"Slum" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... Chesilstowe cottage already," he said, "when that happened. It was last December. I had taken a room in London, a large unfurnished room in a big ill-managed lodging-house in a slum near Great Portland Street. The room was soon full of the appliances I had bought with his money; the work was going on steadily, successfully, drawing near an end. I was like a man emerging from a thicket, and suddenly coming on some unmeaning tragedy. I went to bury him. My mind ...
— The Invisible Man • H. G. Wells
... in the shop and slum Blazing a path for health and hope to come; And men and women of large soul and mind Absorbed in toil ...
— Poems of Optimism • Ella Wheeler Wilcox
... 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 from a disabling blow on the back of the neck. Also, he was not ...
— None Other Gods • Robert Hugh Benson
... existence in it was picturesque, varied, exciting, full of accidents, as existence is apt to be in residences that cost their occupiers an average of three shillings a week. Some persons referred to the quarter as a slum, and ironically insisted on its adjacency to the Wesleyan chapel, as though that was the Wesleyan chapel's fault. Such people did not understand ...
— The Card, A Story Of Adventure In The Five Towns • Arnold Bennett
... implicated was institutional, not personal. Their punishment was rank injustice; inexpedient, moreover, as provocative of further crime, instead of a means of repression. On the other hand, when it appears that the congestion of the slum produces vice and disease, we are not urged by the spokesmen of this ethical creed, to blame the chain of institutional causes typified by scarcity of land, high prices of building materials, the incapacity ...
— The Unpopular Review, Volume II Number 3 • Various
... of the majority of people is greatly to be deplored, as nature is ever offering them on their retina, even in the meanest slum, a music of colour and form that is a constant source of pleasure to those who can see it. But so many are content to use this wonderful faculty of vision for utilitarian purposes only. It is the privilege of the artist to show ...
— The Practice and Science Of Drawing • Harold Speed
... She'll have his money also some day—but Lord, how he does hold on to it meantime! It's quite tragic, if you come to know him—he's frightened at his own shadow. He goes in for slum tenements, and I guess he evicts more people in a month than you could crowd into ...
— The Metropolis • Upton Sinclair
... the little lamp of the first experiment grew, and grew into gorgeous centers of sun-like radiance, shining everywhere, illuminating hitherto darkened, impenetrable places, carrying the torch of civilization round the entire world. Alike in slum and palace, in homes of poverty, and set to shine in the gilded resorts of the noble and wealthy; blessing the student, and the vast army of enforced workers; lighting the paths of men, and the ways of the multitude; making vice ...
— Insights and Heresies Pertaining to the Evolution of the Soul • Anna Bishop Scofield
... internal comment. His mind seemed to 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
... port Made famine's sport; The empty wave Made reeling dreadnought's grave; Cathedral, castle, gallery, smoking fell 'Neath bomb and shell; In deathlike trance Lay industry, finance; Two thousand years' Bequest, achievement, saving, disappears In blood and tears, In widowed woe That slum and palace equal know, In civilization's suicide,— What served thereby, what satisfied? For justice, freedom, right, what ...
— The Audacious War • Clarence W. Barron
... very different pattern. Thoreau did a vast amount of good by showing 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 ...
— The Quest of the Simple Life • William J. Dawson
... case of Semper Idem aroused a vast deal of unseemly yet highly natural curiosity. He had been found in a slum lodging, with throat cut as aforementioned, and blood dripping down upon the inmates of the room below and disturbing their festivities. He had evidently done the deed standing, with head bowed forward that he might gaze his last upon a photograph ...
— When God Laughs and Other Stories • Jack London
... 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 ...
— Never-Fail Blake • Arthur Stringer
... sure 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
... cliff grit slip grin frog grip slat trot trill stiff slop spot blot prig sled still sniff drip slap slab scan scud twit step spin brag span crab stag glen drag slum stab crag trim skill skim slim glad crop drop snuff skin skip scab snob skull snip bled stun twin dress grab drill skiff from swell drug twig grim snap scum bran stub snag stem plum sped spill prop slam drum gruff snug tress snub smell ...
— The Beacon Second Reader • James H. Fassett
... life, and she told about hers—a pitiful and moving story. She had been brought to America as an infant; her father had been killed in an accident, and her mother had supported several children by scrub-work. Lizzie had grown up in a slum on the far east side of New York, and she could not remember a time when she had not been sexually preyed upon; lewd little boys had taught her tricks, and men would buy her with candy or food. And yet there had been something in her struggling for decency; of her own volition she had tried ...
