| Title | The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists |
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| Page | 923 |
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| Chapter | -- |
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| Text |
a week for the last six weeks. Often they had no coal and sometimes not even a penny to put into the gas meter, and then, having nothing left good enough to pawn, he sometimes obtained a few pence by selling some of his books to second-hand book dealers. However, bad as their condition was, Owen knew that they were better off than the majority of the others, for whenever he went out he was certain to meet numbers of men whom he had worked with at different times, who said - some of them - that they had been idle for ten, twelve, fifteen and in some cases for twenty weeks without having earned a shilling. Owen used to wonder how they managed to continue to exist. Most of them were wearing other people's cast-off clothes, hats, and boots, which had in some instances been given to their wives by `visiting ladies', or by the people at whose houses their wives went to work, charing. As for food, most of them lived on |
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