"Middle-class" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... initiating nucleus of engineers and skilled mechanics. If it is an educated class, its existence implies a class of educators, and just as far as it does get educated the schoolmasters will be skilled and educated men. The shabby-genteel middle-class schoolmaster of the England of to-day, in—or a little way out of—orders, with his smattering of Greek, his Latin that leads nowhere, his fatuous mathematics, his gross ignorance of pedagogics, and his incomparable snobbishness, certainly does not represent the ...
— Anticipations - Of the Reaction of Mechanical and Scientific Progress upon - Human life and Thought • Herbert George Wells
... the tables wine flowed freely, and a few of the young men soon ordered it at the one where our girls were seated. It is more commonly used at meals abroad than with middle-class Americans at home, and nearly all partook. Neither Bess nor Dwight, however, would take it and, seeing this, Faith and Hope, caring little about it, also declined, though they had never been taught conscientious ...
— All Aboard - A Story for Girls • Fannie E. Newberry
... expression by his journey through the manufacturing districts of Gloucestershire, more particularly by the fine scenery of the Vale of Stroud. The whole seemed to him a smiling scene of prosperous industry and middle-class comfort. ...
— The Life of Thomas Telford by Smiles • Samuel Smiles
... to be an errand boy, a clerk, a chauffeur, a salesman or a house man. You might have placed him in almost any middle-class walk in life. Perhaps, thought Arthur, he might even be a good detective! yet his personality scarcely ...
— Aunt Jane's Nieces in Society • Edith Van Dyne
... puzzle me and my colleague. Mme. Flachet and I always amuse ourselves by trying to guess from appearances. Well, the cloak comes from a good dress-maker, but not from a great one. It is fine and well-made, but it has no style. I think they are middle-class people, prince. But how stupid I am! You know M. Palmer—well, a little while ago he came to ...
— Parisian Points of View • Ludovic Halevy
... power of language wasn't exhausted. The response was discouragingly weak—an occasional government investigation, an impassioned protest from a few individuals, a placid charity, were about all that the middle-class public had to say about factory life. The cynical indifference of legislatures and the hypocrisy of the dominant parties were all that politics had to offer. The Lawrence strike touched the most ...
— A Preface to Politics • Walter Lippmann
... and the two women were ready to go. Already milor and his gallant English friends were busy once more transforming themselves into grimy workmen or seedy middle-class professionals. ...
— The League of the Scarlet Pimpernel • Baroness Orczy
... feet that pass him, he would probably feel grieved if the strong hand of some clear-headed individual lifted him up out of the gutter's filth and he was informed that much depended upon one's view being from a level, not an incline. We do not Judge our middle-class citizens by our cooks, and it is apt to suggest unwisdom, to express it very mildly, to gauge the men and women workers of the stage by beer-hall habitues ...
— Volume 10 of Brann The Iconoclast • William Cowper Brann
... was alarmed for the Bradley blood! Sarah feared for the pollution of that sacred fluid derived from English yeomen (at best), filtered through the middle-class expatriates of a nation itself hopelessly middle class beside the pure strain of a race of kings that was old and majestically forgotten ere Romulus was dreamed of! Back, back through those mysterious Etruscans, back to the very gods ...
— Margarita's Soul - The Romantic Recollections of a Man of Fifty • Ingraham Lovell
... quite complacently afloat. Your male associates must render you support, be capable of looking the part and playing up generally, if your enjoyment is to be complete. And for all that Marshall Wace, frankly, couldn't be depended on. Not only was he too unmistakably English and of the middle-class; but the clerical profession, although he had so unfortunately failed it, or it so unkindly rejected him, still seemed to soak through, somehow, when you saw him in public. A whiff of the vestry queerly clung to his ...
— Deadham Hard • Lucas Malet
... installed then in the big library on the first-floor, adjoining the drawing-room, its other door opening on the passage opposite M. Mouillard's door, and its two large windows on the garden. What a look of good antique middle-class comfort there was about it, from the floor of bees'-waxed oak, with its inequalities of level, to the four bookcases with glass doors, surmounted by four bronzed busts of Herodotus, Homer, Socrates, and Marmontel! Nothing had been moved; the books ...
— The Ink-Stain, Complete • Rene Bazin
... them much possibility for divergence of opinion about these "Rules." She foresaw a certain narrowness and hardness. She herself had made her fight against the characteristics of Sir Isaac and—perhaps she was lacking in that aristocratic feeling which comes so naturally to most successful middle-class people in England—she could not believe that what she had found bad and suffocating for herself could be agreeable and ...
— The Wife of Sir Isaac Harman • H. G. (Herbert George) Wells
... at a time. They seem, both of them, as if petrified. Everyone else has a subject for conversation—ladies, for instance, people in society, the upper ten—all these sets have some topic or other. It is the thing, but somehow people of the middle-class, like you and I, seem constrained and taciturn. How does that come about, batuchka? Have we no social interests? Or is it, rather, owing to our being too straightforward to mislead one another? I don't know. What is ...
— The Continental Classics, Volume XVIII., Mystery Tales • Various
... Parliament was past praying for. Long before 1795 the Irish aristocracy had lost whatever power for good it ever possessed, and most of the resolute reformers of Wolfe Tone's middle-class Protestant school had turned, under the enthralling fascination of the French Revolution, into revolutionaries. Reform had been refused in 1782; again, and without coercion from the Volunteers, ...
— The Framework of Home Rule • Erskine Childers
... is not a hobby to be cultivated if your means allow the luxury of better accommodation. The travelling German has a habit of taking off his boots when he journeys in the train by night—and a carriageful of lower middle-class Huns, thus unshod, in the temperature at which railway compartments are habitually kept in Germany, is an environment which makes neither for comfort ...
— The Man with the Clubfoot • Valentine Williams
... is this: He comes to tea. I do all I can to put him at his ease. He merely sits and scowls at me. Then I show him our manuscripts. At this he becomes really angry, and tells me I've no business to call myself a middle-class woman. So we part in a huff; and next time we meet, which was to-night, he walks straight up to me, and says, 'Go to the Devil!' That's the sort of behavior my mother complains of. I want to know, what ...
— Night and Day • Virginia Woolf
... Small, cautious, middle-class, had been the ideals of aboriginal New York; but it suddenly struck the young man that they were singularly coherent and respectable as contrasted with the chaos of indiscriminate appetites which made up its modern tendencies. ...
— The Custom of the Country • Edith Wharton
... the times and adapted itself to the new desires and growing needs of men. Its aristocratic prejudices have not been allowed longer to confine its privileges and its operations to one class alone of the community,—and in identifying itself with the system of middle-class education, Oxford has won new claims to gratitude and to respect, and now exercises a wider and more confirmed authority over the thought of England than ever before. To us, who take pride in her ancient fame, who honor her ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. IV, No. 26, December, 1859 • Various
... long period. I read other books of his. I read The Young Idea, and The Happy Family, and, I think, his critical work on George Gissing. The Happy Family marked a new stage in his development. It has some really piquant scenes, and it revealed that minute knowledge of middle-class life in the nearer suburbs of London, and that disturbing insight into the hearts and brains of quite unfashionable girls, which are two of his principal gifts. I read a sketch of his of a commonplace crowd walking around a bandstand which brought me to a real decision ...