— Jimmie Higgins • Upton Sinclair
... are 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. Was it the ironic fate of power to be always ...
— Young Lives • Richard Le Gallienne
... wild and dismal mountain region, in which these fierce tribesmen dwell, are the temple and village of Jarobi: the one a consecrated hovel, the other a fortified slum. This obscure and undisturbed retreat was the residence of a priest of great age and of peculiar holiness, known to fame as the Hadda Mullah. His name is Najb-ud-din, but as respect has prevented it being mentioned by the tribesmen ...
— The Story of the Malakand Field Force • Sir Winston S. Churchill
... our agriculture, our army has become composed of starving slum dwellers who, according to the German notion are better at shouting than at fighting. German generals have pointed out that in the South African war our regular and auxiliary troops often raised the white flag and surrendered, without necessity, sometimes to a few ...
— The Crime Against Europe - A Possible Outcome of the War of 1914 • Roger Casement
... sourly. "He says it's no use to clean up the slums unless you raise wages—and that then the slum people'd clean themselves up. The idea of giving those worthless trash more money to spend for beer and whisky and finery for their fool daughters. Why, they don't earn what we ...
— The Conflict • David Graham Phillips
... 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 is a ...
— Sisters • Ada Cambridge
... working class joined the bread-lines. As a result, the provisions General Folsom had taken possession of diminished with perilous rapidity. How were the soldiers to distinguish between a shabby middle-class man, a member of the I.L.W., or a slum dweller? The first and the last had to be fed, but the soldiers did not know all the I.L.W. men in the city, much less the wives and sons and daughters of the I.L.W. men. The employers helping, a few of the known union men were ...
— The Strength of the Strong • Jack London
... he 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 ...
— A Tall Ship - On Other Naval Occasions • Sir Lewis Anselm da Costa Ritchie
... 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 ...
— The Loom of Youth • Alec Waugh
... amusements, German opera and Italian 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, ...
— In the High Valley - Being the fifth and last volume of the Katy Did series • Susan Coolidge
... dangerous, and I hope she is well instructed." "How?" I asked. "Oh," Mrs. Besant replied, "it is all right if she knows what she is about, but it is just as dangerous to go waltzing about on the astral plane as it is for a girl to go skylarking down a dark slum when roughs are about. Elementals, with the desire to live, greedily appropriating the vitality and the passions of men, are not the pleasantest companions. Nor can other astrals of the dead, who have met with sudden or violent ends, ...
— Real Ghost Stories • William T. Stead
... she would have had to know how that life began in a city slum. She would have had to see the career of the sneak thief which culminated in the episode of the lumber camp eight years before. She would have had to understand how the lesson from the hand of big Sinclair had begun the change which transformed the sneak into the dangerous man ...
— The Rangeland Avenger • Max Brand
... 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 ...
— Clayhanger • Arnold Bennett
... not to rush through the slums, and then preach a sensational sermon about bad places in the slums, of which most people never knew before! To reform is to know something of the conditions which produce the slums—it is not to scatter the slum-people broadcast elsewhere in the town; it is not alone to give them baths, playgrounds, circulating libraries of books and pictures, dancing-parties, and social clubs. To reform the slums is to set up a new ideal of God, and of righteous conduct in the ...
— The Warriors • Lindsay, Anna Robertson Brown
... 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 Dreamer - A Romantic Rendering of the Life-Story of Edgar Allan Poe • Mary Newton Stanard
... 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 in the ...
— Annie Besant - An Autobiography • Annie Besant
... including The Army. She began to wonder if after all they were not right, and whether or not the Holy Spirit was amongst us. Her heart was full of distress, and she cried to God. And then the vision of our Slum Officers rose before her eyes. She saw their devotion, their sacrifice, their lowly, hidden service, year after year, among the poor and ignorant and vicious, and she said to herself, "Is not this the Spirit of Jesus? ...
— When the Holy Ghost is Come • Col. S. L. Brengle
... know what my notion of Heaven is? It would be to go off alone, with one suit of clothes in a handbag, oh, and fifty or a hundred dollars in my pocket—I wouldn't mind that; I don't want to be a tramp—to some mining town, or mill town, or slum, where I could start a general practise; where the things I'd get would be accident cases, confinement cases; real things, urgent things, that night and day are all alike to. I'd like to start again and be poor; get this stink of easy money out of my nostrils. I'd like to see ...
