"Canvasser" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... down-hearted! you are too—too gentlemanly, De Stancy, in this matter—you are too soon put off—you should have a touch of the canvasser about you in approaching her; and not stick at things. You have my hearty invitation to travel with us all the way till we cross to England, and there will be heaps of opportunities as we wander on. I'll keep a slow pace ...
— A Laodicean • Thomas Hardy
... scale of all human employments is the art of canvassing for a sewing machine company. I did it for two weeks. My teacher taught me how to canvass a tenement. The janitor is the traditional arch enemy of the canvasser. My teaching consisted largely in how to avoid him, circumvent him, or exploit him. A Mrs. Smith—a mythical Mrs. Smith—always lived on the top floor. I was taught to interview her first; then I ...
— From the Bottom Up - The Life Story of Alexander Irvine • Alexander Irvine
... nor the last time that he acted in this capacity. The place had become his by a sort of prescription. His persuasive and convincing oratory was thought so useful to his party that every four years he was sent, in the character of electoral canvasser, to the remotest regions of the State to talk to the people in their own dialect, with their own habits of thought and feeling, in favor of the Whig candidate. The office had its especial charm for ...
— Abraham Lincoln: A History V1 • John G. Nicolay and John Hay
... the part of host to these rural folks!" said George, with a secret envy. "Do observe how quietly he puts that shy young farmer at his ease, and now how kindly he deposits that lame old lady on the bench, and places the stool under her feet. What a canvasser he would be! and how young he still looks, and ...
— Kenelm Chillingly, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... his clock back thirteen minutes. Keeping his eye, while in the shop, on the clock, every now and then—although, as he admitted afterwards, it seemed a long quarter of an hour—he still kept off his persecutors. When the hand approached the quarter on the false-telling dial, one canvasser, bolder than the rest, laid 35 pounds on a box of cigars, as the bid for it. But Master Pipes only was sold, for just as he was about to take up the tissue paper bearing the magic name of Henry Hase, St. George's ...
— Recollections of Old Liverpool • A Nonagenarian
... book canvasser should come to your door and offer you two volumes as large as Webster's Unabridged Dictionary, containing nearly a thousand pages in each volume, and illustrated with ten thousand pictures that interested you; and suppose that within the limits of ...
— Wholesale Price List of Newspapers and Periodicals • D. D. Cottrell's Subscription Agency
... have given to his masters of the street railway, and be the next morning three miles nearer his work, if he spent the night in the polling-cabin. He looked around for a minute or two, and found some large rolls of street posters, which had been left there by some disappointed canvasser the year before, and which had accompanied one cell of the cabin in its travels. Dane is a prompt man, and, in a minute more, he had locked the door behind him, had struck a wax taper which he had in his cigar-box, had rolled the paper roll out ...
— The Brick Moon, et. al. • Edward Everett Hale
... huge bunches of fragrant violets, tied with a bow the exact shade of the flower, or a dull shade of purple, a sort of Lenten lugubriousness particularly becoming to blonde penitents. The ladies are indefatigable in their efforts against Home Rule, and one distinguished canvasser for signatures to the Roman Catholic petition has been warned by the police, as she values her life, to leave Dublin for a time. The ruffian class, needless to say, has undergone no change, but still demands ...
— Ireland as It Is - And as It Would be Under Home Rule • Robert John Buckley (AKA R.J.B.)
... think so,' replied the young gentleman, folding up the proof and putting it in his inside pocket. 'Now, as I said before, although I am not the advertising canvasser of the Financial Field, I thought I would see you with reference to an advertisement for ...
— A Woman Intervenes • Robert Barr
... country. 5. That the unions are popular with the paupers, and the like. 3rd. He that is DOMESTICALLY humbugged, as 1. He who voteth because the candidate's ribbons suit his wife's complexion. 2. Because his wife was addressed as his daughter by the canvasser. 3. Because his wife had the candidate's carriage to make calls in, and the like. 4. Because his daughter was presented with a set of the Prince Albert Quadrilles. 5. Because the candidate promised to stand ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 1, July 17, 1841 • Various
... fashions, a book of Stories and Pastimes for Children, a book of Cookery and Kitchen Information, a book on House-building and House-furnishing; and then suppose that, in addition to all this, the book canvasser should point out that in his two large volumes there were over six hundred pages of stories, poems and literary articles, the latest advice regarding Club Women and Club Life, and, above all, three ...
— Wholesale Price List of Newspapers and Periodicals • D. D. Cottrell's Subscription Agency
... declaration" of the State canvassers, cannot be shown to be false, though it may have been obtained by force or fraud. This doctrine admits that the truth of the Governor's certificate can be inquired into, else why the qualification that it must be "on and according to" the canvasser's certificate. It is said to be good only when in such accord; therefore, when not in accord, it is good for nothing. We may, then, dismiss the Governor's certificate as of no account, and to be left therefore out of further discussion. The substance of the doctrine is, ...
