All 4 Uses of
parish
in
Bleak House
- …however, the possession, and the only possession except fifty shillings per annum and a very small box indifferently filled with clothing, of a lean young woman from a workhouse (by some supposed to have been christened Augusta) who, although she was farmed or contracted for during her growing time by an amiable benefactor of his species resident at Tooting, and cannot fail to have been developed under the most favourable circumstances, "has fits," which the parish can't account for.†
Chpt 10-12
- As to corporations, parishes, vestry-boards, and similar gatherings of jolter-headed clods who assemble to exchange such speeches that, by heaven, they ought to be worked in quicksilver mines for the short remainder of their miserable existence, if it were only to prevent their detestable English from contaminating a language spoken in the presence of the sun—as to those fellows, who meanly take advantage of the ardour of gentlemen in the pursuit of knowledge to recompense the…†
Chpt 13-15
- "I was just eight," says Phil, "agreeable to the parish calculation, when I went with the tinker.†
Chpt 25-27
- And so I told her I had been a poor child myself, and it was according to parishes.†
Chpt 58-60 *
Definition:
-
(parish) a local church community
or in some places including Louisiana: a jurisdiction of government like a county