"Charwoman" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... disregard a customer's poverty. He had thought the thing out, faced all its most sordid aspects. Yes, he was fighting with these people for daily bread; he and his could live only if his three farthings of profit were plucked out of that toil worn hand of charwoman or sempstress. Accept the necessity, and think no more of it. He was a man behind the counter; he saw face to face the people who supported him. With this exception had not things been just the same when he sat in the counting-house ...
— Will Warburton • George Gissing
... at the time of the murder; she was evidently an accomplice of the murderer. My cook had left on the same day, having conceived a not unnatural horror of the house. Since then I had made shift with a charwoman. But I should want a housemaid and a cook, and if I acted judiciously in the matter of references, I might get the sort of persons who would help my plans. For there are female rats as ...
— The Uttermost Farthing - A Savant's Vendetta • R. Austin Freeman
... what's best for us all," as an old charwoman said to me, years ago, when she was remarking on how I had grown. I never saw the application of the remark, and do not think I ever shall. Whether my growth was a subject to deplore, and she tried to comfort me, or not, I cannot say; but she was evidently proud of the remark, for she ...
— Lazy Thoughts of a Lazy Girl - Sister of that "Idle Fellow." • Jenny Wren
... Knopf, he said, was a diamond merchant, and a bachelor. He himself had been in Mr. Knopf's employ over fifteen years, and was his only indoor servant. A charwoman came every day to ...
— The Old Man in the Corner • Baroness Orczy
... establishment were irregular and fragmentary. They depended chiefly on tea, pickles, and biscuit, as he had suspected from the beginning. The girls were supposed to market week and week about, but they lived, with the help of a charwoman, as casually as the young ravens. Maisie spent most of her income on models, and the other girl revelled in apparatus as refined as her work was rough. Armed with knowledge, dear-bought from the Docks, Dick warned Maisie that the end of semi-starvation meant the crippling of power ...
— The Light That Failed • Rudyard Kipling
... delightful qualification of being able to travel on any road, no matter how rough, without breaking down or turning over; in fact, when travelling by road in Africa, it facilitates matters as much as the employment of a charwoman oils the wheels in an English household, and it is therefore as much to ...
— South African Memories - Social, Warlike & Sporting From Diaries Written At The Time • Lady Sarah Wilson
... that summer I found that a maid was one of the things I could do without, making the discovery in an interregnum not of my original choosing. A charwoman came in for the heavier work, and I took over the cooking. Almost immediately, in spite of my inexperience, the bills dropped. I could not cook rich pastries and fancy desserts, and fell back on simple salads and fruit instead. I dipped into the household magazines, followed on into technical ...
— How To Write Special Feature Articles • Willard Grosvenor Bleyer
... and rented lands which were worked by the peasants, in payment of debts which they could never shake off. He was a widower, with four grown-up daughters. One of them was already a widow and lived in the inn with her two children, his grandchildren, and worked for him like a charwoman. Another of his daughters was married to a petty official, and in one of the rooms of the inn, on the wall could be seen, among the family photographs, a miniature photograph of this official in uniform and official epaulettes. The two younger daughters used to wear fashionable blue or green ...
— The Brothers Karamazov • Fyodor Dostoyevsky
... continued by every Indian mail after his receipt of her guarded refusal; he Quixotic, devoted, no matter how she had changed. He loved the mere scent of her letter paper. Was she only a governess? Had she been a charwoman, he would have kissed her cheeks white. The boyish extravagance of his passion worked upon her, troubling her to her sincerest core. She would hide nothing from him. She wrote a full account of her stage career, morbidly exaggerating the vulgarity of ...
— The Grey Wig: Stories and Novelettes • Israel Zangwill
... and the way in which it was kept was the more meritorious inasmuch as Anna, even now, when she had become an old woman, would have nothing of what is in England called "help." She had no wish to see a charwoman in her kitchen. Fortunately for her, there lay, just off and behind the kitchen, a roomy scullery, where most of the dirty, and what may be called the smelly, work connected with ...