— The Real Adventure • Henry Kitchell Webster
... have had just a good hospital. Almost a village was pulled down to make room for it, on a site that would suit the medical needs of the University. It needed a strong will to put it there, against the opinions of other people; a great hospital on the end of a slum! The same will put the great "Methodist Book Room" where it is—against the wish ...
— The Masques of Ottawa • Domino
... 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
... taken in and presented. She looked stupefied. Certainly the Americans were a marvelous people—to have taken into their house and their hearts this strange child—if he were strange. Marie's suspicious little slum mind ...
— The Street of Seven Stars • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... are elementary schools, for example, in which the children, being allowed by enterprising teachers to walk in new paths without leading strings, have become unexpectedly active and versatile. And there are others—mostly in the slum regions of great towns—in which the devotion, the sympathetic kindness, and the gracious bearing of the teachers have won from the children the response of unselfish affection, attractive manners, and happy faces.[20] Yet even in these exceptional cases ...
— What Is and What Might Be - A Study of Education in General and Elementary Education in Particular • Edmond Holmes
... go 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 itself in ...
— Hawthorne and His Circle • Julian Hawthorne
... deal 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
... found it out," returned Clytie, making a sudden veer. "Is he suffering for lack of fresh air and pure water? And does he have to pay an extra price for sunlight? And must he herd in a filthy slum full of awful plumbing and crowded by more awful neighbours? Does he have to put up with municipal neglect and corruption, and worry along on make-believe milk and doctored bread and adulterated medicines, and endure long hours in unsanitary places under ...
— Under the Skylights • Henry Blake Fuller
... 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
... whereas in 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 ...
— Woman Suffrage By Federal Constitutional Amendment • Various
... taking my hat I followed him to 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
... an ill-chosen neighborhood: one of those crowded slum quarters, swarming with Mexicans and Italians and other foreigners. Of course, that was the only neighborhood in which it could have happened, because it is only there that children run wild in the streets at night. There was one child under the front wheels, crushed almost in half, so ...
— They Call Me Carpenter • Upton Sinclair
... behavior results from the rather simple, arithmetical combination of the inherited nature of man and the environment in which his maturing years are passed! Man will behave according to the hints for conduct which the accidents of his life have stamped into his memory mechanism. A slum produces a mind which has only slum incidents with which to work, and a spoiled and protected child seldom rises to aggressive competitive behavior, simply because its past life has stored up no memory imprints from which a predisposition ...
— An American Idyll - The Life of Carleton H. Parker • Cornelia Stratton Parker
... 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 quarter. ...
— Richard Wagner - Composer of Operas • John F. Runciman
... every pocket save her own. She had neither kith nor kin, nor friends, nor even acquaintances; but, being something of a miser, scraped and screwed to amass money she had no need for, and dwelt in a wretched little apartment in a back slum, whence she daily issued to ...
— The Silent House • Fergus Hume
... the legless man went about the business of begging among the business men of the city, since from the congested slum into which he disappeared at night it was no great feat for a man of his power to reach the more northern streets of that circle in whose midst the finances of the nation by turns simmer, boil, and boil over. It was not unusual, during the noon-time rush of self-centred ...
— The Penalty • Gouverneur Morris
... idea for which Man will die will be a Catholic idea. When the Spaniard learns at last that he is no better than the Saracen, and his prophet no better than Mahomet, he will arise, more Catholic than ever, and die on a barricade across the filthy slum he starves in, for universal liberty ...
— Man And Superman • George Bernard Shaw
... has come from the gloom of the slum Is charmed by the magic of dazzle and hum; He feasts his big eyes on the cakes and the pies, And they seem to grow green and protrude with surprise At the goodies they vend and the toys without end— And it's oh! if he had but a ...
— Songs and Other Verse • Eugene Field
... In the "Sacred Circle of the Great Grandmotherhood," I never heard the slightest reference to income. Not that the Whigs despised money. They were at least as fond of it as other people, and, even when it took the shape of slum-rents, its odour was not displeasing; but it was not a subject for conversation. People did not chatter about their neighbours' incomes; and, if they made their own money in trades or professions, they did not regale us with statistics ...
