Word: slumming
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...plot line, but found it gripping and disturbing nevertheless. Beaten Blanche Du Bois, danced by Slavenska, quickly revealed the incipient madness which, in the play, had a slower buildup. Thereafter, the dance action veered between Blanche's lurid inner life and the real life of a New Orleans slum: Blanche's wistful meeting with a potential suitor, a boisterous crap game, the taut marriage of her sister and brother-in-law (danced by Lois Ellyn and Franklin). Dramatic climax: a hair-raising chase through a series of shuttered doors...
...wrote, "and an awful sight it is ... I have very seldom seen, in all the strange and dreadful things I have seen in London and elsewhere, anything so shocking as the dire neglect of soul and body exhibited in these children." Again, he describes to Miss Coutts a slum called Hickman's Folly: "wooden houses like horrible old packing cases full of fever for a countless number of years. In a broken down gallery at the back of a row of these, there was a wan child looking over at a starved old white horse . . . The sun was going...
...Ragged Schools (set up by private charity for England's poor) promptly got support from Miss Coutts, and landlords in the slums were encouraged to install sanitary facilities by the good lady's promise to meet all costs above a basic minimum. The novelist and the heiress drew up plans for slum clearance, model-housing projects, community flats with gardens, and Dickens gave days on end to making their paper schemes come brick & mortar true...
Bullying and aggressive, she is Shaw's symbol of entrenched wealth, and perhaps his embodiment of a thesis that unless wealth keeps on snowballing, it will melt away. Challenged to live on a pittance, she goes to work in a slum and in no time is richer than ever. In one of his most effective passages, Shaw has her defend her resistance to all charitable appeals on the theory that it is the first step that counts, that to part with a farthing may open the door to losing a fortune. Shaw, who loved money itself almost as much...
...during one of the dozens of strikes in which he was privileged to take part. Pa was a formidable and handsome man-tall, erect, curly-haired and with a straight right capable of breaking a man's jaw. Ma was handsome and formidable too-once she hit a slum bully over the head with a ball bat and knocked him colder than a brass casting. But there the similarity ceased...