— Good Old Anna • Marie Belloc Lowndes
... of him. The third showed him the "shadows of the things that have not happened, but will happen in the time before us." He saw himself dead, uncared for, unwept, unwatched, his effects plundered by the charwoman, laundress, and undertaker's man and realized the end to which he must come unless he led an altered life. Holding up his hands he prayed to have his fate reversed and saw the Ghost shrink and dwindle ...
— The Ontario Readers: Fourth Book • Various
... up Mrs. Barry's spine. That settled it. This exquisite creature must not stay where that charwoman could speak of her ...
— In Apple-Blossom Time - A Fairy-Tale to Date • Clara Louise Burnham
... wives and children. I told them the story of my jail sentence—while I swore vengeance on Henry LaSalle. I told them that he had had me arrested for something I never stole while I was working for him as a charwoman, and that he had had me railroaded to jail. There wasn't one but gave me credit for the theft, perhaps; but equally, there wasn't one but understood, and my eccentricity helped this out, my wanting to 'get' Henry LaSalle. Well—do you see now, Jimmie? I had money, ...
— The Adventures of Jimmie Dale • Frank L. Packard
... mansions in the neighbourhood, for luring maids from the smaller homes. Of course Mrs. Airedale and Mrs. Collie could afford to pay any wages at all. So now the best he could do was to have Mrs. Spaniel, the charwoman, come up from the village to do the washing and ironing, two days a week. The rest of the work he undertook himself. On a clear afternoon, when the neighbours were not looking, he would take his own ...
— Where the Blue Begins • Christopher Morley
... Fancy being later in the day than she had promised, the charwoman had given up expecting her; whereupon Dick could do no less than stay and see her comfortably tided over the disagreeable time of entering and establishing herself in an empty house after an absence of a ...
— Under the Greenwood Tree • Thomas Hardy
... for the last six weeks. Not a confidence man; not a coiner; not a note expert. And they had the opportunity of their lives with the JOHN BRADBURY notes! We shall have to shut up our office, and then what's to become of our clerk? What's to become of our charwoman? I ask you, what's to become of our charwoman's poor old husband dependent on her? No, let's have patriotism in ...
— Punch or the London Charivari, Vol. 147, October 21, 1914 • Various
... were black as the inside of a tomb. Once he stumbled over the body of a charwoman ...
— The End of Time • Wallace West
... said Captain Sellers, shaking his head. "I never lost a glue-pot before in my life—never. Do you know anything about that charwoman ...
— Salthaven • W. W. Jacobs
... terrible. Take for instance to-day! I spent this morning at Rzhnov's lodging-house, among the outcasts there; and I saw an infant literally die of hunger; a boy suffering from alcoholism; and a consumptive charwoman rinsing clothes outside in the cold. Then I returned home, and a footman with a white tie opens the door for me. I see my son—a mere lad—ordering that footman to fetch him some water; and I see the army of servants who ...
— The Light Shines in Darkness • Leo Tolstoy
... itself in the drawing-room, that Miss Filkin had only just finished making the claret cup, or that Dora had been cutting sandwiches till the last minute, or that Mrs Milburn had been obliged to have a distinct understanding with the maid—Mrs Milburn's servants were all "maids," even the charwoman, who had buried three husbands—on the subject of wearing a cap when she answered the door. Mrs Milburn sat on a chair she had worked herself, occupied with something in the new stitch; Dora performed lightly at ...
— The Imperialist • (a.k.a. Mrs. Everard Cotes) Sara Jeannette Duncan
... brows slightly arched; (No mortal wight had ere that night Seen him with shirt unstarched;) And Bob, the shockhaired knifeboy, Wielding two Sheffield blades, And James Plush of the sinewy legs, The love of lady's maids: And charwoman and chaplain Stood mingled in a mass, And "Things," thought he of Houndsditch, "Is ...
— Verses and Translations • C. S. C.
... appearance of figures is recorded in twenty-four of these stories, whilst four record noises only. Ten years later the Proceedings take up the subject again, and give us at some length an elaborate story on the evidence of two or three ladies, two servants, a charwoman, and a little boy. ['Records of a Haunted House.'] No proper journal was kept, and the Society for Psychical Research came upon the scene ...
