Both Uses of
wanton
in
Nicholas Nickleby
- You, who sent me to a den where sordid cruelty, worthy of yourself, runs wanton, and youthful misery stalks precocious; where the lightness of childhood shrinks into the heaviness of age, and its every promise blights, and withers as it grows.†
Chpt 20 *
- The mother was a gentle, loving, confiding creature, and although he wounded her from their marriage till her death as cruelly and wantonly as ever man did, she never ceased to love him.†
Chpt 46
Definition:
-
(wanton) of something considered bad: excessive, thoughtless indulgence -- such as waste, cruelty, violence, and (especially in the past) sexual promiscuity