City dweller

“ The city bore marks of havoc everywhere. Gaping bridges, half-demolished houses, many without doors, which had been taken off their hinges and cast into the courtyard or the roadside, fallen roofs, smouldering ruins, told their dismal tale. ”

“ Through the whole night long upon the curb stones, at the corners, lounging against the windows and doors of closed houses or shops, this lower stratum of life appears with its atmosphere of dusky gloom. When the daylight dawns upon the city, it seems to shrivel up and shrink into the mouths of the yawning black cellars and foul alleys whose very breath is a deadly poison. ”

“ Doubtless the city must have been crammed with the dead! There must have been corpses at the thresholds of the garden gates, upon the stairways, in all the chambers, and piled up so high that the doors could no longer move upon their hinges!... ”

“ The blessed breeze and the sweet sunshine have aroused the poor children who vegetate in courts and alleys; and these dirty images of innocence have descended from the close, high attics, and climbed out of the low, damp cellars, and now, bare-headed and barefooted and scantily clad, they are chasing each other like swallows, and appear as happy as if neither rags nor hunger existed in this great city of palaces, poor-houses, and prisons. ”

“ By midnight, the streets were clear and quiet, and, save that there stood in two parts of the town a heap of nodding walls and pile of rubbish, where there had been at sunset a rich and handsome building, everything wore its usual aspect. Even the Catholic gentry and tradesmen, of whom there were many resident in different parts of the City and its suburbs, had no fear for their lives or property, and but little indignation for the wrong they had already sustained in the plunder and destruction of their temples of worship. ”

“ And then followed the big city’s biggest shame, its most ancient and rotten surviving canker, its pollution and disgrace, its blight and perversion, its forever infamy and guilt, fostered, unreproved and cherished, handed down from a long-ago century of the basest barbarity—the Hue and Cry. Nowhere but in the big cities does it survive, and here most of all, where the ultimate perfection of culture, citizenship and alleged superiority joins, bawling, in the chase. ”

“ To an indifferent person either side of the gutter would have seemed much the same, the houses equally mean, the children as ragged and dirty, the carmen as brutal—the whole forming the same picture of low life in a deserted and impoverished quarter of a large city. ”

“ Scarcely had the news of the queen's happy arrival rung from the capital, than it was followed by the horrible intelligence that, owing to an oversight of the police during the festal fireworks, an infinite number of persons, with horses and carriages, had been destroyed in a street obstructed by building materials, and that the city, in the midst of the nuptial solemnities, had been plunged into mourning and sorrow. ”

“ Immediately from every quarter of that ancient city uprose a tumult as of hell. The clanging of bells, the crashing doors, the rush of armed men, the musket-shots, the shrieks of their victims, and high over all the yells of the mob, fiercer and more pitiless than hungry wolves—made such an uproar that the stoutest hearts shrank appalled, and the sanest appear to have lost their reason. Women unsexed, men wanting but the strength of the wild beast, children without a single charm of youth or innocence, crowded the streets where rising day still struggled with the glare of a thousand torches. ”

“ For the first time, I viewed with a tranquil mind the narrow, dirty, and unpaved streets, the blackened houses full of cracks running over the walls in all directions, lurking-places of the thieves and robbers who ply their calling on the streets, and who sometimes even break into houses in the city. ”

“ But, ah! to dreader things than these our fair young city comes, For in its heart are growing thick the filthy dens and slums, Where human forms shall rot away in sties for swine unmeet, And ghostly faces shall be seen unfit for any street — Rotting out, rotting out, For the lack of air and meat — In dens of vice and horror that are hidden from the street. ”

“ These days were days of anguish to the rulers, to those who considered themselves the masters of life; each night was as long as thousands of nights, so thick was the gloom, so timidly shone the few fires scattered through the city. And then the monster city, created by the centuries, gorged with human blood, showed itself in all its shameful weakness ”

