London labour and the London poor, Volume 31861 |
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a-day a-week ain't asked average ballast ballast-heavers beer better boys bread brought busking called carry casual wards clothes Clown coal coalporters coalwhippers comes comic dance docks dressed drink earnings employed exaunts exhibit eyes fair father figuers figures five four gave gentlemen give goes Gravesend Guy Fawkes hands head horses Jack Black keep knocks labour lady legs lightermen living lodging lodging-house London look master miles months mother never night paid penny penny gaffs performance pipes play poor pounds public-house publican Punch rats regular river round Scaramouch shillings ship sing sometimes stop streets teetotaler teetotalism tell theatre there's thing told tons took trade Trinity House vagrants vessels watermen week West India Docks whilst wife workhouse young
Popular passages
Page 340 - Other hackneymen seeing this way, they flocked to the same place, and performed their journeys at the same rate ; so that sometimes there is twenty of them together, which disperse up and down, that they and others are to be had everywhere, as watermen are to be had by the water-side. Everybody is much pleased with it...
Page 211 - The Lord giveth, and the Lord ' taketh away ; blessed be the name of the Lord.
Page 384 - ONCE upon a time, and a very good time it was, though it wasn't in my time, nor in your time, nor any one else's time, there was a girl whose mother had died, and her father had married again.
Page 295 - Here the heavily-laden ships are down far below the quay, and you descend to them by ladders; whilst in another basin they are high up out of the water, so that their green copper sheathing is almost level with the eye of the passenger; while above his head a long line of bowsprits stretches far over the quay ; and from them hang spars and planks as a gangway to each ship. This immense establishment is worked by from one to three thousand hands, according as the business is either brisk or slack.
Page 294 - ... flags flying in the air, has a most peculiar effect; while the sheds, with the monster wheels arching through the roofs, look like the paddle-boxes of huge steamers. Along the quay, you see now men with their faces blue with indigo, and now...
Page 327 - Act be required to be registered or licensed by the master, wardens, and commonalty of watermen and lightermen of the River Thames to be registered or licensed under this Act.
Page 295 - The sailors are singing boisterous nigger songs from the Yankee ship just entering ; the cooper is hammering at the casks on the quay ; the chains of the cranes, loosed of their weight, rattle as they fly up again ; the ropes splash in the water ; some captain shouts his orders through his hands ; a goat bleats from some ship in the basin ; and empty casks roll along the stones with a hollow drum-like sound.
Page 363 - ... criminals or vagrants in the gaols, we find that in scarcely any cases is it ascribable to the pressure of unavoidable want or destitution ; and that in the great mass of cases it arises from the temptation of obtaining property with a less degree of labour than by regular industry...
Page 25 - June 25. died at Asbornby (Lincolnshire), John Page, a pauper belonging to Silk-Willoughby, under circumstances truly singular. He being of a restless disposition, and not choosing to stay in the parish workhouse, was in the habit of strolling about the neighbouring villages, subsisting on the pittance obtained from door to door: the support he usually received from the benevolent was bread and meat; and after satisfying the cravings of nature, it was his custom to deposit the surplus provision,...
Page 231 - ... and part of whom, (the coalwhippers) are extremely proud of their having turned out to a man on the 10th of April, 1848, and become special constables for the " maintenance of law and order " on the day of the great Chartist Demonstration — it has been shown that these same unskilled labourers constitute the most immoral class.