— Fifteen Chapters of Autobiography • George William Erskine Russell
... Lonely Ranch. No one, finding themselves suddenly dropped into the midst of those wood-covered crags and clean-cut ravines, the boulder-strewn, grassless land, would have dreamed that they were within half-a-dozen miles of the fertile prairie-lands of Canada. It was like a slum hidden away in the heart of a fashionable city. The country round the mysterious Lake of the Woods is something utterly apart from the rest of the Canadian world, and partakes much of the nature of the Badlands of Dakota. It ...
— The Hound From The North • Ridgwell Cullum
... 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 ...
— The Master Mummer • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... with flexile face, With bagman smartness and batrachian grace. Is he not sweet and winning? Mime of the gutter, mimic of the slum, Muse of the haunts unspeakable, else dumb, A satyr ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 98, March 1, 1890 • Various
... 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 of me in being ...
— The Reminiscences Of Sir Henry Hawkins (Baron Brampton) • Henry Hawkins Brampton
... their Tom Hood 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 ...
— Bernard Shaw's Preface to Major Barbara • George Bernard Shaw
... had a letter from my brother Joe the other day, and he says Tom has altogether gone to the bad. He met him drunk coming out of some slum in Holborn, and followed him for a long time in hopes of being able to speak to him, but the fellow couldn't, or wouldn't recognise him, and only swore. He is living at some ...
— The Adventures of a Three-Guinea Watch • Talbot Baines Reed
... Piazza 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 shop streets, ...
— The Spirit of Rome • Vernon Lee
... politician's job so profitable in our large cities, and that of the patriot and the housekeeper so wearisome. We all know the process. The immigrant has no patent on it. It afflicts the native, too, when he goes to a town where he is not known. In the slum it reaches its climax in the second generation, and makes of the Irishman's and the Italian's boys the "toughs" who fight the battles of Hell's Kitchen and Frog Hollow. It simply means that we are creatures of environment, that ...
— The Making of an American • Jacob A. Riis
... 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 ...
— Merton of the Movies • Harry Leon Wilson
... the corner," said Cranley to the four or five men who accompanied him. "The Cockpit, where I am taking you, is in a fashionable slum off St. ...
— The Mark Of Cain • Andrew Lang
... 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 ...
— Fifteen Years With The Outcast • Mrs. Florence (Mother) Roberts
... In Germany we have concentration of power, a benevolent paternalism that knows the needs of the people and supplies them whether the people wish it or not. For example, in Germany we have to a great extent abolished poverty and such degrading slum conditions as prevail in English and American cities. We know that slums lead to drink, vice and physical unfitness. We know that we must kill the slums or see the slums kill efficiency ...
— The Conquest of America - A Romance of Disaster and Victory • Cleveland Moffett
... 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 little Tapsters and their like run about, playing their innocent games. Some ...
— McClure's Magazine, Vol 31, No 2, June 1908 • Various
... 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 ...
— The San Francisco Calamity • Various
... weakness of the "swells"? But cease to move so near the clouds, and cease To sit a votary of the "Great Pooh-Pooh"; And come, for Labour's in the valley, come, For Toil dwells in the valley, come thou down And watch him; by the dim slum threshold, he, Or hand in hand with poverty in the docks, Or black with stithy-swartness by the forge, Or troll-like in the mine; nor cares to walk With Wealth and Fashion in the parks and squares; But follow! Come thou down, and let the ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 104, January 7, 1893 • Various
... the daily manufacture of a newspaper. A newspaper office seems to 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; ...
— The Man Who Would Be King • Rudyard Kipling
... young LAMBTON, or young MORE, He to the fight advances. Yet looks to that Slum Dragon o'er, With caution in his glances. If he make shift that sword to lift, And smite that Dragon dead, No hero young song yet hath sung A fouler pest ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 99, November 15, 1890 • Various
... and circumstances become. Therefore, as a man is, so is his environment. This may sound rather metaphysical, but it is really quite simple, and proof meets us at every turn. Take a man from slumdom and put him in nice surroundings, and note what happens. Very soon he either drifts back to a slum or turns his new house into a slum dwelling. Take a man of a higher type, and put him in a slum, and soon he will either leave the slum or change his slum dwelling into a more decent habitation. Put a slut in a mansion, and she will turn ...