— The Vote That Made the President • David Dudley Field
... is she who suggests Saint-Simonianism (as a resource, not as a creed), and actually herself becomes a priestess of the first class—till the funds give out. She, being an untiring and unabashed canvasser, gets Jerome his various places; she reconciles his nightcap-making uncle to him; she, when the pair go to the Palace and he is basely occupied with supper, carries him off in dudgeon because none of the princes (and in fact nobody at all) has asked her to dance. ...
— A History of the French Novel, Vol. 2 - To the Close of the 19th Century • George Saintsbury
... Thames from its Source to the Sea, The Queens of England are among the commonest on the boards of the books I allude to. The presence of these editions indicates that the possessor at a certain period of his life was shy and could not say no to that limb of the Evil One—the book-canvasser. The latter individual is the forerunner of the colporteur, who will bring you, if you wish poetry, an edition of the works of Shakespeare which is peculiarly ill-adapted for holding in the hand and reading. The print ...
— Literary Tours in The Highlands and Islands of Scotland • Daniel Turner Holmes
... her, and she put them all down again, and went out into the kitchen for a little comfort from Allida. But Allida had gone out, too; so she came back to the sitting-room, and longed for the stir and bustle and frequent faces of the tavern, and welcomed a book-canvasser presently as if she ...
— The Wit and Humor of America, Volume IX (of X) • Various
... morning and who saw both Mr. and Mrs. Collins in the house. There is the employe of the lighting company who came to read the electric meter, two employes of a vacuum cleaning company whose names you may have, and the canvasser for a magazine who came to solicit a subscription. I have no hesitancy in giving you their names, so ...
— The Substitute Prisoner • Max Marcin
... canvasser, substitute, deputy, factor, procurator, syndic, go-between, commissioner, proctor, emissary, envoy, solicitor, negotiator. ...
— Putnam's Word Book • Louis A. Flemming
... to know this part of the country well," she said. I think she was considering me as a possible canvasser—an infinitesimal thing, but of a kind possibly worth remembrance ...
— The Inheritors • Joseph Conrad
... thoughts indeed seemed to dwell on no other subject, and who expressed herself with a warmth which betrayed her secret feelings. Had the place only been in Yorkshire, she was sure he must have succeeded. She was the best canvasser in the world, and everybody agreed that Harry Grey-stoke owed his election merely to her insinuating tongue and unrivalled powers of scampering, by which she had completely baffled the tactics of ...
— The Young Duke • Benjamin Disraeli
... told of the job she had as a canvasser and her feeling that the detective work was going to take all her time. "I thought I'd find out things as a canvasser and never dreamed of how easy it was to get boarders to talking and find out that way. Now I hear ...
— Mary Louise and Josie O'Gorman • Emma Speed Sampson
... him to learn and issued orders to find employment of some remunerative kind. Accordingly during the next two years Francis served indifferently for brief periods as a clerk in the shop of a maker of surgical instruments and as a canvasser of an encyclopedia. Both experiments in the art of making a living were failures, increasing paternal dissatisfaction. The desperate young man then enlisted in the army, and after a few weeks' of drilling was rejected on the score ...
— The Hound of Heaven • Francis Thompson
... his own especial province; and there he ruled without a rival. But he extended his care over the Whig interest in Yorkshire, Cumberland, Westmoreland, Wiltshire. Sometimes twenty, sometimes thirty, members of Parliament were named by him. As a canvasser he was irresistible. He never forgot a face that he had once seen. Nay, in the towns in which he wished to establish an interest, he remembered, not only the voters, but their families. His opponents were confounded by the strength of his memory and the affability ...
— The History of England from the Accession of James II. - Volume 4 (of 5) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... relieved the walls. A large, beautifully bound Bible lay on the table, and beside it a photograph album, which had been subscribed for a few days previous by the persistent, efforts of an indefatigable canvasser. A white tidy covered the back of the rocking-chair, and another the back of the lounge. An old-fashioned pitcher filled with sweet-brier and some of the old-time flowers, such as bachelors' buttons, London pride, blue ...
— Marguerite Verne • Agatha Armour
... useful or necessary, and Jim and I drifted apart. He had always kept up a voluminous correspondence with that class of advertisers whose black-letter "Agents Wanted" is so attractive to the farmer-boy; and he was usually agent for some of their wares. Finally, I heard of him as a canvasser for a book sold by subscription,—a "Veterinarians' Guide," I believe it was,—and report said that he was "making money." Again I learned that he had established a publishing business of some kind; and, later, that reverses had forced him to discontinue it,—the old farmer who told me ...
— Aladdin & Co. - A Romance of Yankee Magic • Herbert Quick
... her mind, at sight of the books, that he was a canvasser for some subscription book, such as used to come in her father's time, but when she opened to him he took off his hat with a great deal of manner, and said "Miss Kilburn?" with so much insinuation of gentle ...
— Annie Kilburn - A Novel • W. D. Howells |
