Disorderly house

“ The uncommunicative old gardener continued his interrupted vocation; his wife, quitting the party and entering the house by a back door, suddenly flung open the windows of the drawing-room, and so admitted the visitors.
There is always an air of discomfort about a furnished house, a kind of grim bareness that suggests an asylum or a prison, rather than a home; and in foreign furnished houses this is specially apparent: there are the regulation amount of chairs and tables it is true ”

“ Whether she entered a store, or swept the back porch, or stood at the bay-window in the living-room, the village peeped at her. Once she had swung along the street triumphant in making a home. Now she glanced at each house, and felt, when she was safely home, that she had won past a thousand enemies armed with ridicule. She told herself that her sensitiveness was preposterous, but daily she was thrown into panic. ”

“ The house itself was a wretched place—out of order, with doors and windows and floors shattered, broken, and decayed. There were none of womankind belonging to the family, and in such a house a decent woman-servant would have been out of her place. ”

“ To a large extent they are retained in their homes, and when they cannot be managed or maintained by their own relatives, the poor-house becomes their home, and they consequently do not appear on the lunacy list. ”

“ Though few of the sounder authorities openly advocated the suppression of Homes, was it not true that they—and he once among them—practically did so by denying any value in their schemes to those emotional and spiritual contributions which alone turned a house into a Home? There lay the heart of the whole great problem. "Four walls," mused Charles, as he swung rapidly down Center Street, "and three meals a day, and even the banisters dusted, to boot—these mere utilities can never make a Home." ”

“ I always lived in a flat, John, and there was always a family above and a family below, and it frightens me to think I am in a house where there is no family above me, and not even a janitor's family below me. ”

“ Can we conceive the mysterious inhabitant as forming a part of its own habitation? The tenant and the house are so inseparable, that in striking at any part of the dwelling, you inevitably reach the dweller. If the mind be disordered, we may often look for its seat in some corporeal derangement. Often are our thoughts disturbed by a strange irritability, which we do not even pretend to account for. This state of the body, called the fidgets, is a disorder to which the ladies are particularly liable. ”

“ Who has not either seen or heard of some house, shut up and uninhabitable, fallen into decay, and looking dusty and dreary, from which, at midnight, strange sounds have been heard to issue—aerial knockings—the rattling of chains, and the groaning of perturbed spirits?—a house that people have thought it unsafe to pass after dark, and which has remained for years without a tenant, and which no tenant would occupy, even were he paid to do so? ”

“ Indeed, the front door is a constant factor of discord, the baiting-place of disquiet, the arch enemy of household peace.
Many of the vexations that are ever striving to wedge their way through the vestibule may be avoided by intelligent, well-drilled servants who are capable of reading human nature, and at a glance can distinguish the false from the true. A thoroughly competent house-maid should wear her cap internally as well as externally, and, like a thrasher’s sieve, be able to winnow the chaff from the wheat. ”

“ All houses are open to him, Pröbler had said. All houses? that is as bad as none at all. Unless you can enter a house without interrupting the inmates in their occupation; unless no glance, no expression asks, What have you come for? what plan is on foot? unless you are made to feel at home,--you have no house open to you. ”

“ The violence of the short tumult within him had been such as could well have shattered all creation; and yet nothing was changed. He faced his wife in the familiar room in his own house. It had not fallen. And right and left all the innumerable dwellings, standing shoulder to shoulder, had resisted the shock of his passion, had presented, unmoved, to the loneliness of his trouble, the grim silence of walls, the impenetrable and polished discretion of closed doors and curtained windows. ”

“ The family cluster fearfully at the door as the head of the house, with surly resignation, departs for the scene of his daily servitude with the smoke of his pipe trailing behind him, animated by no love for the human race but only by a firm resolution not to lift his hand until the last echoes of the whistle have died away. ”

“ There is no more frequent cause of the ill-health of domestic servants than the damp and sunless rooms in which they pass so much of their time, owing to the injurious practice of building dwelling-houses, both in town and country, without a cellar under the whole house, drained, and ventilated from side to side. ”

“ There were occasions when it seemed to them that they must be the victims of an elaborate conspiracy of house agents, so bleak and cheerless is a second-hand empty house in comparison with the humblest of inhabited dwellings. ”

“ Our theory trembled beneath the shock. We hastened home; and fancying we foresaw in the swift progress of events, its entire abolition, resolved from that day forward to vent our speculations on our next-door neighbours in person. The house adjoining ours on the left hand was uninhabited, and we had, therefore, plenty of leisure to observe our next-door neighbours on the other side.
The house without the knocker was in the occupation of a city clerk, and there was a neatly-written bill in the parlour window intimating that lodgings for a single gentleman were to be let within. ”

“ At first it was jammed so tight together that I could not stir it, but the next shake of the house flung it wide open, and I crept into the hall, where I found the whole family hurrying out of their rooms, all in nightclothes, of course, and scared most to death.
“We must get out of the house before the walls fall,” said my brother-in-law, helping his wife down the stairs, which swayed and tottered as if they would fall, every minute. ”

“ The gloomy, half-closed house, the garden paths, green with damp and thick with weeds, the servants acting entirely upon their own authority, and the master querulous, impatient, and unjust, either shut up in his own room brooding over the past and present, or freely distributing oaths, complaints, and sometimes even blows, amongst the unfortunate inmates of his household. ”

“ Some have come from the country, from kind and respectable homes, to seek work in the city; here they gradually consume their scanty means, and are driven from one refuge to another, till they stand on the street, with the gayly-lighted house of vice and the gloomy police-station to choose between. Others have sought amusement in the town, and have been finally induced to enter some house of bad character as a boarding-house, and have been thus entrapped; and finally, in despair, and cursed with disease, they break loose, and take shelter even in the prison-cell, if necessary. ”

