“Pale and haggard faces, lank and bony figures, children with countenances of old men, deformities with irons on their limbs, boys of stunted growth, and others whose long meagre legs would hardly bear their stooping bodies, all crowded on the view together; there were the bleary eyed, the hare-lip, the crooked foot, and every ugliness and distortion that told of unnatural aversion conceived by parents for their offspring, or of young lives which, from the earliest dawn of infancy, had been one horrible endurance of cruelty and neglect. There were little faces which should have been handsome, darkened with the scowl of sullen, dogged suffering; there was childhood with the light of its eye quenched, its beauty gone and its helpless alone remaining; there were vicious-faced boys, brooding, with leaden eyes, like malefactors in jail; and there were young creatures on whom the sins of their frail parents had descended, weeping even for the mercenary nurses they had known, and lonesome even in their loneliness. With every kindly sympathy and affection blasted in its birth, with every young and healthy feeling flogged and starved down, with every revengeful passion that can fester in swollen hearts eating its evil way to their core in silence, what an incipient Hell was breeding here.”
Charles Dickens “Nicholas Nickleby”, 1839
A Bird's Eye View of Fashion, Food, Travel, Culture, Beverage and Curiosity 