Ropemaker's Alley in Moorfields was a highly respectable street at the beginning of last century; a lodging there was far from squalid.
"Daniel Defoe"
William Minto
A small, squalid town, a "manufacturing town" the guide-book calls it.
"Afoot in England"
W.H. Hudson
Barbarous as we remember the Rome of the Popes, we must imagine it just a hundred times more barbarous, more squalid, picturesque, filthy, and unsafe if we would know what it was a hundred years ago.
"The Countess of Albany"
Violet Paget (AKA Vernon Lee)