— When Winter Comes to Main Street • Grant Martin Overton
... it leaps to the embrace of the atom it selects, but only under the influence of powerful affinities; and what it clasps once, it clasps for ever. That is the pure air which we drink in on the heather-clad heights—not the venomous air of the crowded casino, nor even the close air of the middle-class parlour. It thrills and nerves us. How we smile, we who live here, when some dweller in the mists and smoke of the valley confounds our delicate atmosphere, redolent of honey and echoing the manifold murmur of bees, with that stifling miasma of ...
— The British Barbarians • Grant Allen
... always be inspired with instantaneous indignation about the persecuted Jews in Russia. We have heard less about them since we heard more about the persecuting Jews in Russia. I fear there are a great many middle-class Englishmen already who wish that Trotsky had been persecuted a little more. But even in those days Englishmen divided their minds in a curious fashion; and unconsciously distinguished between the Jews whom they had never seen, in Warsaw, and the Jews whom they ...
— What I Saw in America • G. K. Chesterton
... knew that the family had no principles and no scruples, nothing was ever said against the morals of the Grand-I-Vert. At the beginning of this book it is necessary to explain, once for all, to persons accustomed to the decencies of middle-class life, that the peasants have no decency in their domestic habits and customs. They make no appeal to morality when their daughters are seduced, unless the seducer is rich and timid. Children, until the State takes possession of them, are used either as capital ...
— Sons of the Soil • Honore de Balzac
... satisfying the House. Mr. Clynes pointed out that large numbers of the working-classes now took their long holidays in August. Mr. Palmer was of opinion that the working-classes could pay well enough; it was the middle-class that would suffer most; and Mr. R. McNeill, following up this assertion, suggested (without success) that for the sake of poverty-stricken M.P.'s the House should adjourn ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 159, July 21, 1920 • Various
... imposed from above and without, or to accept those restrictions of society, self-imposed by man's own codified and corrected observations of the natural world and his own impulses. He jeers at the one as hypocrisy and superstition and at the other as mere "middle-class respectability." He himself is the perpetual Ajax standing defiant upon the headland of his own inflamed desires, and scoffing at the lightnings either of heaven or society. Neither devoutness nor progress but mere personal expansion is his goal. The humanist ...
— Preaching and Paganism • Albert Parker Fitch
... [THE DUCHESS.] At middle-class party I play at ECARTE - And I'm by no means a beginner; To one of my station The remuneration - Five guineas a night and my dinner. I write letters blatant On medicines patent - And use any other you mustn't; And vow my complexion Derives its perfection ...
— Songs of a Savoyard • W. S. Gilbert
... forget the pioneer squatter, the Oxford scholar disguised as a 'rouseabout,' and the digger and bushranger of a past generation; who will sacrifice something of dramatic effect in the endeavour to produce a faithful and finished picture of colonial middle-class society. As qualifications for such work, Clarke had exceptional courage, straightness of eye, and a decided taste for exposing shams, superadded to a forcible and satirical ...
— Australian Writers • Desmond Byrne
... "German middle-class taste," he commented, "but in this matter we certainly gave them a lead. I suppose the idea is that childish fancy is dead and that it is only decent to erect some sort ...
— When William Came • Saki
... England as the engine of civilisation, as an evangelising power, as the John the Baptist of the nations—a country with a mission. For so beautiful a woman, of so worldly a stock, of a society so in the front of things, she had some Philistine notions, some quite middle-class ideals. It was like a duchess taking to Exeter Hall; but few duchesses so afflicted had been so beautiful and so young, so much of the worldly world—her father was high in the household of an illustrious person. ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... another. Although in range and sweep of general knowledge Sir Walter Scott was far more vast than Jane Austen, he confessed amazement at the depth of her specific knowledge of every-day English middle-class society. Most of the great novelists have made, like Jane Austen, a special study of some particular field. Hawthorne is an authority on Puritan New England, Thackeray on London high society, Henry James on cosmopolitan super-civilization. ...
— A Manual of the Art of Fiction • Clayton Hamilton
... the verdure of the native inhabitants. It is delightful to realize the fact that while the West End of London is flaunting its splendors and the East End in struggling with its miseries, these great middle-class communities are living as comfortable, unpretending lives as if they were in one of our thriving townships in the huckleberry-districts. Human beings are wonderfully alike when they are placed ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... middle-class well-being will by that time have been consumed; the families which for generations have visibly incorporated the German spirit will less than others contrive to secure special advantages by profiteering and evading the laws; as soon as their modest possessions are taxed away or consumed ...
— The New Society • Walther Rathenau
... one conveniently may say) can understand and speak the tongue it has been learning. In England we have a method that for obtaining the least possible result at the greatest possible expenditure of time and money is perhaps unequalled. An English boy who has been through a good middle-class school in England can talk to a Frenchman, slowly and with difficulty, about female gardeners and aunts; conversation which, to a man possessed perhaps of neither, is liable to pall. Possibly, if he be a bright exception, he may be able ...
— Three Men on the Bummel • Jerome K. Jerome
... They were divinely appointed to be the guides of nations and the counsellors of kings, but they could not be kings themselves. As the duty of the Sudra was to serve, of the Vaisya to till the ground and follow middle-class trades or crafts; so the business of the Kchatryas was to fight the public enemy, and of the Brahman to propitiate ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Vol. 1 • Various
... grand Mahogany Bedstead, 9-1/2' x 8', with posts and testers complete, meant for Rajas and Zemindars. Can also accommodate 4 middle-class people comfortably. Going for Rs. 500."—Advt. in ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 156, June 18, 1919 • Various
... many middle-class individuals whom he knew, who had money, would get into trouble, he would shake his head. It didn't do to talk about those things. If it came up for discussion among such friends as with him passed for close, he would deprecate the folly of the thing. "It was all right to do it—all men do those ...
— Sister Carrie • Theodore Dreiser
... the blundering of the watch is made to bring about the denouement of the main action. The Merry Wives of Windsor is an exception to this plan of construction. It is Shakspere's only play of contemporary, middle-class English life, and is written almost throughout in prose. It is his only pure comedy, except ...
— Brief History of English and American Literature • Henry A. Beers
... and was sold to Praeneste, but was nevertheless manufactured in Rome.(33) But as the net proceeds even of retail business flowed for the most part into the coffers of the great houses, no industrial and commercial middle-class arose to an extent corresponding to that increase. As little were the great merchants and great manufacturers marked off as a distinct class from the great landlords. On the one hand, the latter were from ancient times(34) simultaneously traders ...
— The History of Rome (Volumes 1-5) • Theodor Mommsen
... rare is it for a gentleman new-chum to find a berth of that sort, perhaps he may after he has become "colonized," but at first he will have to go straight away and fell bush, chop firewood, drive cattle, or tend pigs. About the best advice I ever heard given to middle-class men, who thought of emigrating to New Zealand, was couched in some ...
— Brighter Britain! (Volume 1 of 2) - or Settler and Maori in Northern New Zealand • William Delisle Hay
... monarch nor the King of Prussia had his household with him; nor did Alexander at Tilsit or Erfurt. There, as at Dresden, they ate at Napoleon's table. These courts, the Emperor used to say, were mean and middle-class; it was he who arranged the etiquette and set the tone. He invited Francis to visit him and dazzled him with his splendor. Napoleon's luxury and magnificence must have made him seem like an Asiatic satrap. There, as at Tilsit, ...