— The Alleged Haunting of B—— House • Various
... to do with poor people. Mrs. Symons had helped the charwoman, and the gardener, and the driver from the livery-stables, when they were in special difficulties, and Henrietta had continued to do so, and had had her hour at the hospital. That was all. There were the servants, of ...
— The Third Miss Symons • Flora Macdonald Mayor
... the young man with his hat on one side who chaffs the young ladies behind the bar, the gin-drinking female by his side, the gin-loving cripple, the small boy who brings the family bottle to be filled with gin, whose head barely reaches the counter, the gin-drinking charwoman to the left, and the quarrelsome gin-drinking Irish customers at the back. Everything in this picture reeks of gin; the only persons not imbibing it are the proprietor and his dowdy barmaids, whom I have no manner of doubt the ...
— English Caricaturists and Graphic Humourists of the Nineteenth Century. - How they Illustrated and Interpreted their Times. • Graham Everitt
... this vestige of hope, Florence mounted an omnibus, and presently found herself at South Kensington. She found the right street, and stopped before a door of somewhat humble dimensions. She rang the bell. A charwoman opened the door after some delay, told her that Mrs. Fleming was within, and asked her what her ...
— The Time of Roses • L. T. Meade
... you missed the inspired charwoman. It's rather upsetting to think—do you suppose ...
— The Convert • Elizabeth Robins
... Eliza thought we should do more wisely to spread the money over making ourselves more comfortable generally. When she came to go into it in detail, I found that on the whole hers was the preferable course. New curtains for the drawing-room are to be put in hand at once. The charwoman is to come regularly once a week. We raised the girl's wages a pound, and she went into hysterics. Eliza has insisted that I am to have a first-class season-ticket in future. There is much can ...
— Eliza • Barry Pain
... answer: "Even so. But how can Mother know, Who meditates upon the price of bacon? On 'liberties' the charwoman has taken, And on the laundry's last atrocities? She knows her cookery book, And how a joint of English meat should look. But all such things as these Make up her life. She dwells in tents, but I In a vast temple open ...
— The Verse-Book Of A Homely Woman • Elizabeth Rebecca Ward, AKA Fay Inchfawn
... apron, and handkerchief; when I watched her glide along the gallery, her quiet tread muffled in a list slipper; when I saw her look into the bustling, topsy-turvy bedrooms,—just say a word, perhaps, to the charwoman about the proper way to polish a grate, or clean a marble mantelpiece, or take stains from papered walls, and then pass on. She would thus descend to the kitchen once a day, eat her dinner, smoke a moderate pipe on the hearth, and go back, carrying her pot of porter ...
— Jane Eyre - an Autobiography • Charlotte Bronte
... on Wednesday evening, Letty with her, and in a telescope basket her costume—a simple affair. A plaid shawl borrowed from the washerwoman, a ragged scrubbing skirt borrowed from the charwoman, and a gray wig rented from a costumer for twenty-five cents a night, completed the outfit; for Edna had elected to be an old Irishwoman singing broken-heartedly after her ...
— Moon-Face and Other Stories • Jack London
... of Paddy Green, personally attended to the laundry; a fortnight's wash took place, when Mrs. Briggs, the charwoman, was in waiting. Mrs. P. Green, with her accustomed liberality, sent out for a quartern of gin and a quarter of an ounce of ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 1, December 11, 1841 • Various
... revolution, now long overdue in these islands, or would he sing the Marsellaise of womanhood, emerging in hordes from their underground kitchens to make a still greater revolution? He did neither. He forgot all about the storm of things, and delighted us with his story of Mary, the charwoman's daughter, a tale of Dublin life, so, kindly, so humane, so vivid, so wise, so witty, and so true, that it would not be exaggerating to say that natural humanity in Ireland found its first worthy chronicler ...
— Imaginations and Reveries • (A.E.) George William Russell
... clearing away when there came a knock at the door. His charwoman, whose duty it was to clean his brushes every week, came in with ...
