What is "penury"

Usage examples of "penury".

It was the absolute penury, the debt, the care, that haunted him and made such miserable contrast with the tens and hundreds of thousands that were the subject of discussion on the present occasion.

The thrill of fear which had crossed the mind of Villiers, as to the health and preservation of his wife, had served to dissipate the lingering sense of shame and degradation inspired by the penury of their situation.

She was not aware how, hereafter, these small things would become the shapings and embodyings which desertion and penury would adopt, to sting her most severely.

But wealth and lassitude have their temptations as well as penury and toil.

When your own follies plunged you into penury, mine was the unseen hand that plucked you from famine, or the prison.

Even in utmost penury she had known the ministrations of chaplains and clerks, of keepers and serving folk.

And yet we can look upon our past life with complacency, can delight to recall the hours of happiness we have past, and if some scene of penury and grief is recalled to our memory, we drive away the thought of what we then beheld and sought not to better.

No gift of futurity had disclosed to her the wretchedness and penury that after years had prepared for her.

In it we find misery enough, we find sorrow and wretchedness, without the hand of compassion being held forth to help the miserable from the deep and fearful gulf with which penury and want abound.

Alfred Wentworth feared that his wife was living in penury, for he knew that she was without adequate means.

I have known their penury, I should have been only glad to relieve them, and even now, it is not too late for us to benefit this child and his mother.

We have shown them plunged in direst misfortunes, and is there not force in the question when we ask if their months of penury and suffering were the works of the God of Mercy and Righteousness?

Among them are many high-toned and respectable families, whose pride shrinks from begging for bread, and who now live a life of penury and starvation rather than become the mendicant.

It is true they are in many instances, reduced to penury, but in their poverty are as different from the mendicant as the good are from the bad.

By these means alone do we judge the extent of suffering in the land, and, not hearing of many cases of penury, or receiving many applications for assistance, we believe that the assertions of great want being among the people are untrue, and we purposely avoid searching for the truth of such assertions.