Before the base and foul their sordidness was brought to light.
That earth-born sordidness which marked all slaves as common chattels, was being burnt out of our national life, as our basest national sin.
In his strong breast all pride was crucified, malice was melted down to tenderness, hypocrisy and sordidness were purged away.
With no class of society did Dickens deal more successfully than with the sordidness of crime.
Thus does the pomp of state make way for the sordidness of trade, and even the wealthy corporation of the City of London was not above turning a penny or two as additional revenue.
It might have enabled men to reach a better country, but not, while on earth, to rise into and live in that better country, or to live in a region above the sordidness of actual life.
Familiarity with vice and sordidness in fiction is a low entertainment, and of doubtful moral value, and their introduction is unbearable if it is not done with the idealizing touch of the artist.
Bit by bit we learn the whole tragedy of each of the defendants; we see all the sordidness of poverty, the inability to procure the bare necessities of life, and the dread of the unwelcome child.
As long as there is still such material in society as the Constantines--men and women who would rather die than compromise with the sordidness of life--there is hope for humanity.
In spite of the growing sordidness of Lyme Street, my mother and I still lived in the old house, for which she very naturally had a sentiment.
She herself had revolted against the monotony and sordidness of that existence She herself!
I was silent, the tears almost forcing themselves to my eyes at the pathetic sordidness of what I had heard.
She, too, knew that tragedy of the tenements, of the poor, its sordidness and cruelty.
The sordidness of her life, its cruel lack of opportunity in contrast with the gifts she felt to be hers, and on which he had dwelt, was swept back into her mind.
I can imagine myself how such a strike as this might appeal to a girl with a sense of rebellion against sordidness and lack of opportunity--especially if she has had a tragic experience.
If want be accompanied with sordidness and squalor, though it be pitied, the pity will be mixed with some degree of contempt.
The effrontery of slaveholders was matched by the sordidness of the Eastern members.
Those who acquire what may be called liberal education, will do so in order to employ it as the means of their own subsistence or advancement in a profession, and literature itself will partake of the sordidness of trade.
It was the beauty of holiness--the beauty of wholeness--the wholeness of life, the saving of the whole life from the sin and sordidness of self and thereby giving supreme satisfaction to God.
Sordidness rejected The Atlantic traditions, for the most part, have rejected the harrowing and the sordid and the meretricious.
Don't think of this as a bit of sordidnesscreeping in.
And when he awoke in the morning and looked upon the wretchedness about him, his dream had had its usual effect--it had intensified the sordidness of his surroundings a thousandfold.
It did not occur to him, the deep-down reason of sordidness that enabled him to compel; but she could think of nothing else.
In presence of those clear, noble eyes of hers, the sordidness of his "romance" now once more began to stand out.
Una knew it, and the sordidness of that curiosity so embarrassed her that she stopped typing to clutch at the throat of her own high-necked blouse, her heart throbbing.
And as she walked in a mist of agony, a dumb, blind creature heroically distraught, she could scarce distinguish betweensordidness and the great betrayals, so chill and thick was the fog about her.
Now he said to himself that she would sooner desert a friend to please him than sacrifice a fraction of her income; and the discovery cast a stain of sordidness on their whole relation.
A scene of perfect sordidness will arouse the sympathetic laughter or tears of the people.
It is not unnatural in this time of great attention to east side charitable work to give greater value than it deserves to an art which represents the sordidness and the pathos of that part of the city.
There was such a mixture of sordidness and vanity in the whole apparatus, as made it truly contemptible.
So long as something took her for a little while away from the sordidness of home, its stale odors, its untidiness, its querulous inmates.
Despite the sordidness of the man, Josè was profoundly grateful to him for this information.
Nor could he readily associate the voice, which again and again he could not distinguish from the flute-like tones of the organ, with the sordidness and grime of material, fleshly existence.
Even success only brought the same preoccupations with prices, it was all the old sordidness over again on a higher plane.
But the open air gave him an appetite, too, and the appetite brought him back to the sordidness of things, to his nigh-bare pockets and the insistent sphinx of his future.
In no one of the poems I am thinking of, is the inherent sordidness of everything in the persons supposed, except the one poetic trait then under treatment, quite forgotten.
It had to be secret, not only because the sordidness of wagging tongues would have spoilt it so, but because my life would have been so unbearable in the world.
Not the better, but the finer side of him woke up, and he felt the necessity of a quieting and poetic influence to counteract the clever sordidness of the afternoon.
Strangely enough the utter sordidness of the place did not strike a jarring note.