— Happy Days • Alan Alexander Milne
... had always a particular weakness for everything "grand;" and so grand a turn-out as this one was rare in their neighborhood. She paused and stared hard at it. "Whose is it, Mrs. Biggs?" she asked awe-struck of the friendly charwoman, who happened to pass at the moment,—the charwoman who frequently came in to do a day's cleaning at her mother's lodging-house. Mrs. Biggs knew it well; "It's Sir Anthony Merrick's," she answered in that peculiarly ...
— The Woman Who Did • Grant Allen
... charwoman, "who has done this. It was a wicked thing to do. Oh, sir, they have broken this beautiful statue that you had in the Exhibition last year," and she picked up the broken fragments ...
— The Untilled Field • George Moore
... and exceeding well-to-do people keep servants, others content themselves with a charwoman who comes in for two hours a day, and is paid ten or twelve francs a month, many ladies, by birth and education, living on small means, doing all the lighter household work, marketing, &c., themselves, whilst the small shopkeeping class, who with us must ...
— Holidays in Eastern France • Matilda Betham-Edwards
... Superman for eons, if not for ever. Not only should every person be nourished and trained as a possible parent, but there should be no possibility of such an obstacle to natural selection as the objection of a countess to a navvy or of a duke to a charwoman. Equality is essential to good breeding; and equality, as all economists know, is incompatible ...
— Revolutionist's Handbook and Pocket Companion • George Bernard Shaw
... a farmer's wife residing in the neighbourhood of Arundel. It appears that she was in the habit of making a large quantity of blackberry jam, and finding that less fruit had been brought to her than she required, she said to the charwoman, "I wish you would send some of your children to gather me three or four pints more." "Ma'am," exclaimed the woman in astonishment, "don't you know this is the 11th October?" "Yes," she replied. "Bless ...
— The Folk-lore of Plants • T. F. Thiselton-Dyer
... the dessert. What fun there was about it all! The cleaning of the doorstep by night, when from the ill-lit street a gentleman with a piece of sacking round his legs might very well pass for a somewhat tall charwoman. I would keep watch at the gate to give warning should any one looking like a possible late caller turn the corner of the street, coming back now and then in answer to a low whistle to help my father grope about in the dark for the hearthstone; ...
— Paul Kelver • Jerome Klapka, AKA Jerome K. Jerome
... consisting of a bedroom and a sitting room for study and entertaining. "Scouts" are a kind of servant attached to one student or a small number of students. They run errands, bring meals from the kitchen, and take care of clothing. A bootblack called the "boots" takes care of footwear. A charwoman called the "char" ...
— Tom Brown at Oxford • Thomas Hughes
... He also took a five-pound note and placed it where he knew he could lay his hands upon it easily. Then he sprang round with a flush upon his cheeks, for one of the side-doors had been flung open with a great bustle and clanging. A stout charwoman entered with a tin pail ...
— A Duet • A. Conan Doyle
... small tiresomenesses of that kind. It was made of some glistening black material, and at its center there bloomed a fearful red cabbage rose, a rose all vulgarity, ostentation and importance. This monstrosity had been given to Rosamund as a thank-offering by a poor charwoman to whom she had been kind. It had been in constant use now for over three years. The charwoman knew this ...
— In the Wilderness • Robert Hichens
... toes, half by their filmy purple wings, their delicate bodies swaying in time, that they could be anything but fairies. It seemed absurd to imagine that they were Johnny Mullens, the washerwoman's son, and Polly Flinders, the charwoman's little girl, and ...
— The Children's Book of Christmas Stories • Various
... Murray cites the instance of a woman of thirty-eight, well developed, healthy, and the mother of normal children, who had a double hand. The left arm was abnormal, the flexion of the elbow imperfect, and the forearm terminated in a double hand with only rudimentary thumbs. In working as a charwoman she leaned on the back of the flexed carpus. The double hand could grasp firmly, though the maximum power was not so great as that of the right hand. Sensation was equally acute in all three of the hands. The middle ...
