Citations:child

English citations of child

			1678	1719	1843	1913
ME «	15th c.	16th c.	17th c.	18th c.	19th c.	20th c.	21st c.

• 1678 — John Bunyan. The Pilgrim's Progress.

  Some cry out against sin even as the mother cries out against her child in her lap, when she calleth it slut and naughty girl, and then falls to hugging and kissing it.

• 1719 — Daniel Defoe. Robinson Crusoe.

  Some days after this, and after I had been on board the ship, and got all that I could out of her, yet I could not forbear getting up to the top of a little mountain and looking out to sea, in hopes of seeing a ship; then fancy at a vast distance I spied a sail, please myself with the hopes of it, and then after looking steadily, till I was almost blind, lose it quite, and sit down and weep like a child, and thus increase my misery by my folly.

  In the midst of the greatest composure of my mind, this would break out upon me like a storm, and make me wring my hands and weep like a child.

  But I needed none of all this precaution; for never man had a more faithful, loving, sincere servant than Friday was to me: without passions, sullenness, or designs, perfectly obliged and engaged; his very affections were tied to me, like those of a child to a father; and I daresay he would have sacrificed his life to save mine upon any occasion whatsoever—the many testimonies he gave me of this put it out of doubt, and soon convinced me that I needed to use no precautions for my safety on his account.

• 1843 — Charles Dickens. A Christmas Carol.

  It was a strange figure — like a child: yet not so like a child as like an old man, viewed through some supernatural medium, which gave him the appearance of having receded from the view, and being diminished to a child's proportions.

  "I have come to bring you home, dear brother!" said the child, clapping her tiny hands, and bending down to laugh. "To bring you home, home, home!"

  And you're to be a man!" said the child, opening her eyes, "and are never to come back here; but first, we're to be together all the Christmas long, and have the merriest time in all the world."

• 1913, Edward Alsworth Ross, The Old World in the New: The Significance of Past and Present Immigration to the American People, page 139:

  A steel-town superintendent of schools finds the bulk of the children of the Slavs "rather sluggish intellectually."