scrofulously

Updated: May 25, 2025

Rickety dwellings of undoubted fashion, but of a capacity to hold nothing comfortably except a dismal smell, looked like the last result of the great mansions' breeding in-and-in; and, where their little supplementary bows and balconies were supported on thin iron columns, seemed to be scrofulously resting upon crutches.

Charles Dickens - Little Dorrit

"As the day, ma'am," says Jane. "And is she willing?" "Oh, as willing as the rising sun, ma'am." "And is she clean?" "Clean, ma'am," says Jane, raising her black gloved hands to emphasise the affirmation, "she's scrofulously clean!" And then the poets! there was not a parish or a hamlet for a good ten miles round but had its own acknowledged bard.

David Christie Murray - Recollections: With Photogravure Portrait of the Author and a number of: Original Letters, of which one by George Meredith and: another by Robert Louis Stevenson are reproduced in: facsimile