— Anomalies and Curiosities of Medicine • George M. Gould
... and redolent of the wit and humour of a century ago. He should have lived with Gay and his set. The Chessiad is so clever that I relish'd it in spite of my total ignorance of the game. I have it not before me, but I remember a capital simile of the Charwoman letting in her Watchman husband, which is better than Butler's Lobster turned to Red. Hazard is a grand Character, Jove in his Chair. When you are disposed to leave your one room for my six, Colebrooke ...
— The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb (Vol. 6) - Letters 1821-1842 • Charles and Mary Lamb
... all three sides and not colliding. Well, this sort of cantrip was 'common form,' as we say at the Bar, in Hollond's Space, and he was very curious about the why and wherefore of Sleep. He began to haunt psychological laboratories, where they experiment with the charwoman and the odd man, and he used to go up to Cambridge for seances. It was a foreign atmosphere to him, and I don't think he was very happy in it. He found so many charlatans that he used to get angry, and declare he would be better employed ...
— The Moon Endureth—Tales and Fancies • John Buchan
... that no one could hold him personally to blame. His plays had always exhibited domestic servants in a most favourable light. Not only was a butler the hero of The Admirable Crichton, a maidservant the heroine of A Kiss for Cinderella and a charwoman the heroine of The Old Lady Shows Her Medals, but the actual authorship of Peter Pan was given to the smallest nursemaid ...
— Punch, Volume 156, 26 March 1919 • Various
... our ancestors live in us. Well, I can't bother. If Maurice were a crossing-sweeper, and his grandmother had been an evilly disposed charwoman, who could never get any one to trust her to char, I'd marry him to-morrow ...
— The Call of the Blood • Robert Smythe Hichens
... a hus-bondi, or house-inhabitor, though probably he had more to do with agriculture than the farmer who ousted him. The 'fermor' farmed or rented certain land from his overlord, making what he could out of the tenants on it. And in time even the word 'farmer' will pass out of use. Just as the charwoman to-day insists upon a fictitious gentility, so in years to come the farmer will denote himself an agriculturist, possibly with the epithet 'scientific.' We no longer talk of villeins and carles; both have become sadly ...
— The Book-Hunter at Home • P. B. M. Allan
... when she had lived in the dreadful fear that she and the Lump might be driven by necessity into the workhouse, she had gone shabby herself. She knew that Millicent's mother, who had once been a dancer, was now a charwoman, often out of work, and in feeble health. It was Millicent's perpetual complaint that she herself was so slow growing up to the age at which she would be earning money and supporting her ailing mother. Down the vista of the ...
— Happy Pollyooly - The Rich Little Poor Girl • Edgar Jepson
... keep five maids indoors, and a charwoman three times a week, two men and a boy in the garden, and two men in the stables," glibly enumerated Miss Jane. "All that is not done on small means, and I happen to know that Mr. Shafto himself paid everything monthly—which is more than we ...
— The Road to Mandalay - A Tale of Burma • B. M. Croker
... of vases you chose," continued the veracious Mr. Hurst. "She says they are in bad taste, but she can give them to the charwoman." ...
— Deep Waters, The Entire Collection • W.W. Jacobs
... o'clock, with the aid of the charwoman, she laid him out; then she went round the dreary London village to the ...
— Sons and Lovers • David Herbert Lawrence
... embarking upon other novel schemes when there was a ring at the bell, and the charwoman, who passed with him for servant, ushered in his private secretary, Mr. Minks. Quickly readjusting the machinery of his mind, Rogers ...
— A Prisoner in Fairyland • Algernon Blackwood
... expected, nor, indeed, did Mrs. Bolton expect, that, arrived in the royal property, and strongly illuminated by the flare of the twenty thousand additional lamps, the captain would relax from his dignity, and give an arm to a lady who was, in fact, little better than a housekeeper or charwoman. ...
— The History of Pendennis, Vol. 2 - His Fortunes and Misfortunes, His Friends and His Greatest Enemy • William Makepeace Thackeray
... Sheila found her voice and sang at her work. She gave herself an overwhelming task of cleaning and scrubbing. She was on her knees like a charwoman, sniffing the strong reek of suds, when there came a knocking at her door. She leapt up with pounding heart. But the knocking was more like a scraping and it was followed by a low whine. For a second Sheila's head filled with a fog of terror and then came a homely little begging ...
