As a work of Realist fiction, “The Furnished Room” captures the harsh realities of life on New York City’s Lower West Side at the turn of the 20th century. One of the ways that O. Henry makes the story feel true-to-life is through his rendering of Mrs. McCool’s Irish dialect, as seen in the following passage:
’Tis right ye are, ma’am; ’tis by renting rooms we kape alive. Ye have the rale sense for business, ma’am. There be many people will rayjict the rentin’ of a room if they be tould a suicide has been after dyin’ in the bed of it.”
“As you say, we has our living to be making,” remarked Mrs. Purdy.
Mrs. McCool’s Irish dialect comes across in several different grammar and spelling choices that O. Henry makes in this passage. “It is” becomes “’tis,” “you” becomes “ye,” “keep” becomes “kape,” “reject” becomes “rayjict,” “told” becomes “tould” and so on. Mrs. Purdy—the housekeeper—also demonstrates a subtle use of dialect in the way that she says “we has our living to be making” rather than “we have a living to make.” Though Mrs. Purdy’s dialect is more subtle throughout the story, it’s likely that she, too, is a first- or second-generation Irish immigrant.
In addition to communicating the two housekeepers' country of origin, their dialects also indicate that they are not college-educated and are thus from a lower-class background. It’s possible that O. Henry chose to make the housekeepers lower-class characters in order to demonstrate that, despite being unsympathetic and money-driven people, they are not at fault for the dehumanizing tenement housing system of which they are a part. As Mrs. Purdy says, they have their "living to be making." In this way, O. Henry shows how capitalism itself forces all the characters into exploitative relationships.