— Within You is the Power • Henry Thomas Hamblin
... purely "working" classes also. Their centres of occupation will be distributed, and their freedom to live at some little distance from their work will be increased. Whether this will mean dotting the country with dull, ugly little streets, slum villages like Buckfastleigh in Devon, for example, or whether it may result in entirely different and novel aspects, is a point for which at present we are not ready. But it bears upon the question ...
— Anticipations - Of the Reaction of Mechanical and Scientific Progress upon - Human life and Thought • Herbert George Wells
... F.O. WARD, visited him, and, to amuse him, related some of his adventures in the low parts of the metropolis in his capacity as a sanitary commissioner. "Pray desist," said Hood; "your anecdote gives me the back-slum-bago." The proximity of death could no more deprive poor Artemus of his power to jest than it could Thomas Hood. When nothing else was left him to joke upon, when he could no longer seek fun in the city streets, or visit the Tower ...
— The Complete Works of Artemus Ward, Part 7 • Charles Farrar Browne
... Warren's profession on Mrs Warren herself. Now the whole aim of my play is to 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 ...
— Mrs. Warren's Profession • George Bernard Shaw
... had vomited their population into the Lane. Fat girls clad in shawls sat around the slum opening nursing their babies. Old women crouched in decrepit doorways, fumbling their aprons; skipping ropes whirled in the roadway. A little higher up a vendor of cheap ices had set up his store and was rapidly absorbing ...
— Esther Waters • George Moore
... 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 ...
— Hilda - A Story of Calcutta • Sara Jeannette Duncan
... from her hospital roof, while all around her the slum children, on other roofs, fought for the very breath of life, others who knew and loved her watched the stars, too. K. was having his own troubles in those days. Late at night, when Anna and Harriet ...
— K • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... Roy backed him up. "It won't happen so much among our boys. The slum districts will get most of it. Some of those suckers would do almost anything to get out ...
— The Outdoor Girls in Army Service - Doing Their Bit for the Soldier Boys • Laura Lee Hope
... Family.—As we have already seen, the development of modern industry is one of the chief causes of the decay of modern family life. Certain aspects of our industrialism, such as the labor of women and children in factories, the growth of cities, and the loss of the home through the slum and the tenement, the higher standards of living and comfort, and the resulting higher age of marriage,—all of these have had, to a certain extent at least, a disastrous effect upon the family. Some of these things, like the growth of cities, seem inseparable from modern industrial ...
— Sociology and Modern Social Problems • Charles A. Ellwood
... their 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 ...
— The Life and Letters of Walter H. Page, Volume I • Burton J. Hendrick
... portions of the 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 ...
— Civics and Health • William H. Allen
... vivid, impersonal descriptions of the conduct of the derelicts—illuminated by the heroic deed of Kuvalda, as by an unquenchable star. Kuvalda loses his mainstay when his comrade, the schoolmaster, dies. He is enraged at the brutal treatment meted out to him and to the other inhabitants of the slum by the Officials of the City and the Government. He embroils himself with ill-concealed purpose with his deadly enemy the merchant Petunikov and insults the police. His object is gained. He is beaten, and led away ...
— Maxim Gorki • Hans Ostwald
... said Mr Slum, 'that's a good remark. 'Pon my soul and honour that's a wise remark. Who would have thought it! George, my faithful ...
— The Old Curiosity Shop • Charles Dickens
... Victoria, with Whippup and his powdered head on the box. I don't mind that young chauffeur with one leg lost in the war, but I don't like that wicked-looking red vermilion motor-car of her grace's, though the slum-folks do, and you should hear them cheer, Miss Jill, when it goes ...
— The Hawk of Egypt • Joan Conquest
... fellows, fellowship to the point of radically affecting our lives. Sympathy will go deeper than a sense of pity for those less fortunate, and a giving to them a warm hand and a good lift up. The poor woman, living in a slum district, being visited by a mission visitor, spoke for the universal human heart when she said earnestly, "We don't want things; we want love." As we get up close to our Lord Jesus there will ...
— Quiet Talks on Following the Christ • S. D. Gordon
... villagers for many miles around. Nothing can be imagined more painful than the appearance of these precincts. The graves are, for the most part, shallow, and closely huddled together. The cemetery, in truth, is a ghastly slum, a "tenement-house" of the dead. The dead of to-day literally elbow the dead of yesterday out of their resting-places, to be in their turn displaced by the dead of to-morrow. Instead of the crosses and the fresh garlands, and the inscriptions full of loving thoughtfulness, which ...
