Refuge - applying for admittance

An illustration of a crowd of men waiting in the rain for admittance to a refuge. From the book 'London: a Pilgrimage' by Blanchard Jerrold and Gustave Doré, 1872. Jerrold writes: 'London spends the revenue of many a Continental State on the unfortunate within her gates... No single fact more forcibly illustrates the enormous trade of London, than the million sterling which the metropolitan pocket disgorges at the call of charity', the money being spent on 'hospitals, refuges, orphanages, soup-kitchens, [and] retreats kept for the old by heroic Little Sisters of the Poor'.