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:
“How marvellous it all is! Built not by saints and angels, but the work of men’s hands; cemented with men’s honest blood and with a world of tears, welded by the best brains of centuries past; not without the taint and reproach incidental to all human work, but constructed on the whole with pure and splendid purpose. Human, and yet not wholly human—for the most heedless and the most cynical must see the finger of the Divine.”
—Archibald Philip Primrose, 5th Earl Rosebery (1847–1929)
“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)