she had rented that house of my uncle. She was a woman of superior education and strong mind, and was the only person I could ever induce ...
— The Lock and Key Library • Julian Hawthorne, Ed.
... answered that he can go to the workhouse, I reply that such an answer is founded on confused thinking. It is true that he is free to go to the workhouse, but only in the same sense in which he is free to go to jail, only in the same sense in which the serf under the gibbet was free ...
— Eugenics and Other Evils • G. K. Chesterton
... 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
... cried Jones, highly delighted. "You would have made an actor, and a rare one. You had the proper workhouse cough, and those weak legs of yours are worth ten pound a week. I thought I knew the glint of your eye, though. You didn't get away from us so ...
— The Sign of the Four • Arthur Conan Doyle
... he was ruined; he knew that he was a workhouse boy for evermore, and that the bright freedom of sixteen hours a day in a cellar was lost to him for evermore. He was now a prisoner, branded, hopeless. He would never be able to withstand the influences that had closed around him and upon him. He ...
— Clayhanger • Arnold Bennett
... express, and in some fright; for he was absolutely warned out of his lodging, and had only a week to provide himself. His brother John was in as bad a case, for he was quite out, and had only begged leave of his master, the biscuit-maker, to lodge in an outhouse belonging to his workhouse, where he only lay upon straw, with some biscuit-sacks, or bread-sacks, as they called them, laid upon it, and some of the same sacks to ...
— A Journal of the Plague Year • Daniel Defoe
... not the workhouse. Oh, God, not the workhouse," and she is borne out screaming and fighting and invoking Christ to her aid. The judge turns and says in explanation, "an old case, an example of what they all may ...
— The Man in Court • Frederic DeWitt Wells
... of its beauty—no serpent's trail, no touch of 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, man had not ...
— Twilight And Dawn • Caroline Pridham
... and left his whole property, amounting to about fifty thousand pounds, to neither relatives nor priests, but to works of benevolence for the relief of the poor. The trustee under the deed was proceeding to plan a workhouse or an asylum for infirm old men, when the Chapter of St Peter's claimed the money, on the ground that, as the works of benevolence were not specified in the will, the funds were the property of St ...
— Pilgrimage from the Alps to the Tiber - Or The Influence of Romanism on Trade, Justice, and Knowledge • James Aitken Wylie
... the evil quality of the immigrants. The Immigration Minister, writing to the Agent-General in June, 1874, says: "I have already called your attention to the fact that the shipment by the ... included a number of girls out of the Cork Workhouse, and I took the opportunity of remarking on the very undesirable character of such immigration. A perusal of the report of the Immigration Officer at Dunedin will, I think, convince you how very disastrous it is likely to prove to the cause of immigration ...
— Mental Defectives and Sexual Offenders • W. H. Triggs, Donald McGavin, Frederick Truby King, J. Sands Elliot, Ada G. Patterson, C.E. Matthews
... appears that in these remote islands of Scotland Christmas is not forgotten. But a writer in a well-known Scotch journal says the surest sign of the general joy is "Christmas in the Workhouse":— ...
— Christmas: Its Origin and Associations - Together with Its Historical Events and Festive Celebrations During Nineteen Centuries • William Francis Dawson
... can't say,' answered Knight carelessly; 'but it is without doubt a misfortune for a man who has a living to get, to be born of a truly noble nature. A high soul will bring a man to the workhouse; so you may be right ...
— A Pair of Blue Eyes • Thomas Hardy
... 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 ...
— Hodge and His Masters • Richard Jefferies
... such a message, declared it was just such a mean, shabby trick as might have been expected from a Scotchman—called himself a booby, a dupe, and a blockhead, for ever having trusted to the civil speeches of a Scotchman—swore that he would die in the parish workhouse before he would ever ask another favour, be it ever so small, from a Scotchman; related to his wife, for the hundredth time, the way in which he had been taken in by the Scotch peddler ten years ago, and concluded by ...
— The Parent's Assistant • Maria Edgeworth
... sense ought to be able to regulate a private establishment at least as well as a board of thick-headed guardians can regulate a workhouse." ...