“ They cling to their own bits of rooms and to the companionship of the members of their own families, brutal as they often are, and would rather stay and suffer, and die in the midst of all the filth and squalor that surrounds them in their own dens, than go to the big house, which, to them, looks very like a prison.
The sufferings of the wretched occupants of the Slums that we have been describing, when sick and unable to help themselves, makes the organisation of some system of nursing them in their own homes a Christian duty. ”

“ Here and there a half-decayed blockhouse peeps out from under these weeping banners, and as everything there offers the picture of rapid desolation, you see in this house, where so many families have died out one after the other, the pale, yellow wasted faces of the new-comers peering out, like candidates for death, till it becomes too late to escape from this pestilential abode. ”

“ Very often, according to other equally good authority, there is not more than one room for the whole family, [Pg 17] and the demoralization of that family is the natural consequence. The Morning Chronicle of November, 1849, said of the cottages at Southleigh, in Devon—
"One house, which our correspondent visited, was almost a ruin. ”

“ The children of the Gentiles play in the door-yard and grow sickly and die. The mother working in the house has a pale face and poison in her blood. She cannot be a strong wife. She cannot bear strong sons to the man. He stays healthy because he toils in the field. He does not breathe the tainted air rising from the swill in the door-yard. ”

“ In Loos the ruined houses looked gloomy by day, by night they were ghastly. A house is a ruin when the family that dwelt within its walls is gone; but by midnight in the waste, how horrible looks the house of flesh from which the soul is gone. We are vaguely aware of what has happened when we look upon the tenantless home, but man is stricken [212] dumb when he sees the tenantless body of one of his kind. ”

“ A poor-house, is at best an unpleasant, and when it is not cleanly kept, a disgusting sight. Those who are confined, are criminals of a lower kind, the worst are not confined longer than three years. The men work during the day, either in the fields belonging to the city, or in the public streets. ”

“ They lived, as you probably recall, in a quaint old-fashioned home near Hubbard Woods—just the two of them; no children. Following the tragedy, the house was closed up and for a long while remained unoccupied. Despite the scarcity of dwelling places, nobody apparently cared to live there. ”

“ An empty house is like a stray dog or a body from which life has departed. Decay sets in at once in every part of it, and what mould and wind and weather would spare, street boys commonly destroy. Ernest's shop in its untenanted state was a dirty unsavoury place enough. ”

“ On being taken the other day through a large and costly residence, with the thoroughness that only the owner of a new house has the cruelty to inflict on his victims, not allowing them to pass a closet or an electric bell without having its particular use and convenience explained, forcing them to look up coal-slides, and down air-shafts and to visit every secret place, from the cellar to the fire-escape, I noticed that a peculiar arrangement of the rooms repeated itself on each floor, and several times on a floor. ”

“ I had some little obligations, indeed, upon me to go to my brother’s house, which was in Coleman Street parish and which he had left to my care, and I went at first every day, but afterwards only once or twice a week.
In these walks I had many dismal scenes before my eyes, as particularly of persons falling dead in the streets, terrible shrieks and screechings of women, who, in their agonies, would throw open their chamber windows and cry out in a dismal, surprising manner. It is impossible to describe the variety of postures in which the passions of the poor people would express themselves. ”

“ If you work in the front of your pretty little house, your nervous system 'll be shattered by the shrieks of your neighbours' children swinging on the gates—forty-pound-a-year houses in the suburbs are infested with children; nothing seems to exterminate them, and the inevitable gates groan like souls in hell—and if you choose the back, you'll be assisted by the arrival of the joint, and the vegetables, and the slap of the milk-cans, and Cornelia the Second's altercations with the errand-boys. ”

“ The old houses that from private dwellings were made into tenements, or were run up to house the biggest crowds in defiance of every moral and physical law, can be improved by no device short of demolition. They will ever remain the worst.
That ignorance plays its part, as well as poverty and bad hygienic surroundings, in the sacrifice of life is of course inevitable. They go usually hand in hand. A message came one day last spring summoning me to a Mott Street tenement in which lay a child dying from some unknown disease. ”

“ Lack of study and experience leads the family living in the suburbs, in one of the worst legacies of the past, to attempt the same style as friends maintain in a lately built apartment house, without in the least understanding wherein the difference lies. ”

“ Her perception of the fact that no crusty caretaker could see her from the windows led her at once to slacken her pace, and stroll through the flower-beds coolly. A house unblinded is a possible spy, and must be treated accordingly; a house with the shutters together is an insensate heap of stone and mortar, to be faced with indifference. ”

“ Better, we can not do for you. This house is not a tavern, but the somewhat valuable property of—" He turned with a bow and smile, as every one there drew a deep breath; but no one ventured to end that sentence. [Pg 32]
I would have given all my future prospects (which, by the way, were not very great) to remain in that room. The oddity of the situation; the mystery of the occurrence; the suspense I saw in every face; the eagerness of the cries I heard redoubled from time to time outside; the malevolence but poorly disguised in the old lawyer's countenance ”

“ This work is intended not merely to point out certain common defects in the Dwelling House, and to show how evils more or less necessary in towns may be avoided in the country, but to call attention to the fact that our modern methods of sanitation, and the heavy taxation of the dwelling, inevitably increase overcrowding, and the moral and physical ills which follow in its train. ”

“ It may be that the streets are dull and dirty, but the interiors are worse. Only think of a family, with grown-up sons and daughters, all living and sleeping in one room! The conditions of the place are as bad morally as they are physically. ”