— Hidden Creek • Katharine Newlin Burt
... off to stare at "Tenby"—"Tenby" with the local charwoman already there, throwing up the windows and sweeping away the dust ...
— In the Mist of the Mountains • Ethel Turner
... fallen from their pristine polish. The geraniums and fuchsias with which she had filled the window all the summer before had died into dry blackened stalks; and the dust lay heavy on the room, in spite of the well-meant but wholly ineffective efforts of the charwoman next door. The two old men had avoided the place for months past by common consent, and the door into it ...
— Robert Elsmere • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... keep no work, and at last came to scrub out the shop and rooms for Virginie. She came on Saturday morning with a pail and a scrubbing brush, without appearing to suffer in the least at having to perform a dirty, humble duty, a charwoman's work, in the home where she had reigned as the beautiful, fair-haired mistress—for thirty sous. It was a last humiliation, the end of her pride. Virginie must have enjoyed herself, for a yellowish flame darted from her cat's eyes. ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol VIII • Arthur Mee and J.A. Hammerton, Eds.
... lady, though she was but a charwoman depending for professional engagements rather on the goodwill—for auld lang syne—of one or two families in Chiswick, of prodigious opulence in her eyes, yet was regarded by Sapps Court, when she visited her niece, Mrs. Rackstraw, or Ragstroar, ...
— When Ghost Meets Ghost • William Frend De Morgan
... the justness of his remarks acceptable. After the revolution of July, Fougeres sent about ten pictures a year to the Salon, of which the jury admitted four or five. He lived with the most rigid economy, his household being managed solely by an old charwoman. For all amusement he visited his friends, he went to see works of art, he allowed himself a few little trips about France, and he planned to go to Switzerland in search of inspiration. This detestable artist was an excellent citizen; he mounted guard duly, went to reviews, and paid his ...
— Pierre Grassou • Honore de Balzac
... take care of a child who is sick. You see I am mistress of all trades—nurse, waitress, charwoman, ...
— The Gay Cockade • Temple Bailey
... heartily congratulate Mr. Jerome Longmore, the well-known bookman and literary curio-collector, on his latest stroke of good luck. It appears that in a recent pilgrimage to Selborne he met the only surviving great-granddaughter of Sarah Timmins (charwoman at Chawton in the years 1810 to 1815), and purchased from her a pair of bedroom slippers, a pink flannel dressing-gown and a boa which had belonged to the great novelist. A full description of these priceless relics will shortly appear in The Penman, together ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 153, July 25, 1917 • Various
... Knag took up the kitchen candles from the counter, and preceded the ladies with mournful steps to a back-parlour, where a charwoman, employed in the absence of the sick servant, and remunerated with certain eighteenpences to be deducted from her wages due, was putting the ...
— The Life And Adventures Of Nicholas Nickleby • Charles Dickens
... contained a fireplace and a long dormer window—three square casements in a row, of which the outer pair opened like doors—facing the morning sun and a country landscape. The previous tenants had used it for a box and lumber room, and left it cobwebbed, filthy and asphyxiating. Deb ordered a charwoman to clean it, and a man to distemper the grubby plaster and stain the floor, and then laid down rugs, and assembled tables and books, and basket-chairs, and girls' odds and ends; whereby it was transformed into a cosy boudoir and their favourite room. Hither came Mary ...
— Sisters • Ada Cambridge
... charwoman in one of the houses on Faithful's beat, and sometimes you can hear her trying to char him, and then lots of things come out through the front door, with Faithful in the middle of them. Sometimes you don't know which is Faithful and which is a scrubbing-brush, ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 150, March 1, 1916 • Various
... lock one of the doors of the green room, but while I was given brandy, and congratulated by my chairman and his family, a very old charwoman peeped in at another ...
— My Impresssions of America • Margot Asquith |
