Some are locked in all day, “to keep ’em quiet,” while their owners go forth to work or to booze. The infant faces, lined with their own dirt, and distorted by the smeared impurities of the window-panes, seem like the faces of actors made up for effects of old age. The poor little hands finger the panes without ceasing, as they might finger prison bars. The captives crawl over one another like caged insects, and all their gestures show the irritation of contact. But the clearest transmission through that foul medium is to the ear rather than to the eye, in the querulous whimper, at times rising to a wail, which betokens the agitation of their shattered nerves. The children playing below look up at them, and beckon them into the yard, or make faces at them, with the charitable intent of provoking them to a smile.
Locksley Hall Fifty Years After
By Alfred Tennyson
Is it well that while we range with Science, glorying in the time,
City children soak and blacken soul and sense in city slime?
There among the gloomy alleys Progress halts on palsied feet;
Crime and hunger cast out maidens by the thousand on the street;
There the master scrimps his haggard seamstress of her daily bread;