— The Happy Days of the Empress Marie Louise • Imbert De Saint-Amand
... "How very middle-class you are, Miss Rider!" he scoffed. "Those verses have been acclaimed by some of the best critics in the country as reproducing all the beauties of the ...
— The Daffodil Mystery • Edgar Wallace
... her,' continued Alaric, 'that's all my eye. Love is a luxury which none but the rich or the poor can afford. We middle-class paupers, who are born with good coats on our backs, but empty purses, can have nothing ...
— The Three Clerks • Anthony Trollope
... scornful of privilege, practically supporters of that mode of freedom which regards life as a remorseless conflict. Not a few of the young men (some of these the hardest and most successful workers) came from poor, middle-class homes, whence, but for Sir Job's foundation, they must have set forth into the world with no better equipment of knowledge than was supplied by some 'academy' of the old type: a glance distinguished ...
— Born in Exile • George Gissing
... meet a man or a woman, yellow-faced and probably negligently dressed and armed—prowling for food. These people would have the complexions and eyes and expressions of tramps or criminals, and often the clothing of prosperous middle-class or upper-class people. Many of these would be eager for news, and willing to give help and even scraps of queer meat, or crusts of grey and doughy bread, in return for it. They would listen to Bert's story with avidity, ...
— The War in the Air • Herbert George Wells
... any human society the parents are the most important people. The division is not between education and the lack of it, or wealth and the lack of it, or breeding and the lack of it. It is not the aristocracy that matters supremely; nor the "great middle-class"; nor the masses; nor the teachers; nor the doctors; nor the servants of modern industrialism. The classification is a biological one—into parents and non-parents. The non-parents may be invaluable in their way, if only ...
— Woman and Womanhood - A Search for Principles • C. W. Saleeby
... bands of steel to the huge granitic cliff of English puritanism. No account was taken of his manifold virtues and graces: no credit given him for his extraordinary achievements: he was hounded out of life because his sins were not the sins of the English middle-class. The culprit was in[1] much nobler and better than ...
— Oscar Wilde, Volume 1 (of 2) - His Life and Confessions • Frank Harris
... skin, did not arouse any curiosity or interest in me. The middle-class merchant or clerk from the big towns is repugnant to me, whether well or ill. I would exchange a curt salute with those liverish parties and go my way on ...
— Caesar or Nothing • Pio Baroja Baroja
... stated more concretely, if not more accurately, than was done at the opening of the paper, by saying that the ideal of rural betterment is to preserve upon our farms the typical American farmer. The American farmer has been essentially a middle-class man. It is this type we must maintain. Agriculture must be made to yield returns in wealth, in opportunity, in contentment, in social position, sufficient to attract and to hold to it a class of intelligent, ...
— Chapters in Rural Progress • Kenyon L. Butterfield
... passed the frontier the douaniers returned to their fishing opposite the little cabaret where we had some needed refreshment. It is curious what satisfaction middle-class officialdom in Continental Europe gets out of fishing. It is their one passion, apparently, if their work lies near a well-stocked stream. The chef de bureau goes fishing, the commissionnaire goes fishing, and everybody goes fishing. ...
— The Automobilist Abroad • M. F. (Milburg Francisco) Mansfield
... other words, be something of a "substantial middle class," dependent on the wealthy and on their expenditure of wealth, but presumably imbued with the Victorian middle-class illusion that they are of some account in their own right. Under the due legal forms and sanctions this, somewhat voluminous, middle-class population would engage in the traffic which is their perquisite, and would continue to believe, in some ...
— An Inquiry Into The Nature Of Peace And The Terms Of Its Perpetuation • Thorstein Veblen
... not a grain of romance in one of them," she announced. "Curious that the sons of the rich nearly always have round faces, no particular features, and a tendency to bulge. I intend to have a romance—old style—good old style—before the vogue of the middle-class realists. There's nothing in life but youth and you only have it once. I'm going to have a romance that means falling ...
— The Sisters-In-Law • Gertrude Atherton
... appearance. He stands for the new and virile element, for which the reforms of the Sixties had been the preparation. These reforms, one-sided and imperfect as they may have been, had none the less sufficed to create new economic conditions. On the one hand, a well-to-do middle-class, recruited almost entirely from non-aristocratic strata, sprang up; on the other, an industrial proletariat. Maxim Gorki emerged from this environment: and as a phenomenon he is explained by this essentially modern antithesis. He flung himself into the literary movement ...
— Maxim Gorki • Hans Ostwald
... our old poets. He evidently believed in them with all his heart; and it would have been a good thing for England if our educators since had followed his example. If the time wasted, almost, in Latin and Greek by so many middle-class boys, had been given to Milton and Shakspere, Chaucer and Langland, with a fit amount of natural science, we should have been a nobler nation now than we are. There is no more promising sign of the times than the increased attention paid ...
— Caxton's Book of Curtesye • Frederick J. Furnivall
... be compelled to cast a slur upon the Literary profession, but observation shows me that it still contains within its ranks writers born and bred in, and moving amidst—if, without offence, one may put it bluntly—a purely middle-class environment: men and women to whom Park Lane will never be anything than the shortest route between Notting Hill and the Strand; to whom Debrett's Peerage—gilt-edged and bound in red, a tasteful-looking volume—ever has been and ever will remain a drawing- room ...
— The Angel and the Author - and Others • Jerome K. Jerome
... 1599), one year the junior of the immortal Milton (born 1608), and some fifteen years older than George Fox (born 1624). Of his earlier years we know nothing; but, to judge from many passages in his writings, he appears to have received a good middle-class education, and to have been brought up a dutiful follower of the Church as by law established. When arrived at man's estate, he settled as a small trader in London, of which City he probably became ...
— The Digger Movement in the Days of the Commonwealth • Lewis H. Berens
... gilded folly revels, let us leave the solemn chamber of science and of art, men have chilled it with the foul and withering breath of infidelity and materialism, let us leave the busy arena of commerce, men are gloating over gain and gold in their hidden corners; let us rest with that sturdy, active, middle-class, where the mechanic's ingenious conceptions puzzle and captivate the most listless observer; let us watch the busy minds and busier fingers of those men, so fascinated by their daily toil, that all ...
— The Doctor's Daughter • "Vera"
... would be called a born flirt. She is pretty, charming, and talented; but she is cold, unresponsive, selfish, and futile. She is also eminently respectable after the English middle-class manner. She has ambition, but she lacks the will-power to school herself and the determination to accomplish. She is rich in goods but very poor in goodness. She is often moved profoundly by beautiful thoughts and uplifting emotions of which she herself is the pleasing, pulsating centre; but her ...
— Celibates • George Moore
... Franco-Prussian War Frederick-Charles, Prince French people self-centred attitude of conventions in dress of girls interest of women in their children lack of regard for, on part of Northern races defence of fine qualities of difficulties of interpreting conversation, cramped lives of middle-class women religious question among Freycinet, M. de appointed Minister of Public Works ability displayed by, as a Republican statesman excellent qualities of succeeds M. Waddington as premier official changes made by Freycinet, Madame de author's ...
— My First Years As A Frenchwoman, 1876-1879 • Mary King Waddington
... couldn't overcome that argument, but in the long run, our cause will not be won permanently and definitely by the bread and butter and taxes argument, except as that sort of argument proves the justice of our cause and arouses love in the hearts of you middle-class people." ...