“ The most able people of the whole city and suburbs were out of town; if any remained, it were such as were engaged by parish officers to remain; no habit of a gentleman or woman continued; the woeful calamity of that year was grievous, people dying in the open fields and in open streets. ”

“ It is not long since the gallows was a public spectacle here in the midst of us, and a hanging made a holiday for the rabble of this city and the neighboring towns; even women came to see the death-struggle of a fellow-creature, and formed the larger part of the mob; many of you remember the procession of the condemned man sitting on his coffin, a procession from the jail to the gallows, from one end of the city to the other. ”

“ Here a door would be standing open, day after day, because the very last dweller in the house had crawled out into the street to die, while from an open window would hang the head of a woman whose last cry for help had been unheeded. ”

“ The mob had collected and organized to the number of several hundred, and were marching through the lower part of the city, dealing destruction in their course; the houses of respectable and worthy colored citizens were broken in upon, the furniture scattered to the winds, all they possessed destroyed or plundered, and they themselves subjected to the most brutal and savage treatment. ”

“ Every dwelling, from the palace of the noble to the shop of the meanest artisan, was abandoned. The churches alone contained any living occupants, and they were the wounded only, or those whom age or infancy had rendered incapable of retiring with the remainder of its inhabitants from the doomed city. ”

“ A dweller in great cities—say, for instance, one who lives within decent distance of such a charming locality as that called the Five Points in New York—could hardly realize the amount of awe that an event so trifling as a sudden and violent death will spread over a primitive village community. ”

“ Ruin and desolation reigned around, for only the poorest and most abandoned were willing to erect their abodes in the neighbourhood of a spot deemed accursed. Beyond rose the dark walls erected around the city—a sign of the degeneracy of the inhabitants, whose breasts and stout arms in former days had been considered sufficient for its protection. ”

“ Who will ever forget the marvelous rapidity with which the better streets were filled with a ruffianly and desperate multitude, such as in ordinary times we seldom see—creatures who seemed to have crept from their burrows and dens to join in the plunder of the city—how quickly certain houses were marked out for sacking and ruin, and what wild and brutal crimes were committed on the unoffending negroes? ”

“ Many of them go insane and are taken to state institutions where death soon mercifully comes and wipes out their useless lives.
Many of them are cast forth from the dens where they have turned their every drop of blood to gold for their masters, and are picked up dead in the alleys and streets of the city. ”

“ How miserable a spectacle was then presented, when each man was suddenly and treacherously murdered wherever he happened to be, in the field or on the road, in the town, in his own home, or in the street, in market or temple, in bed or at table! ”

“ They were about to pour into the city when the women, mad with fear, rushed into the streets with cries and moans, now reproaching the men-at-arms with cowardice, now begging them with sobs and tears to make a last effort to save the city from the brutal infidels. ”

“ You're all alone in a deserted city. You walk down an empty street, yearning for the sight of one living face—one moving figure. Then you see a man on a corner and you know your terror has only begun. ”

“ Crime is abundant in this city: the lazar-house, the prison, the brothel, and the dark alley, are rife with all kinds of enormity; in the same way as the palace, the mansion, the clubhouse, the parliament, and the parsonage, are each and all characterised by their different degrees and shades of vice. ”

“ They alone know that every vicissitude of the city’s condition is traceable to that source—its sadness, its merriment, its carnivals and its lents, its health and its disease, its prosperity and the hideous plagues which at distant intervals kill one in ten of the population. ”

“ For long the Destroying Angel hovered over the devoted city—neither age nor infancy was spared, and numbers were daily hurried from the vigour of living manhood into the silence and oblivion of the grave. Vigorous people, walking along the streets, were suddenly seized with shiverings and cramp, and sank down on the pavement to rise no more, sometimes actually expiring on the cold, hard stones. ”

“ Within the walls of the wretched city all are struck down with fear: everything falls and flies to dust,—the besiegers are on the walls! The last magistrates, seeing from their tower their vain hope in the distant armies and Stanislaus who had taken refuge within their walls, besides themselves, exclaim: “We are fated to fall!” ”