— Ireland Under Coercion (2nd ed.) (1 of 2) (1888) • William Henry Hurlbert
... 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 command sit down and sketch the outline of a series of ten, twelve, or twenty- four leading articles on Seniority versus Selection; missionaries ...
— The Works of Rudyard Kipling One Volume Edition • Rudyard Kipling
... have intimated, in spite of the Honourable George's affiliations with the slum-characters of what I may call Red Gap's East End, he had not yet publicly identified himself with the Klondike woman and her Bohemian set, in consequence of which—let him dine and wine a Spilmer as he would—there was yet hope ...
— Ruggles of Red Gap • Harry Leon Wilson
... first venture was "Maggie: A Girl of the Streets." It was, I believe, the first hint of naturalism in American letters. It was not a best-seller; it offers no solution of life; it is an episodic bit of slum fiction, ending with the tragic finality of a Greek drama. It is a skeleton of a novel rather than a novel, but it is a powerful outline, written about a life Crane had learned to know as a newspaper reporter in New York. It is a singularly fine piece ...
— Men, Women, and Boats • Stephen Crane
... not usually come from the slums. His place of birth is ordinarily a bit above, and sometimes a very great bit above. A confessed failure, he yet refuses to accept the punishment, and swerves aside from the slum to vagabondage. The average beast in the social pit is either too much of a beast, or too much of a slave to the bourgeois ethics and ideals of his masters, to manifest this flicker of rebellion. But the social pit, out of its discouragement and ...
— War of the Classes • Jack London
... of laughter. Myra was shocked. A slum girl to speak like this of Vassar students? She noticed then, with a queer pang, that Sally made for the window group, who at once made a place for her. Sally ...
— The Nine-Tenths • James Oppenheim
... 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 ...
— The Trimmed Lamp • O. Henry
... 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 of the forge, sees ...
— Grain and Chaff from an English Manor • Arthur H. Savory
... both 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 we believe in it enough: for faith can move even that mountainous ...
— The Life of the Spirit and the Life of To-day • Evelyn Underhill
... 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, ...
— A Soldier of the Legion • C. N. Williamson
... to "42" 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 ...
— Story of Chester Lawrence • Nephi Anderson
... at noon when slum was served. Night mess in England invariably was cheese and tea and jam, which was always good as far as it went. The entire 311th regiment was served from one kitchen. It was good fortune that the Americans had individual mess kits with them and that there occurred no sanitary inspections ...
— The Delta of the Triple Elevens - The History of Battery D, 311th Field Artillery US Army, - American Expeditionary Forces • William Elmer Bachman
... there and she would scarcely notice the 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 of ...
— Mary, Mary • James Stephens
... the truth, Cloudy, I never saw but one that didn't have shifty eyes. He was a little missionary chap that worked in a slum settlement and would have taken his eye-teeth out for anybody. Oh, I don't mean that old guy to-day looked shifty. I should say he was just dull and uninteresting. He may have thought he had a call long ago, but he's been asleep ...
— Cloudy Jewel • Grace Livingston Hill
... for those poor kids, sent suddenly back to their slum homes after being here for weeks," said ...
— The Luckiest Girl in the School • Angela Brazil
... a slum," he grumbled. "And nothing but dagoes in it. What a place!—and what scum!" he commented frankly upon his wife's birthplace. "Was it like this when you lived here?" he ...
— Clark's Field • Robert Herrick
... Wilberforce has made so famous 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 escaped his ...
— Birds in Town and Village • W. H. Hudson
... Theatre Francais is only one of many thousands of men and women who have sloughed off their native dialects and acquired a new tongue. But the thing has to be done scientifically, or the last state of the aspirant may be worse than the first. An honest and natural slum dialect is more tolerable than the attempt of a phonetically untaught person to imitate the vulgar dialect of the golf club; and I am sorry to say that in spite of the efforts of our Academy of Dramatic Art, there is still too much sham golfing English on our stage, and ...
— Pygmalion • George Bernard Shaw
... at reveille, He puts his elbow on his knee; His head upon his hand; And tho' he's slept ten hours or more, His back is weak, his feet are sore, And he can hardly stand. And, as he goes to get his chow, He says, "By Gosh!—I don't see how A soldier lives so long. The spuds is rotten and the slum Is always worse than on the bum. The coffee is too strong. That cow was killed ten years before They organized this bloomin' war; These flapjacks taste like wood." And so he growls through all the day, And fills his comrades with dismay; They'd kill him if they could. When ...