— In the Heart of a Fool • William Allen White
... wages, prices and tariffs, and he knows no history. The Germans in August, 1914, were still "Lancashire's best customers"—not a warlike race bent on winning world-empire by blood and iron. The social traditions of the middle-class urban population, from which the Territorials were drawn, had never fostered the military spirit, nor the power to recognise and understand that spirit in others. In such circumstances the sober zeal with ...
— With Manchesters in the East • Gerald B. Hurst
... of the new influences which have been brought to bear on the middle-class mind, with respect to Art, may be sufficiently seen in the great rise in the price of pictures which has taken place (principally during the last twenty years) owing to the interest occasioned by national ...
— On the Old Road Vol. 1 (of 2) - A Collection of Miscellaneous Essays and Articles on Art and Literature • John Ruskin
... progressive movement to be carried out, or a right to be vindicated, the insurrections rapidly spread throughout the whole city. But they always begin at some particular point. Paris, in its vast historical task, comprises two revolutionary classes, the "middle-class" and the "people." And to these two combatants correspond two places of combat; the Porte Saint Martin when the middle-class are revolting, the Bastille when the people are revolting. The eye of the politician ...
— The History of a Crime - The Testimony of an Eye-Witness • Victor Hugo
... could elevated taste demand in the way of literature? Nobody ever read the books; but Mrs. Sheldon's visitors were sometimes glad to take refuge in the Scottish scenery and the pictorial Vicar during that interval of dulness and indigestion which succeeds a middle-class dinner. Georgy read a great many books; but they were all novels, procured from the Bayswater branch of a fashionable circulating library, and were condemned unread by Mr. Sheldon, who considered all works of fiction perfectly equal in demerit, and stigmatised them, in a ...
— Birds of Prey • M. E. Braddon
... The middle-class society of the town was still, as far as he was concerned, a foreign world. Most of the townsfolk were as poor as church mice, but they concealed the fact skilfully, and seemed to have no other desire than to preserve appearances. "Money!" said Master Andres; "here there's only one ten-kroner ...
— Pelle the Conqueror, Complete • Martin Andersen Nexo
... country town. His old parents had brought him up in strict provincial ways, ignoring the boy's idiosyncrasies as much as possible. They did not want an exceptional and abnormal son, and they tried to put down his dreamy, self-conscious habits by forcing him into the common, middle-class, Evangelical groove. As soon as he got to college, however, the brooding, gifted nature had a moment of sudden and, as it seemed to the old people in Gainsborough, most reprehensible expansion. Poems were sent to them, cut out of one or the other of the leading ...
— Robert Elsmere • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... Christine should not be missed by anyone who wants to know in what a state of militant anticipation the Germans were living. The strongest searchlight has been thrown over the Hun, from the habitues of a middle-class boarding-house to members of the Junker breed. Whether these letters ought to be classed as fiction or not they contain facts, and as they are written in a style at once vivid and engaging my advice to you is to read them and not worry ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 153, Oct. 24, 1917 • Various
... luxury had gone far to weaken the fibre of that strong and opulent middle-class who had been the backbone of England, the entrenched Philistines. The value of birth as a moral asset which had a national duty and a national influence, and the value of money which had a social responsibility and a communal use, ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... of a little coldness creeping over his body. She was usually lighter when they were not entirely alone. Just now, in the midst of this commonplace, exceedingly middle-class evening party, with the Larkins, the Downings, and the Burtons chattering, warm, diffuse, and elate, about him, she stirred him with a little horror—not horror of herself, but of something ...
— In Connection with the De Willoughby Claim • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... affairs of Shelley, Hazlitt, and Burns. And afterwards they write essays on the lectures, and the names in order of merit are put in conspicuous places. You see how your little germ has grown? The illiterate middle-class of your ...
— The Sleeper Awakes - A Revised Edition of When the Sleeper Wakes • H.G. Wells
... with his Gulliver's Travels, so transparent upon the surface that a child reads the book with delight and remains happily ignorant that it is a satire upon humanity. And then, into the London of Defoe and Swift, and into the very centre of the middle-class mob, steps, in 1724, the bland Benjamin Franklin in search of a style "smooth, clear, and short," and for half a century, with consummate skill, shapes that style to his audience. His young friend Thomas Paine takes the style and touches it with passion, ...
— The American Mind - The E. T. Earl Lectures • Bliss Perry
... really. Then there's the middle-class like Mr. Thurston and Miss Avies who pretend to believe all that Mr. Warlock says, but of course, they don't believe a word of it, and they hope that this will prove his ruin. They know there won't be any Second Coming on ...
— The Captives • Hugh Walpole
... river is the point to which the authorities are directing their attention. On that river many battles must be fought and heavy risks incurred before any impression can be made on the enemy, all of which could be avoided by using the Tennessee river. This river is navigable for middle-class boats to the foot of the Muscle Shoals, in Alabama, and is open to navigation all the year, while the distance is but two hundred and fifty miles, by the river, from Paducah, on the Ohio. The Tennessee offers ...
— A Military Genius - Life of Anna Ella Carroll of Maryland • Sarah Ellen Blackwell
... any sleeper. The pillows were of lambs' wool, as good as the best pillows. And, in a big chest in each hovel, were good, new, clean tunics, cloaks, rain-cloaks, and with them sandals, shoes, hats, rain-hats and all sorts of clothing, not as if for slaves, but as if for middle-class farmers, prosperous ...
— Andivius Hedulio • Edward Lucas White
... Jethro was transformed into a middle-class citizen of Thebes, and started on his mission of inquiry. During the day some officials came to the establishment and made many inquiries after the missing lads. Not contented with denials, they went through the whole buildings, examining all ...
— The Cat of Bubastes - A Tale of Ancient Egypt • G. A. Henty
... found himself in a strange and truly foreign land, a queer, cold, dismal country inhabited by vast quantities of "second-class sahibs," as he termed the British lower middle-class and poor, a country of a strange greenness and orderedness, where there were white servants, strangely conjoined rows of houses in the villages, dangerous-looking fires inside the houses, a kind of tomb-stones on all house-tops, strange horse-drawn vehicles, ...
— Snake and Sword - A Novel • Percival Christopher Wren
... that? And those are the kind of people Switzerland was full of. Some were alone, and some were impersonally conducted in a very loose sort of way. Wherever you wanted to go they were sure to be ahead, and kicking up a middle-class dust that choked you. The loud sound of their incessant talk echoed from snow peak to snow peak. And their terrible clothes, chosen evidently "not to show the dirt" (but they did), came between your eyes and any beauty of scenery there might be, ...
— The Smart Set - Correspondence & Conversations • Clyde Fitch
... the history of its development from small beginnings to its present impressive magnitude, have analyzed the theory of its intentions, and have expounded its extraordinary influence over what may be called the middle-class culture of our present-day America. It would be beyond the scope of my equipment to add another solemn treatise to the extensive list already issued by the tireless Chautauqua Press. My own experience ...
