World Outlook
The first-person narrator shows a very negative image of the city he lives in – and he shows the readers an authentic view on the New York in 1871. He describes the corruption by William Tweed (whose picture we know from Thomas Nast's cartoons, published in Harper's Weekly) and he describes the child poverty, the calamities of the newsboys and a lot of buildings and streets how they looked at this time. He cites Walt Whitman for showing that his New York is another one.
Read more about this topic: The Waterworks
Famous quotes containing the words world and/or outlook:
“For twenty-five centuries, Western knowledge has tried to look upon the world. It has failed to understand that the world is not for the beholding. It is for hearing. It is not legible, but audible. Our science has always desired to monitor, measure, abstract, and castrate meaning, forgetting that life is full of noise and that death alone is silent: work noise, noise of man, and noise of beast. Noise bought, sold, or prohibited. Nothing essential happens in the absence of noise.”
—Jacques Attali (b. 1943)
“My whole outlook on life changed with those three little words, “The rabbit died.””
—Anonymous Mother. Quoted in When Men Are Pregnant, ch. 5, Jerrold Lee Shapiro (1987)