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:
“The world is for thousands a freak show; the images flicker past and vanish; the impressions remain flat and unconnected in the soul. Thus they are easily led by the opinions of others, are content to let their impressions be shuffled and rearranged and evaluated differently.”
—Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe (1749–1832)
“Even in ordinary speech we call a person unreasonable whose outlook is narrow, who is conscious of one thing only at a time, and who is consequently the prey of his own caprice, whilst we describe a person as reasonable whose outlook is comprehensive, who is capable of looking at more than one side of a question and of grasping a number of details as parts of a whole.”
—G. Dawes Hicks (1862–1941)