— Rhymes of the Rookies • W. E. Christian
... wage must choose a tuberculosis incubator for a home. Ireland is a one-room-home country. In the great "rural slum" districts, the one-room cabin prevails. Country slums exist where homes cannot be supported by the land they are built on—they occur, for instance, in the rocky fields of Galway and Donegal and in the stripped bog lands of Sligo. Galway and Donegal cabins are made of stones ...
— What's the Matter with Ireland? • Ruth Russell
... within the rubric of the tears drawn by mere contemplation of visual beauty. The Morris, as I saw it, was curious, antique, racy, what you will: not beautiful. Nor was there any obvious pathos in it. Often, in London, passing through some slum where a tune was being ground from an organ, I have paused to watch the little girls dancing. In the swaying dances of these wan, dishevelled, dim little girls I have discerned authentic beauty, and have wondered where they had learned the grace of their movements, and where the certainty with which ...
— Yet Again • Max Beerbohm
... 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 have ...
— The Conquest of Bread • Peter Kropotkin
... 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 ...
— Voice Production in Singing and Speaking - Based on Scientific Principles (Fourth Edition, Revised and Enlarged) • Wesley Mills
... art. Again the setting is Wild West, on the Mexican border, the theme of the 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 ...
— Punch, Volume 156, January 22, 1919. • Various
... work of the 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, particularly the women. ...
— Painted Windows - Studies in Religious Personality • Harold Begbie
... 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 ever after all plingers in the land would give this unsafe "dump," as tramps call this class ...
— The Trail of the Tramp • A-No. 1 (AKA Leon Ray Livingston)
... room, where three gentlemen stood, backed by book cases, conversing in blue vapours of tobacco. They were indistinct; she could see that one of them was of good stature. One she knew; he was the master of the house, mildly Jewish. The third was distressingly branded with the slum and gutter signs of the Ahasuerus race. Three hats on his head could not have done it more effectively. The vindictive caricatures of the God Pan, executed by priests of the later religion burning to hunt him ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... effusively praised. There is nothing in those Commandments to restrain the sweater, the rack-renter, the jerry-builder, the slum landlord, the usurer, the liar, the libertine, the gambler, the drunkard, the wife-beater, the slave-owner, the religious persecutor, the maker of wheat and cotton rings, the fox-hunter, the bird-slayer, the ill-user of horses and dogs and cattle. There is nothing ...
— God and my Neighbour • Robert Blatchford
... was probably in a slum, certainly in a mean street—one stepped direct from the pavement into a small kitchen, where an elderly man sat smoking a long clay pipe. A covered stairway rose mysteriously from one side of this apartment into the two bedrooms above. A door beside the stairway ...
— The Record of Nicholas Freydon - An Autobiography • A. J. (Alec John) Dawson
... a class (I take the town-bred, slum-bred majority, mind) are men who have discarded the civil standard of morality altogether. They simply ignore it. This, no doubt, is why civilians fight shy of them. In the game of life they don't play ...
— With Rimington • L. March Phillipps
... Mr. Dinwiddie, veiling his hope that it was not. But the assent was general. They were all as excited over the prospect of a picnic as if they were slum children about to enjoy their first charitable outing, and it was settled that they were to start at ten o'clock. Mrs. Minor and Miss Gold went into the kitchen to help Mrs. Larsing make sandwiches and salads, and the others ran ...
— Black Oxen • Gertrude Franklin Horn Atherton
... the cooking. He loved to cook. Each day he jumbled all the mixable portions of the food together, and, in a big tin wash-boiler which he had rescued from "the dump" outside of town, he stewed up quite a palatable mess which we called "slum" or "slumgullion," or, ...
— Tramping on Life - An Autobiographical Narrative • Harry Kemp
... 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 ...
— The Glory of the Trenches • Coningsby Dawson
... some evening and go down to Red Gap's Latin Quarter; it might be amusing. Cora Wales glistened at this. She said she guessed people could now see how such goings-on were regarded by society in the true sense of the word. And it did give the girls a chill, calling the Bigler home a slum. But I still didn't see any stuff ...
— Ma Pettengill • Harry Leon Wilson
... never more serious in my life, father," replied his son. "But in order to arrest your attention I have to be theatrical. Now if you will really believe what I am going to say I will drop play-acting. I have, as I tell you, been down into our slum districts, I have been among the slum workers, means have been offered me for studying these problems at first hand, and I am prepared,—from this week on when Parliament rises, and the metropolis empties itself of pleasure, ...