— Vixen, Volume II. • M. E. Braddon
... these forlorn outcasts were bundled wholesale into the streets, and they formed up in a large body, many of them with only a shift and a petticoat on, and with a lot of drunken men and boys with a fife and fiddle they paraded the streets for several days. They marched in a body to the workhouse, but for many reasons they were refused admittance.... These women wandered about for two or three days shelterless, and it was felt that the remedy was very much worse than the disease, and the women were allowed to go back ...
— Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 6 (of 6) • Havelock Ellis
... from heaven knows what domestic debacle and horror, Miss Pinnegar saved him from the workhouse. Let us not mince matters. For a dozen years Miss Frost supported the heart-stricken, nervous invalid, Clariss Houghton: for more than twenty years she cherished, tended and protected the young Alvina, shielding the child alike from a neurotic mother and a father ...
— The Lost Girl • D. H. Lawrence
... ceiling. I have fortunately discovered one such library still in existence at Rheims. It belonged originally to the Jesuits, who had constructed it about 1678, and when the Order was expelled from France in 1764, and their House became the workhouse (hopital general) of the town, it was fortunately made use of as the lingerie, or linen-room, without any material change. Even the table has been preserved. The view here presented of the interior ...
— The Care of Books • John Willis Clark
... reading Filicaja. He found a very strong, angry, and general sentiment, not against the principle of the poor law as regards the able-bodied, but against the regulations for separating man and wife, and sending the old compulsorily to the workhouse, with others of a like nature. With the disapprobation on these heads he in great part concurred. There was to be no contest, but arrangements of this kind still leave room for some anxiety, and in Mr. Gladstone's ...
— The Life of William Ewart Gladstone, Vol. 1 (of 3) - 1809-1859 • John Morley
... told, in the beauty of the language; and also—last but not least—the burning earnestness of the author's tone as he contrasted the hopeless, heartless misery of the poor in our great cities with the ideal life of man. His pictures of London life, drawn from the street, the hospital, the workhouse, were touched in with merciless fidelity: his satire on the modern benevolence and modern civilization which allows such evils to flourish side by side with lecture-rooms, churches, intellectual culture, and refined luxury ...
— Brooke's Daughter - A Novel • Adeline Sergeant
... the face, And tell him—what he'd very much prefer— That, while he saved the Empire his employer saved his place, And his mates (that's you and me) looked out for her. He's an absent-minded beggar, and he may forget it all, But we do not want his kiddies to remind him, That we sent 'em to the workhouse while their daddy hammered Paul, So we'll help the home our ...
— Successful Recitations • Various
... buried here, and there is a monument erected to his memory by his friend and contemporary, Bartolozzi. When the Sydney Street burial-ground was opened in 1810, this was used for interment no more. Chelsea Workhouse stands just behind it, and the old women use the burial-ground for exercise. It is a quaint sight to see them through the tall iron railings wandering about dressed in their bright red-and-black check ...
— Chelsea - The Fascination of London • G. E. (Geraldine Edith) Mitton
... 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 ...
— Vanishing England • P. H. Ditchfield
... not let Mr. Boldwood do any such thing—I shall do it! Fanny was my uncle's servant, and, although I only knew her for a couple of days, she belongs to me. How very, very sad this is!—the idea of Fanny being in a workhouse." Bathsheba had begun to know what suffering was, and she spoke with real feeling.... "Send across to Mr. Boldwood's, and say that Mrs. Troy will take upon herself the duty of fetching an old servant of the family.... We ought not to put her in a ...
— Far from the Madding Crowd • Thomas Hardy
... is sufficient punishment for their own or their 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 ...
— Commentaries on the Laws of England - Book the First • William Blackstone
... 'be stripped naked from the middle upward, and shall be openly whipped until his or her body be bloody.' In fact, the whole poor-law legislation which followed this enactment, down to the act of 1834, treated the peasant in a great measure as a slave. Doubtless the workhouse-test, which requires that the able-bodied man who gets relief shall give labour for it, involves slavery within the bounds of the workhouse. But this, fortunately, now only applies to a few. The evil of the old system was, that while it was less stringent in giving relief, and afforded much ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 461 - Volume 18, New Series, October 30, 1852 • Various
... The workhouse system in Cornwall is said, by those who are well qualified to form an opinion on the subject, to be generally well administered; the Unions in the eastern part of the county being the least stringent in their regulations, and the most liberal in ...