— The Unpopular Review, Volume II Number 3 • Various
... off? Palliatives—palliatives—and whoy? Because they object to th' extreme course. Look at women: the streets here are a scandal to the world. They won't recognise that they exist—their noses are so dam high! They blink the truth in this middle-class counthry. My bhoy"—and he whispered confidentially—"ut pays 'em. Eh? you say, why shouldn't they, then?" (But Shelton had not spoken.) "Well, let'em! let 'em! But don't tell me that'sh morality, don't tell me that'sh civilisation! What ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... about, and our visitors had to pay for admission at a little kiosk by the gate. At the side of the road stood a travel-stained middle-class automobile, with a miscellany of dusty luggage, rugs and luncheon things therein—a family automobile with father no doubt at the wheel. Sir Richmond left his own trim coupe at ...
— The Secret Places of the Heart • H. G. Wells
... to shake hands, nurse?" once exclaimed a child cynic. The nurse was nonplussed. The middle-class mother answers the ...
— A History of Nursery Rhymes • Percy B. Green
... the fastidious eye; he had no pride in his business nor any initiative; his only virtues were not doing certain things and hard work. "Your uncle," said my mother—all grown-up cousins were uncles by courtesy among the Victorian middle-class—"isn't much to look at or talk to, but he's a Good Hard-Working Man." There was a sort of base honourableness about toil, however needless, in that system of inversion. Another point of honour was to rise at or before dawn, ...
— Tono Bungay • H. G. Wells
... the great army of what may be termed 'middle-class books.' They are bound usually in half-bindings, when they are not in the publisher's cloth, and are good, clean, sound, copies of such works as county histories, antiquarian books, sets of the learned ...
— The Book-Hunter at Home • P. B. M. Allan
... the Villa Joos, and am beginning to enjoy a study of middle-class provincial life. The ladies do all the house-work. We have breakfast (a bite) in the kitchen at 8.30 a.m., then I go to make soup, and when I come back after lunch for a rest, "the family" are dressed ...
— My War Experiences in Two Continents • Sarah Macnaughtan
... many of Keene's middle-class protagonists are peculiar and exceptional, and much of their humour lies in their eccentricity, they are characters themselves, rather than types of English characters. Are they really observed and drawn from life, do they really exist just as they are, or are they partly evolved from the depths ...
— Social Pictorial Satire • George du Maurier
... almost universally a rather heavy version of the French art, with perhaps a compote with the veal to give local colour. In the small hotels in little provincial towns the meals are served at the times that the middle-class German of the north usually eats them, and are an inferior copy of what he gets in his own home. As a warning I give what any enterprising traveller looking for the food of the country from the kitchen of a little inn ...
— The Gourmet's Guide to Europe • Algernon Bastard
... Golden would have saved any foreign observer a great deal of trouble in studying America. He was an almost perfect type of the petty small-town middle-class lawyer. He lived in Panama, Pennsylvania. He had never been "captain" of anything except the Crescent Volunteer Fire Company, but he owned the title because he collected rents, wrote insurance, and ...
— The Job - An American Novel • Sinclair Lewis
... not so much among the wealthy upper classes that the mischiefs of this useless and expensive mummery are felt, as amongst the middle and working classes. An expensive funeral is held to be "respectable." Middle-class people, who are struggling for front places in society, make an effort to rise into the region of mutes and nodding plumes; and, like their "betters," they are victimised by the undertakers. These fix the fashion for the rest; "we must do as Others do;" and most people submit to ...
— Thrift • Samuel Smiles
... to open a biography with some account of the subject's ancestry. Chesterton, in his Browning, after some excellent foolery about pedigree-hunting, makes the suggestion that middle-class ancestry is far more varied and interesting than the ...
— Gilbert Keith Chesterton • Maisie Ward
... to this case let me cite that of the ex-soldier S. He reached the age of twenty-two with a very creditable history. Born of middle-class parents he went through high school and ranked in the upper third of his class for scholarship. His physique was good; he was a joyous, popular young fellow; and wherever he went was pointed out as the clean young American so representative ...
— The Foundations of Personality • Abraham Myerson
... groups and leaders: Christian and Socialist Trade Unions; Federation of Belgian Industries; numerous other associations representing bankers, manufacturers, middle-class artisans, and the legal and medical professions; various organizations represent the cultural interests of Flanders and Wallonia; various peace groups such as Pax ...
— The 2001 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency.
... must be clearly understood. In spite of the fact that middle-class men and professional men are interested in the movement, it is nevertheless a distinctly working-class revolt. The world over, it is a working-class revolt. The workers of the world, as a class, are fighting the capitalists of the world, as a class. The so-called great middle class is a growing ...
— Revolution and Other Essays • Jack London
... of the English and French Club was a Mr. Vieweg, at that time, I believe, the largest manufacturer of sulphate of quinine in Europe. Mr. Vieweg was that rara avis amongst middle-class German business-men, a born sportsman. He had already made two sporting trips to Central Africa after big game, and rented a large shooting estate near Brunswick. In common with the other members of the Club, he treated me very kindly and hospitably, and I often had quaint repasts at his house, ...
— The Days Before Yesterday • Lord Frederick Hamilton
... "What rags these scribblers wear!" and then, casting them over the arm, with a gesture that meant: "Well, they must be brushed, but Heaven knows if they will stand it without coming to pieces!" would next discover in the pockets a great quantity of middle-class things, and ...
— Old and New Masters • Robert Lynd
... typical lower middle-class, nothing-in-particular young man, but there was a certain truculence indicated by his square jaw, and that sort of self-possession which sometimes accompanies physical strength was evidenced in his manner as, tossing the paper aside, he ...
— Tales of Chinatown • Sax Rohmer
... from the main matter in hand. There is a tradition, for example, that men of his name were prominent in the feudal ages; it is based upon little beyond a coincidence of surnames and the fact that Browning used a seal with a coat-of-arms. Thousands of middle-class men use such a seal, merely because it is a curiosity or a legacy, without knowing or caring anything about the condition of their ancestors in the Middle Ages. Then, again, there is a theory that he was of Jewish blood; a view which is perfectly conceivable, ...
— Robert Browning • G. K. Chesterton
... barley; ale, the poor man's wine; hardship, the fear of debt, the dear society of weans and wife, of brothers and sisters, proud of each other, knowing so few, and finding amends for want and obscurity in books and thought. What a love of nature! and—shall I say it?—of middle-class nature. Not great, like Goethe, in the stars, or like Byron, on the ocean, or Moore, in the luxurious East, but in the homely landscape which the poor see around them—bleak leagues of pasture and stubble, ice, and sleet, and rain, and snow-choked ...
— Modern Eloquence: Vol II, After-Dinner Speeches E-O • Various
... some tramp or outcast, or other creature of a low station. He had laid his plans well in this curious, involuntary cerebration. Those big, bare footprints were ample disguise for a well-clad, well-groomed, well-shod middle-class man of a skilful and lucrative employ. The next moment his heart sank like lead. He was followed! He heard the pursuit in the dark! Swift, unerring, leaping along the dusty road, leaving its own footprints as a testimony against him. For he had recognized its nature ...
— The Crucial Moment - 1911 • Charles Egbert Craddock (AKA Mary Noailles Murfree)
... ordinary, middle-class house, wherein sudden illness brings so much strain and upset, Pixie would have expended herself in service, and have found comfort in so doing, but in the great ordered house all moved like a well-oiled ...
