Word: dickensian
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...hours is a three-ton truck. A common racket for landlords is to charge $200 or $300 key money for "fixtures" that seldom amount to more than a broken-down chair. Worst results of the housing shortage: thousands of split families, and the reappearance of something close to the Dickensian workhouse...
...after Sylvia and Janet. After dithering a bit, he marries Sylvia, who is ten years his senior, rather than Janet, who is eight years his junior. Long practiced in the craft of writing family pageants. Author Spring keeps the subplots boiling, has a Victorian fondness for quaint characters with Dickensian names and habits: necrophiliac Mr. Tiddy, bluestocking Medea Hopkins, Brookes the perfect butler, Nurse Collum, who once saved her virginity by diving into the Isis at Oxford...
Vagrant Packs. Scarcely 50 years ago, civilized Americans thought of children as belonging to one of two classes: those with families and those without. The neglected and orphaned were hauled off to Dickensian institutions to live in lockstepped desperation; and when the orphanages were filled, the rest were left to roam the cities in vagrant packs or were rounded up and shipped to agricultural communities to be palmed off on farmers in need of kitchen and field help...
...sycophantic Brother Aloysius. Even the scenes in The Saga are hauntingly familiar: a garden party that is entertained by the Bidcombe Platinum Band recalls the garden party of Decline and Fall, with its Llanabba Silver Band. And Auberon has both his father's love of fantastic Dickensian names (Percy-Scroop-Beauchamp, Nurse Proudfoot, Mrs. Cod-Finger) and his hilarious sense of incongruity...
...Dickensian world of tiny flower girls freezing on wintry corners at midnight and brutalized orphans refused a second helping of porridge came startlingly alive last week in London. The National Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children published a book entitled This Is Your Child, whose 200-odd pages are filled with stories and photographs of starved, burned and appallingly neglected children. One father heated leather thongs in a fire and then lashed his child until the skin lifted from its back. A mother kept her illegitimate son in a chicken coop until he was seven years old. "These...