— Rambles Beyond Railways; - or, Notes in Cornwall taken A-foot • Wilkie Collins
... I suppose this to have been the ancient building known by the name of The Royal, or The Tower Royal, used for a time as the Queen's Wardrobe. It will be seen that it was occupied in 1650 as a workhouse.] ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 219, January 7, 1854 • Various
... said Giles, bursting into tears, "my poor mother and sisters must go to the workhouse or starve if I did not stay and work for them, and I could not be happy if I lived in a fine house, and knew they were in want of a bit ...
— Young Folks Treasury, Volume 3 (of 12) - Classic Tales And Old-Fashioned Stories • Various
... and misery that if even a girl so much as touched him he must flood himself with tears; and the only way out of his misery was the rope. What a disgrace it was, that he should have earned his daily bread and yet have been kept in the workhouse, as though they did him a kindness in allowing him a hole to creep into there, when with his capacity for work he could have got on anywhere! And it became quite unendurable as he grew up and was still misused by all the ...
— Pelle the Conqueror, Complete • Martin Andersen Nexo
... 3. The workhouse, being lately enlarged, and to which belongs a corporation or a body of the inhabitants, consisting of sixty persons incorporated by Act of Parliament Anno 1698 for taking care of the poor. They are incorporated by the name ...
— Tour through the Eastern Counties of England, 1722 • Daniel Defoe
... that he should take his wife with him, to attend upon the lady passengers; so I was left at Yarmouth, and put out to nurse till they came back. But they never came back, Jack; and, as soon as I can recollect, I found myself in the workhouse, and, when old enough, was sent to sea. I had been told that my father and mother had been lost at sea, but no one could tell me how, and I thought little more about it, for I had never known them, and those we don't know we do not love or care for, be they father ...
— Poor Jack • Frederick Marryat
... interesting to know whether Jane Austen had any knowledge of the lives of the officers and women of fashion whom she introduced into her masterpieces. It is interesting to know whether Dickens had ever seen a shipwreck or been inside a workhouse. For in these authors much of the conviction is conveyed, not always by adherence to facts, but always by grasp of them. But the whole aim and purport and meaning of the work of the Brontes is that the most futile thing in the whole universe is fact. Such a story as 'Jane Eyre' is ...
— Twelve Types • G.K. Chesterton
... Mediaevalism believed in mending its broken men; and as the idea existed in the communal life for monks, it existed in the communal land for peasants. It was their great green hospital, their free and airy workhouse. A Common was not a naked and negative thing like the scrub or heath we call a Common on the edges of the suburbs. It was a reserve of wealth like a reserve of grain in a barn; it was deliberately kept back as a balance, as we talk of a balance at the bank. Now these provisions for a healthier ...
— A Short History of England • G. K. Chesterton
... law, and once when a lawyer cited him the criminal code he said, "Tut, tut, that was made a hundred years ago!" Then he fined the man five shillings, and paid the fine himself, when he should have sent him to the workhouse ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great - Volume 12 - Little Journeys to the Homes of Great Scientists • Elbert Hubbard
... responded YORICK. "'The afflicted Violinist' occupied a room at 34, Compton Street, Brunswick Square, in which he lived alone. He suffered from lumbago, as well as from a proud spirit and a broken heart. He had a dread of 'coming to the Workhouse.' Spectral fear which haunts ever the sensitive and poverty-stricken! Unreasonable? Perhaps. But not the less agonising. What comfort may Political Economy and an admirable Poor Law yield to proud-spirited victims ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 103, September 10, 1892 • Various
... von der Golt's own, and that is saying a great deal. In all the German political treatises there is an immeasurable dreariness. They lay down rules for life, and if they be asked what makes such a life worth living they are without any hint of an answer. Their world is a workhouse, tyrannically ordered, and full ...
— England and the War • Walter Raleigh
... into the Parson as he saw and remembered that which had been done to him. He called to him his servant Lissi Workhouse, and her he told to take Gwen to Deinol. The cow lowed woefully as she was driven; she was heard even in Morfa, and many hurried to the road ...