— The Love Affairs of Pixie • Mrs George de Horne Vaizey
... was hysterical. To expect a summons to death and public shame, to find—Bunning. Bunning—that soft, blithering, emotional, religious, middle-class maniac—Bunning! "Soft-faced" Bunning, as he was called, was the man of Olva's year in whom the world at large found most entertainment. The son of some country clergyman, kicked and battered through the slow, dreary years at some small Public School, he had come up to Saul's with an intense, ...
— The Prelude to Adventure • Hugh Walpole
... in my apprehension for Vernon. I, as before when I wrote, continue to see them a little; Not that I like them much or care a bajocco for Vernon, But I am slow at Italian, have not many English acquaintance, And I am asked, in short, and am not good at excuses. Middle-class people these, bankers very likely, not wholly Pure of the taint of the shop; will at table d'hote and restaurant Have their shilling's worth, their penny's pennyworth even: Neither man's aristocracy this, nor God's, God knoweth! Yet they are fairly descended, they give ...
— Amours de Voyage • Arthur Hugh Clough
... Nipe's hideaway. He wondered if it were furnished in the fashion that a Nipe's living quarters would be furnished on whatever planet the multilegged horror had come from. Probably it had the same similarity as Robinson Crusoe's island home had to a middle-class ...
— Anything You Can Do ... • Gordon Randall Garrett
... are Mr. Yeats and Lady Gregory, and therefore less acquainted with them. If one may judge from his writings the intimates of Mr. Martyn have been among his own landlord class, the priests, and the politicians. It is the landlords and middle-class people that occupy the foreground of his plays, Peg Inerny in "Maeve" (1899) being the only important character a peasant, unless Mrs. Font in "The Enchanted Sea" (1902) can be called a member of a class that she was born to, but from which her marriage ...
— Irish Plays and Playwrights • Cornelius Weygandt
... subsequent determination not to propose for the hand of Miss Bines lay in the hopelessly middle-class leanings of the lady who might have incurred the supreme honour of becoming his mother-in-law. Had Mrs. Bines been above talking to low people, a catastrophe might have been averted. But Mrs. Bines was not above it. ...
— The Spenders - A Tale of the Third Generation • Harry Leon Wilson
... mind in which I looked forward to the first performance of my work was a unique experience which I have never felt either before or since. My kind sister Clara fully shared my feelings. She had been living a wretched middle-class life at Chemnitz, which, just about this time, she had left to come and share my fate in Dresden. The poor woman, whose undoubted artistic gifts had faded so early, was laboriously dragging out a commonplace bourgeois ...
— My Life, Volume I • Richard Wagner
... as discontent with monarchy, and its obvious failure as a satisfactory form of government, brought in aristocracy, so at the beginning of the nineteenth century discontent with aristocracy was rife, and a new industrial middle-class looked for "Parliamentary reform," to ...
— The Rise of the Democracy • Joseph Clayton
... shortage of officers for the army. As the army itself is steadily increasing every day, it should have been easy in each regiment for him, gradually and quite quietly, to increase the number of officers drawn from the middle-class; indeed, the change would have practically effected itself, for the Minister of War had a hundred-and-one means of bringing it about. But this rescript has put a check on what might otherwise have been a natural process of change, and unless William now settles matters ...
— The Schemes of the Kaiser • Juliette Adam
... into Oriental modes of thought and feeling, can under any shadow of presence be classed with 'the garbage of the brothels.' In the lack of lucidity, which is supposed to distinguish English folk, our middle-class censores morum strain at the gnat of a privately circulated translation of an Arabic classic, while they daily swallow the camel of higher education based upon minute study of Greek and Latin literature. When English versions of Theocritus and Ovid, of ...
— Supplemental Nights, Volume 6 • Richard F. Burton
... wed me, should demand a metamorphosis of your present self. I should take you as you are, gladly. I should encourage you to be always exactly as you are—a radiant, irresistible member of the upper middle-class, with a certain freedom of manner acquired through a life of peculiar liberty. Can you guess what would be my principal wedding-gift to you? Meg Speedwell had her dairy. For you, would be built another outhouse—a ...
— Zuleika Dobson - or, An Oxford Love Story • Max Beerbohm
... in the same path. At the present time in Scotland, through the foresight of the man who established institutions "for all classes," and combined business with philanthropy in making the rich help the poor, there is plenty of middle-class ...
— Chapters in the History of the Insane in the British Isles • Daniel Hack Tuke
... middle-class girl were regularly provided with a dowry, the matrimonial enthusiasm of young men would probably be stimulated." We cannot imagine how people think of these ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 146, June 24, 1914 • Various
... to be done. I knew this Intelligence Department already, by reputation. Alfred had spoken to me about it. It was a vast suite of rooms on the first floor of a middle-class house, where a number of men in civilian clothes were at work. They all bore the military stamp. We had to wait in a large room filled with draughtsmen and typewriters, and on the wall hung a map, on a huge scale, of the frontier of ...
— A Nest of Spies • Pierre Souvestre
... secured another place, this time in a middle-class family. I remained there nearly a year and was considered by my mistress a model of willingness, patience, endurance, gentleness, and all the other slavish virtues. I never spoke except when spoken to and then I answered so respectfully! The children ...
— An Anarchist Woman • Hutchins Hapgood
... brutal and physical directness utterly foreign to the spirit of the regular pastoral. This is, on the whole, what one would expect. The coarse realism that gave life and vitality to the novel, that characteristic product of middle-class cynicism and humour, finds no place in the pastoral of literary tradition. The conventional grace of the pastoral could offer no material to the novel. It is true that when we speak of the bourgeois spirit of the novella ...
— Pastoral Poetry and Pastoral Drama - A Literary Inquiry, with Special Reference to the Pre-Restoration - Stage in England • Walter W. Greg
... horizons, and is surprised at finding himself in touch with the preoccupations which govern human communities. After disembarking he had spent two hours in a cafe in Boulogne, listlessly watching the middle-class families who passed their time in the monotonous placidity of a life without dangers. Then the special train for the passengers from South America had brought him to Paris, leaving him at four in ...
— The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse • Vicente Blasco Ibanez
... in Paris, like many rich middle-class people do, mixing with their own particular set, without going among other people, and proud of knowing a Deputy, who might perhaps be a Minister some day, while two Chiefs of ...
— The Works of Guy de Maupassant, Vol. 1 (of 8) - Boule de Suif and Other Stories • Guy de Maupassant
... Assistant and his Sanford and Merton. But Marie Derville, when its accent of Berquin is allowed for, is a varied and interesting tale, affording many a glimpse into that country guarded about with such jealous walls—middle-class childhood in France. Marie is the child of a sea-captain who goes to China, disappears for many years, and comes back at last, after a narrow escape from massacre, saying, "How strange it was to find myself on the eve of ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science - April, 1873, Vol. XI, No. 25. • Various
... guests, and those who were there seemed to have conned this placard to their improvement, for there was not much exercise of any sort of taste. Of course there were two or three brides, and there was the inevitable English nice middle-class tourist with his wife, the latter ram-roddy and uncompromising, in big boots and botanical, who, in response to a gentleman who was giving her information about travel, constantly ejaculated, in broad English, "Yas, ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner
... himself deposed that he was about seven," and still more surprised when he discovered that the volume contained "no fewer than twenty-seven cases of the actual marriage in church of the little boys and girls of middle-class folk." The result of Dr. Furnivall's researches is contained in the one-hundred-and-eighth volume (original series) of the Early English Text Society's Publications, dealing with child-marriages, divorces, ...
