Lodging-house

After some altercation with the "mot" of the "ken" (mistress of the lodging-house) about the cleanliness of a knife or fork, my new acquaintance began to arrange "ground," &c., for the night's work.

A successful Australian digger — successful, not merely in siftings and washings, but bearing the title, and its best credentials, of a “nuggetter” − came down from Forest Creek recently and took up his abode in a low lodging-house in Little Bourke Street, Melbourne.

[…] going about the county half-naked, but having good clothes, perhaps sent forward to the lodging-house by his jomer (girl); this is very often a profitable trade; the shallow-cove of course selling all the clothes he does not need himself.

WHEN it comes to the question of numbers with this tramps’ army, another factor of serious portent has to be taken into account: the cheap lodging-houses.

“That’s it!” cried Clare, pleased to think that she had reverted to the real pronunciation. “What place is The Herons?” “A stylish lodging-house. ’Tis all lodging-houses here, bless ’ee.”

In Germany and England the tramps usually eat their set-downs in cheap restaurants or at lodging-houses.

1908, O. Henry, “The Shocks of Doom” in The Voice of The City: Further Stories of the Four Million, Doubleday, Page & Co., 1914, pp. 96-7, He was either young or old; cheap lodging-houses had flavored him mustily; razors and combs had passed him by; in him drink had been bottled and sealed in the devil’s bond.

The porte-cochère of his former lodging-house was not yet open; he took up his stand close beside it.

[…] I went for a night to a lodging-house in Bow, where the charge was only eightpence.

A boy called Hewitt, awaiting transportation on the Euryalus hulk in the mid-1830s, told an interviewer that the swell-mob would often call into lodging-houses in order to recruit "go-alongs" for thieving expeditions: "boys are delighted [they] think it an honour to go with a swell-mob".