— My Neighbors - Stories of the Welsh People • Caradoc Evans
... so bold a daylight housebreaking gave her a right to be; and Caleb was for sending to the county workhouse for the bloodhounds. ...
— The Quickening • Francis Lynde
... destroy her, was evident even at the moment when she was speaking to me. I saw no more of her; but to my infinite regret, I was informed some years after that she had died, the martyr of a premature decay, brought on by the indulgence of her propensity to intoxication, in the workhouse ...
— Beaux and Belles of England • Mary Robinson
... Castle Marling now—gone to it as her home," resumed the earl; "and even you, when you return, will scarcely venture to turn her out again into the road, or to the workhouse. She will not trouble you long," carelessly continued the earl. "One so lovely as Isabel will be sure to marry early; and she appears as gentle and sweet-tempered a girl as I ever saw; so whence can arise your dislike to her, I don't pretend to guess. Many a man will be ready to forget her want of ...
— East Lynne • Mrs. Henry Wood
... alive oh!" bawled the hawker, looking across the road in the April breeze. He was the celebrated Hollins, a professional Irish drunkard, aged in iniquity, who cheerfully saluted magistrates in the street, and referred to the workhouse, which he ...
— The Old Wives' Tale • Arnold Bennett
... obtain from his workmen the customary amount of labor, but that customary labor may be of any degree of inefficiency. Even the laborer who loses his employment by idleness or negligence has nothing worse to suffer, in the most unfavorable case, than the discipline of a workhouse, and if the desire to avoid this be a sufficient motive in the one system, it would be sufficient in the other. I am not undervaluing the strength of the incitement given to labor when the whole or a large share of the ...
— The Communistic Societies of the United States • Charles Nordhoff
... on the estate that he visited, were ending their lives among all the comforts of home, with kindred and friends around them, in a condition which he contrasts, at least by implication, very favourably with the workhouse, the last refuge provided by the social humanity of England—for the pauper labourer when he has reached that term when 'unregarded age is in corners thrown.' On the plantation where I lived the infirmary was a large ...
— Journal of a Residence on a Georgian Plantation - 1838-1839 • Frances Anne Kemble
... 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 ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 158, June 2, 1920 • Various
... the Religious Houses were destroyed in England the State had to do their work. You could not simply flog beggars out of existence, as Elizabeth tried to do. Then the inevitable happened, and it began to be a mark of disgrace to be helped by the State in a workhouse: people often preferred to starve. Then at the beginning of the twentieth century a well-meant attempt was made, in the Old-Age Pensions and George's State Insurance Act, to remedy this and to help the poor in a manner ...
— Dawn of All • Robert Hugh Benson
... But, Andy, it makes me blaze house-high to see the way he hands the law out to 'em. They can cut and fight as long as it is in a whisky dive and no indictment returned; but let one of 'em sidestep an inch in any other ignorant pitiful way and it's the workhouse and the county ...
— Andrew the Glad • Maria Thompson Daviess
... great deal of talk about the new Mr. Temple Barholm and what might be expected of him. When a gentleman was not a gentleman,—this was the form of expression in "the hall,"—the Lord only knew what would happen. And this one, who had, for all one knew, been born in a workhouse, and had been a boot-black kicked about in American streets,—they did not know Tembarom,—and nearly starved to death, and found at last in a low lodging-house, what could he know about decent living? ...
— T. Tembarom • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... spoke again. We lived in Dorsetshire, not far from the town of Poole. Father was a day labourer; he had never saved a sixpence. His club buried him, and we were left to live as we could, or to go to the workhouse. Mother said that she would never do that, and with God's help she'd try to feed and clothe us. She found it ...
— Taking Tales - Instructive and Entertaining Reading • W.H.G. Kingston
... be so prosy, Agatha!' Clare returned impatiently. 'If you were dropped into a workhouse ward, you would look round and remark how comfortable you were, and how at last you had ...
— The Carved Cupboard • Amy Le Feuvre
... the dark workhouse gate Is besieged by a famishing crowd, Forge, hammer, and mine, with their mission divine, Lie dumb, like a corpse in a shroud. And Plenty, with beckon and smile, Points up at the golden rain That is ready ...