“ There was enough in the prospect of beholding the burning palace and the drunken suicide of its desperate guests to animate even the stagnant curiosity of a famishing mob.
On the appointed evening the people dragged their weary limbs from all quarters of the city towards the Pincian Hill. Many of them died on the way; many lost their resolution to proceed to the end of their journey, and took shelter sullenly in the empty houses on the road; many found opportunities for plunder and crime as they proceeded, which tempted them from their destination ”

“ There, by the city gate; whilst the earth shook and rocked, whilst the sky was black with ashes, whilst showers of stones were falling around him, and whilst hundreds of men, women and children brushed past him as they fled in terror from the city, there he stood, firm and unmoved. Should such a man as I flee? ”

“ Thus the midday halt of Charnock—more's the pity!
⁠Grew a City.
As the fungus sprouts chaotic from its bed,
⁠So it spread—
Chance-directed, chance-erected, laid and built
⁠On the silt—
Palace, byre, hovel—poverty and pride—
⁠Side by Side;
And, above the packed and pestilential town,
⁠Death looked down. ”

“ Where the old pigsty stood, children dance and sing to the strumming of a cracked piano-organ propelled on wheels by an Italian and his wife. The park that has come to take the place of the slum will curtail the undertaker’s profits, as it has lessened the work of the police. Murder was the fashion of the day that is past. Scarce a knife has been drawn since the sunlight shone into that evil spot, and grass and green shrubs took the place of the old rookeries. The Christmas gospel of peace and good-will moves in where the slum moves out. ”

“ Picture to yourself nine-tenths of the town in ashes—or in charred blackened ruins—with thousands of the wretched inhabitants, who could not, or did not, make good their escape, wandering about homeless and starving, filling the air with their lamentations. ”

“ Murder and outrage wanton within and without the walls; the smiling fields are devastated, while at the gate of the ruined, bloodstained city hovers the dark and ragged demon of Fear, with a scroll: “Through selfish ambition in this city has Justice been subjected to Tyranny ”

“ The old yards up and down the old street were much trampled, shrubbery broken, fences down, the street thick dust, and still strewn with accoutrements that had been thrown away, with here and there a broken wagon. Street and pavement, there was passing and repassing—the life of the rear of an army, and the faring to and fro on many errands of the people of the relieved town. There were the hospitals and there were the wounded in private houses. There were the dead, and all the burials for the morrow—the negroes digging in the old graveyard, and the children gathering flowers. ”

“ The mysticism of their haunting chant penetrates the walls of this old house, and tonight because of their lamenting, because of their dread disciplined agony of supplication, the street is immensely deep and high, whereas yesterday it was just small and dim and worldly, with its houses blinking over its walls, a proud battered deceiving old street, hiding the rare beauty of its dwellings, guarding the secrets of its families behind mute shutters, till the day it should crumble to pieces or an insolent government should turn it upside down like an ash-bin. ”

“ In some hells there is an appearance as of ruins of houses and cities after fires, in which ruins the infernal spirits dwell and conceal themselves. In the milder hells there is an appearance of rude cottages, in some cases contiguous, having the aspect of a city with lanes and streets. Within the houses are infernal spirits engaged in continual quarrels, enmities, blows, and fightings; in the streets and lanes robberies and depredations are committed. ”

“ Of course, such streets as are contained in wards of the city where the poorest people dwell will invariably have their quota of questionable characters; but the days when gangs of roughs, "toughs" or thieves can flourish in one particular section, it is to be hoped, are matters of the past. ”

“ Horsemen, footmen, carriages squeezed, jammed, intermingled, the pavement blocked up with timbers, hammering and knocking, and falling fragments stunning the ears and threatening the head; not a mob here and there, but the town all mob, thronging, bustling, gaping, and gazing at everything, at anything, or at nothing ”