— The Child and Childhood in Folk-Thought • Alexander F. Chamberlain
... industrial activities were winning recognition as independent and largely self-sufficing units. The gild, a closely compacted brotherhood, existing partly for religious and educational purposes and partly for the control of handicrafts and the exchange of goods, became the center of middle-class energy, and in thousands of instances hedged in the lives of the humbler artisans. Thus it was largely from those who knew no wider world than the fields which they cultivated and the gilds which governed their standards and output that the early settlers ...
— The Fathers of New England - A Chronicle of the Puritan Commonwealths • Charles M. Andrews
... than the deputies. Now, this public is that of the Palais-Royal, consisting of strangers, idlers, lovers of novelties, Paris romancers, leaders of the coffee-houses, the future pillars of the clubs, in short, the wild enthusiasts among the middle-class, just as the crowd which threatens doors and throws stones is recruited from among the wild enthusiasts of the lowest class. Thus by an involuntary selection, the faction which constitutes itself a public power is composed of nothing but violent minds and violent hands. Spontaneously ...
— The Origins of Contemporary France, Volume 2 (of 6) - The French Revolution, Volume 1 (of 3) • Hippolyte A. Taine
... the small lower middle-class household knows how often the life of the little "general" resembles that of an animal rather than a human being. All day long she drudges in a muddling, inefficient way, continually scolded for her inefficiency yet never really taught how to do anything properly. Her work is never done, for she ...
— The Healthy Life, Vol. V, Nos. 24-28 - The Independent Health Magazine • Various
... passion of determination not exceeded by Balzac himself. He had enchanted the public without an effort; he was the best-beloved of modern writers almost from the outset of his career. But he had in him at least as much of the French artist as of the middle-class Englishman; and if all his life he never ceased from self-education but went unswervingly in pursuit of culture, it was out of love for his art and because his conscience as an artist would not let him do otherwise. We have been told ...
— Views and Reviews - Essays in appreciation • William Ernest Henley
... Shelley, of Keats. Even in an age when records are more common, we can only discern a little and can explain less of the silent influences at work that begin to make the man. There are few things more surprising than that, in an age given up chiefly to industrial development, two prosperous middle-class homes should have given birth to John Ruskin and William Morris, so alien in temper to all that traditionally springs from such a soil. In the case of Morris there is nothing known of his ancestry ...
— Victorian Worthies - Sixteen Biographies • George Henry Blore
... power. This feebleness of the Government, as well as this feebleness of parties, proceeds from the fact that each one represents only the interests of a single class in society. Some rely upon the clergy and nobility; others upon the middle-class aristocracy, and others still upon the lower ...
— Hortense, Makers of History Series • John S. C. Abbott
... seeking to attach it to themselves, to reign by it, and even with it, should that be necessary. Socialism, therein lies the future, the new instrument of government; and the kings tottering on their thrones, the middle-class presidents of anxious republics, the ambitious plotters who dream of power, all dabble in socialism! They all agree that the capitalist organisation of the State is a return to pagan times, to the olden slave-market; and they all talk of breaking for ever ...
— The Three Cities Trilogy, Complete - Lourdes, Rome and Paris • Emile Zola
... lads by the time they "graduate" from the middle school into the higher school have had some elementary military training. A higher-school youth knows how to handle a rifle and has fired twice at a target. At Kami Suwa the problem of how middle-class boys should procure economical lodging while attending their classes had been solved by self-help. An ex-scholar of twenty had managed to borrow 4,000 yen and had proceeded to build on a hillside a dormitory accommodating thirty-six boarders. ...
— The Foundations of Japan • J.W. Robertson Scott
... taken from the everyday life of middle-class men and women like ourselves, it is true that the lives of the wealthy afford more incident, and that there is a sort of glamour about them which it is difficult to resist. But with a sufficient subtlety the whole poignancy ...
— On Something • H. Belloc
... bound apprentice to a moneter, or money-changer. Poor Isel had mourned bitterly over this desertion. To her mind, as to that of most people in her day, the priesthood was the highest calling that could be attained by any middle-class man, while trade was a very mean and despicable occupation, far below domestic service. She recognised, however, that Haimet was an exception to most rules, and was likely to take his own ...
— One Snowy Night - Long ago at Oxford • Emily Sarah Holt
... cronies had organized a small supper at a middle-class restaurant on the previous night in honor of his return, and as a natural consequence Mr. Benjamin Levy walked down the Strand at about half-past ten on the following morning, on his way to the office, a little paler than usual, and with a suspicion of a "head." It would have suited him very ...
— The New Tenant • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... of the mob one way or the other," he said. "I despise them utterly; but the troops and the mobiles are sufficient to man the forts and the walls, and I believe that middle-class corps, like the one I have entered, will fight manfully; and the history of Paris has shown over and over again that the mob of Paris, fickle, vain-headed, noisy braggadocios as they are, and always have been, ...
— A Girl of the Commune • George Alfred Henty
... municipal reforms of William IV.'s reign had been to give the middle classes a share in the government of the country, and it was supremely fortunate that the Queen, by a providential gift of temperament, thoroughly understood the middle-class point of view. The two qualities that are most characteristic of British middle-class life are common sense and family affection; and on these particular virtues the Queen's character was based; so that by a happy intuition she was able to interpret and ...
— The Letters of Queen Victoria, Volume 1 (of 3), 1837-1843) • Queen Victoria
... institutions; yet they are generally the very last to be and feel at home in America. A Norwegian mountaineer, in his deerskin doublet, and with a dozen English words picked up on the voyage, will Americanise himself more in one year on an Illinois prairie than an intelligent, middle-class Englishman will do in ten, in the best society of Massachusetts. Now, I am not dallying with a facetious fantasy when I express the opinion, that the life and song of the English lark in America, superadded to the other institutions and influences ...
— A Walk from London to John O'Groat's • Elihu Burritt
... vaguely, for she did not profess to understand His intentions or His will, having a very limited confidence in the priests, whom she regarded merely as the sons of peasants revolting from military service. Her father, a middle-class Parisian, never had imposed upon her any particular principles of devotion, and she had lived on thinking little about religious matters until her marriage. Then, her new station in life indicating more strictly her apparent duties toward the Church, she had conformed punctiliously to this ...
— Strong as Death • Guy de Maupassant
... described to me as, a "pair of parlors." The stereotyped brace is senseless and ugly, but one of the necessaries of life to our ambitious housewife. She would scout as vulgar the homely cheerfulness of the middle-class Englishman's single "parlor" where the table is spread and the family receives visitors. Having saddled himself with a house too big for his family, and stocked the showrooms with plenishings so fine that the family are afraid to use them unless when there is company, ...
— The Secret of a Happy Home (1896) • Marion Harland
... were entirely unable to do justice to its possibilities. The romantic movement touched it into new life, and a school arose which contrived by dint of graceful melody and ingenious orchestral device to invest with real musical interest the simple stories in which the German middle-class delights. The most successful of these ...
— The Opera - A Sketch of the Development of Opera. With full Descriptions - of all Works in the Modern Repertory • R.A. Streatfeild
... there must be a little truth in the accusation, or it would not have been invented. There is no smoke without fire; and these certainly are the faults of which the cleverest middle-class young men whom I know are most ...