— King John of Jingalo - The Story of a Monarch in Difficulties • Laurence Housman
... would make friends with some of the villagers and arrange to turn over their rations so that they would be cooked by the housewife and eaten with the luxurious accompaniment of chair and table. The diplomat would invite a few friends to enjoy with him the welcome change from the "slum" ladled out of the caldrons of the battery rolling kitchen. I had always supposed that I had in my battery a large number of men who could speak German—a glance over the pay-roll would certainly leave that impression—but when I came to test it out, I found that I had but four men ...
— War in the Garden of Eden • Kermit Roosevelt
... and who lived there; also of an Abandoned Youth, who lived somewhere else, Far Away; how a Slum Doctor dressed for a Function, such as involved Studs; and how Kern Garland wishted she was a Lady . . . . . . . . . . . . ...
— V. V.'s Eyes • Henry Sydnor Harrison
... that the supercharger on his airsuit filtered out some of the smell which the thin air carried. He'd thought he was familiar with human misery from his own Earth slum background. But there was no attempt to disguise ...
— Police Your Planet • Lester del Rey
... endurance and of combat. I had a goal before me, and not the goal of the average man. Even when pinched with hunger, I did not abandon my purposes, which were of the mind. But contrast that starved lad in his slum lodging with any fair conception of intelligent and zealous youth, and one feels that a dose of swift poison would have been the right remedy ...
— The Private Papers of Henry Ryecroft • George Gissing
... against the immorality of commercial and industrial creeds. While those two religious 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 of his food and his water-supply. The old system of local government was utterly ...
— The History of England - A Study in Political Evolution • A. F. Pollard
... natural goodness that is so sublime—lose its expression of perfect and unfailing kindness. Words convey little sense of the real horrors of the reality. Life in your case meant this: to be born in a slum, and to leave it to work seventeen hours a day in a lodging-house; to be a Londoner, but to know only the slum in which you were born and the few shops in the Strand at which the landlady dealt. To know nothing of London meant in your case not to know ...
— Confessions of a Young Man • George Moore
... 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 ...
— G. K. Chesterton, A Critical Study • Julius West
... these all supply a clean, comfortable bed, with good moral surroundings, kindly sympathy, and religious services. In New York and other large cities day nurseries have been opened in connection with some slum posts; here mothers bring their children to be cared for during the day, while they are out at work earning the wages upon which the family depend for existence. There are more than 100 rescue homes located in leading cities of the world, and more than 7,000 fallen women were ...
— Final Report of the Louisiana Purchase Exposition Commission • Louisiana Purchase Exposition Commission
... fruitful after all—a friend of his had been ordered to give up his hard work in a slum parish and find a country vocation. He promised that this friend ...
— Joanna Godden • Sheila Kaye-Smith
... 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 ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 98, March 15, 1890 • Various
... cleared away, and a bright, starry dome was over sea and city, over slum and villa alike; but little of it could be seen from the hovel in Jones's Alley, save a glimpse of the Southern Cross and a few stars round it. It was what ladies call a "lovely night," as seen from the house of Grinder—"Grinderville"—with its moonlit terraces and ...
— While the Billy Boils • Henry Lawson
... the overcrowding and consequent immorality come down to us from the newspaper echoes of the earlier part of the nineteenth century. The opening up of the new thoroughfares of New Oxford Street, Shaftesbury Avenue, and Charing Cross Road, have done much, but the neighbourhood is still a slum. The seven streets remain in their starlike shape, by name Great and Little White Lion Street, Great and Little St. Andrew Street, Great and Little Earl ...
— Holborn and Bloomsbury - The Fascination of London • Sir Walter Besant
... the doctor he 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 ...
— The Untilled Field • George Moore
... 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 that they are incapable of further mental ...
— The Farmer and His Community • Dwight Sanderson
... soldiers are like these priests who were valiant with the spirit of Christian faith. Side by side with the priest was the apache, or the slum-dweller, or the peasant from the fields, who in conversation was habitually and unconsciously foul. Not even the mild protest of one of these priests could check the flow of richly imagined blasphemies which are learnt in the barracks during the three years' service, and in the bistros ...
— The Soul of the War • Philip Gibbs |