— The Death of Saul and other Eisteddfod Prize Poems and Miscellaneous Verses • J. C. Manning
... Company, is in liquidation because, though there is really the gold there, it costs too much to get it. I have no relatives anywhere to help me. Unless I can get assistance my children and I must go at once—tomorrow—into the workhouse. Yes, we are paupers. I am ruined by the cruel lies of that prospectus, and the wickedness which deluded me, and I know not how many others, out of my money. I have been foolish, and am punished; but those people, who will punish them? ...
— Victorian Short Stories, - Stories Of Successful Marriages • Elizabeth Gaskell, et al.
... old usurer so much, as to wring a feeble groan or two from his breast, and cause him to declare, with uplifted hands, that he would die in a workhouse. Remembering on further cogitation, however, that under any circumstances he must have paid, or handsomely compounded for, Ralph's debt, and being by no means confident that he would have succeeded had he undertaken his enterprise alone, he regained his equanimity, and ...
— The Life And Adventures Of Nicholas Nickleby • Charles Dickens
... pride is the real evil of poverty—of gentlefolks' poverty. I could not promise for my own part, to cast pride behind me: but then, you know, it has pleased God to give me something to be proud of, far different from rank and money. I could go to jail or the workhouse with my husband without a blush. The agony of it would not ...
— Deerbrook • Harriet Martineau
... proposed to constitute a third kingdom—the Regnum Protisticum—between the animal and the plant worlds, for the reception of the host of doubtful organisms. This third kingdom would resemble the casual ward of a workhouse, in that it would receive the waifs and strays of life which could not ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 787, January 31, 1891 • Various
... family on the point of starvation just because he has lost his work? All his life long he has before his mind the fear of want—not only of straitened means, mind you, but of destitution and the workhouse. How can such a man put aside his common cares? Religion is a luxury; the working man has no luxuries. Now, you speak of the free evenings; people always do, when they're asking why the working classes don't educate themselves. Do you understand ...
— Demos • George Gissing
... They raised him upon his feet to assist him to the watch-house; he walked a few yards, and from weakness fell upon his knees. They got him upon their shoulders to carry him to the watch-house, but before they arrived with him he appeared to be dead. The watchman took him to the workhouse, and called up the house surgeon, who examined the body, and said it was useless to bleed him, or use any method to restore him, as he was quite dead. The deceased is apparently about fifty years of age, the most complete picture ...
— Memoirs of Henry Hunt, Esq. Volume 3 • Henry Hunt
... importance to the beadle, are the master of the workhouse and the parish schoolmaster. The vestry-clerk, as everybody knows, is a short, pudgy little man, in black, with a thick gold watch-chain of considerable length, terminating in two large seals and a key. He is an attorney, and generally in a bustle; at no time more so, ...
— Sketches by Boz - illustrative of everyday life and every-day people • Charles Dickens
... as the reserve employer—maintain a minimum wage which will cover the cost of a decent life. The State will stand at the back of the economic struggle as the reserve employer of labour. This most excellent idea does, as a matter of fact, underlie the British institution of the workhouse, but it is jumbled up with the relief of old age and infirmity, it is administered parochially and on the supposition that all population is static and localised whereas every year it becomes more migratory; it is administered ...
— A Modern Utopia • H. G. Wells
... buried in a shell in the burial-place of Shoe-Lane Workhouse. He was aged seventeen years nine months and ...
— Specimens with Memoirs of the Less-known British Poets, Complete • George Gilfillan
... in a fisherman's cottage, reared in a workhouse, employed in a brothel, won at cards by a royal duke, mistress of that duke, married to a baron, received at Court by three kings (though not much in the way of kings), accused of cozenage and tacitly of murder, died ...
— She Stands Accused • Victor MacClure
... 'For any practical purpose, it is what the people think so[529].'—'I will let the King of France govern me on those conditions, (said he,) for it is to be governed just as I please.' And when Dr. Taylor talked of a girl being sent to a parish workhouse, and asked how much she could be obliged to work, 'Why, (said Johnson,) as much as is reasonable: and what is that? as much as she ...
— Life Of Johnson, Vol. 3 • Boswell, Edited by Birkbeck Hill
... tomorrow it would reach that point again. Speaking of the charity of Quakers, it may not be amiss to state that they keep all their own poor—do not allow any one belonging their society ever to solicit aid from the parish, or migrate in the dark hour of poverty to the workhouse. Reverting to the meeting-house, we may observe that just within its front door particular provision has been made for umbrellas. There is a long, low stand, with a channel below it, and this will afford ...
— Our Churches and Chapels • Atticus
... well, then sold the little vessel and commenced business ashore. I had not heard of or seen him for many years, when one afternoon a friend of mine called at my office and intimated that my old friend was in the workhouse, and had desired him to call and inform me of it, feeling sure that I would not allow him to remain there. I asked my friend to have him taken out and put into respectable lodgings until I could get him some relief from a philanthropic institution, and the odd easy jobs I saw put in his ...
— The Shellback's Progress - In the Nineteenth Century • Walter Runciman
... protgs are left to their new patron. Here they are taught household and farm work, fruit and flower culture, the business of the dairy, carpentering, and other trades; being afterwards placed out. I question whether an English Board of Guardians would so readily hand over seventeen workhouse lads to a foreigner, but it is to be hoped that the Niois authorities will have no reason to regret their confidence. The boys do no work on Sundays, and once a year have a ten days' tramp in the country; ...
— In the Heart of the Vosges - And Other Sketches by a "Devious Traveller" • Matilda Betham-Edwards
... capable of doing penance in Uttoxeter market years after their father's death for a long-passed act of disobedience? Most of us, again, would have a temporary emotion of pity for an outcast lying helplessly in the street. We should call the police, or send her in a cab to the workhouse, or, at least, write to the Times to denounce the defective arrangements of public charity. But it is perhaps better not to ask how many good Samaritans would take her on their shoulders to their own homes, care for her wants, and put her into a ...
— Hours in a Library - New Edition, with Additions. Vol. II (of 3) • Leslie Stephen
... 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 ...
— David • Charles Kingsley
... was going to tell you. A little after you were born in your English workhouse, your kind, honourable, brave country, England, sent an English gentleman, who could not tell a lie, to say that so long as the sun rose and the rivers ran in their courses the Transvaal would belong to England. Did ...
— Traffics and Discoveries • Rudyard Kipling
... looked up to in a cathedral town? The same reason. Where would we be now if we'd minded the clergyman's foolishness? Scrubbing floors for one and sixpence a day and nothing to look forward to but the workhouse infirmary. Don't you be led astray by people who don't know the world, my girl. The only way for a woman to provide for herself decently is for her to be good to some man that can afford to be good to her. If she's in his own station of life, let her make him marry her; but if she's ...
— Mrs. Warren's Profession • George Bernard Shaw
... his case. She was a tower of strength to most of the charitable institutions in the city, a terror to the professional pauper, but a real friend to the deserving. Her time was much occupied with committees, secretarial duties, district visiting, workhouse inspection and other public interests. She was apt indeed to have more than her share of civic business; her reputation for absolute reliability caused people to get into the habit of saying "Oh, go to Miss Beach!" on every occasion, and as she invariably proved the willing horse, she justified ...
— The Luckiest Girl in the School • Angela Brazil
... either parent. Where paternity is established the father is liable for support (or alimony). In Scotland the marriage of the mother with the father legitimizes the child. In Ireland the mother is not allowed to claim alimony herself—she must go into the workhouse and the ...
— Women's Wild Oats - Essays on the Re-fixing of Moral Standards • C. Gasquoine Hartley
... outside the door. The boys won't go to college; but seeing they will have to earn their own living, that, perhaps, is just as well. It is mother, poor dear, that worries so." She laughed again. "Her favourite walk is to the workhouse. She came back quite excited the other day because she had heard the Guardians intend to try the experiment of building separate houses for old married couples. She is convinced she and father are going to end ...
— They and I • Jerome K. Jerome
... 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
... or garotter, or, indeed, a common thief Is very glad to batten on potatoes and on beef, Or anything, in short, that prison kitchens can afford,— A cut above the diet in a common workhouse ward. ...
— More Bab Ballads • W. S. Gilbert
... under this rough exterior he had the voice and address of a cultivated gentleman, though he was so broken down by want and long suffering and exposure and illness that he looked like a beggar just let loose from the workhouse. ...
— Recalled to Life • Grant Allen |