— Sanitary and Social Lectures and Essays • Charles Kingsley
... of the middle-class dairy farmer begins at five in the morning. Rising about that hour, his first duty is to see that the men have all appeared, and that they are engaged in milking the cows. He breakfasts at six, or half-past, and ...
— The Toilers of the Field • Richard Jefferies
... well as various pamphlets published by the National Guilds League. The attitude of the Syndicalists to Guild Socialism is far from sympathetic. An article in "The Syndicalist'' for February, 1914, speaks of it in the following terms: a Middle-class of the middle-class, with all the shortcomings (we had almost said 'stupidities') of the middle- classes writ large across it, 'Guild Socialism' stands forth as the latest lucubration of the middle-class mind. It is a 'cool steal' ...
— Proposed Roads To Freedom • Bertrand Russell
... brougham upholstered in cream, and driven by a chauffeur in a violet and cream livery, created some slight sensation in Spenser Road, S.E. Mollie Gretna's conspicuous car was familiar enough to residents in the West End of London, but to lower middle-class suburbia it came as something of a shock. More than one window curtain moved suspiciously, suggesting a hidden but watchful presence, when the glittering vehicle stopped before the gate of number 67; and the lady at number 68 ...
— Dope • Sax Rohmer
... religious change was the more easily made because many of the bishops were now members of noble families, instead of springing, as had usually been the case in the better days of the mediaeval Church, from poor or middle-class parentage. In the reign of Richard II. a Courtenay, a kinsman of the Earl of Devonshire, had become first Bishop of London (see p. 263), and then Archbishop of Canterbury. He was succeeded in his archbishopric ...
— A Student's History of England, v. 1 (of 3) - From the earliest times to the Death of King Edward VII • Samuel Rawson Gardiner
... Marquise San Carlos. "All the world is here," said she. Certainly it looked as if all Havana filled the Tacon, which is a very large theater. Every box was full, and the parquet, as Lola told me, contained the haute volee of the town; the open balconies were sacred to the middle-class, while in the upper gallery were the nobodies, with their children, poor things! decked out with flowers and trying to keep awake through the very tiresome and demode performance of "Macbeth." Tamberlik sang. What a glorious ...
— In the Courts of Memory 1858-1875. • L. de Hegermann-Lindencrone
... today, in a way which a book written thirty or forty years before would not have been. They have electricity, telephones, trains, buses, and many other things that we still use regularly today. Of course one major difference is that few people today have servants, while middle-class and upper-class families of the eighteen nineties would certainly have ...
— More About Peggy • Mrs G. de Horne Vaizey
... to be a regular reader of the Standard, and I should add rightly said to be, was Queen Victoria. The Queen, as Lord Salisbury said at the time of her death, understood the English people exactly, and especially the English middle-class. Therefore she would have been wise to have read the Standard as the representative and interpreter of that class even if she had not liked the paper on its merits. As a matter of fact, however, its note happened to be pitched exactly to suit ...
— The Adventure of Living • John St. Loe Strachey
... specifically to the Cockney poets. An old French poem on the Land of Cockaigne described it as an ideal land of luxury and ease. The best authorities do not accept Cockney as a derivative form. The Cockney School was composed of Londoners of the middle-class, supposedly ill-bred and imperfectly educated. The critics took special delight in dwelling upon the humble origin of the Cockneys, their lack of university training, and especially their dependence on translations for their knowledge of ...
— Early Reviews of English Poets • John Louis Haney
... It is then necessary to explain what seamen are. They are "these brave, watchful fellows who have our lives in their hands." At this, the chairman looks at the table stewards, who stand about the walls with their napkins and their middle-class grins; brave, watchful fellows trying to look as if they really held our lives and not our ...
— Ship-Bored • Julian Street
... diseased fancy of doing good; to come upon her in the street of a low neighbourhood, followed by a low crowd, supported and championed by a low fellow—well, it was not agreeable! His high breeding made him mind it less than a middle-class man of like character would have done; but with his cold dislike to all that was poor and miserable, he could not fail to find it annoying, and had entered the house intending to exact a promise for the future—not the future ...
— Weighed and Wanting • George MacDonald
... Chippewa—or that comfortable, middle-class section of it which got its exercise walking home to dinner from the store at noon, and cutting the grass evenings after supper—laughed as it read this ...
— Half Portions • Edna Ferber
... me some of the christening sugar-plums for you. She has been very ill, but it is hoped that she is going on better; the infant is not much to look at, having suffered from a fall which his mother had." M. Arouet, the father, of a good middle-class family, had been a notary at the Chatelet, and in 1701 became paymaster of fees (payeur d'epices) to the court of exchequer, an honorable and a lucrative post, which added to the easy circumstances of the ...
— A Popular History of France From The Earliest Times - Volume VI. of VI. • Francois Pierre Guillaume Guizot
... that an entertainment of this kind would be productive of beneficial results. In order to make it a success, it would have to be attended by some of the members of the local Hunt, and not in any way bear the stamp of a charity ball; for untravelled middle-class people in this country are, as a rule, very "select," and eaten up with social ambition, and many who would not think of attending a subscription dance, would be attracted by "an invitation Hunt ball." Besides, after all, even if local residents and farmers pay their ...
— The Horsewoman - A Practical Guide to Side-Saddle Riding, 2nd. Ed. • Alice M. Hayes
... were several other speakers, but no words penetrated to his brain. He felt as if he must stifle. He felt the globe of earth cracking, breaking in two under his feet, and for the first time in his life he was acutely aware of the division of humanity. All through his career he had taken his middle-class position for granted; he tacitly agreed that there were employees and employers; but in his own case his camaraderie had hidden the cleavage. Now he saw a double world—on the one side the moneyed owners, on the other the crowded, ...
— The Nine-Tenths • James Oppenheim
... most cordially despised. The morality was that of Dickens's 'Christmas Carol,' and the political aim that of sentimental socialism. Thus, though all three candidates promised to support Mr. Gladstone's Government, one of Fitzjames's rivals represented the stolid middle-class prejudices, and a second the unctuous philanthropic enthusiasm, which he had denounced with his whole force in 'Liberty, Equality, Fraternity.' No combination could have been contrived which would have set before him more clearly the characteristics of the party of which he still considered ...
— The Life of Sir James Fitzjames Stephen, Bart., K.C.S.I. - A Judge of the High Court of Justice • Sir Leslie Stephen
... mats, fitted upon the floor of every Japanese room, are always six feet long by three feet broad. The largest room in the ordinary middle-class house is a room of eight mats. A room of one hundred mats is something ...
— Glimpses of an Unfamiliar Japan - First Series • Lafcadio Hearn
... ordered room, polished to perfection, steadfast in its shining Sunday state, appeared as the irremovable seat of middle-class tradition, of family virtue, of fidelity and cleanliness, of sacred immutable propriety. And into the bosom of these safe and comfortable sanctities Ranny had brought horror and defilement ...
— The Combined Maze • May Sinclair
... too. They were Dons, older than BOB, but his intimate friends. They had but little belief, but BLACK often preached, and BRIGHAM held undecided views on life and matrimony, having been brought up in the cramped atmosphere of a middle-class parlour. At Oxford, the two took pupils, and helped to shape BOB's life. Once BRIGHAM had pretended, as an act or pure benevolence, to be a Pro-Proctor, but as he had a sardonic scorn, and a face which could become a marble mask, the Vice-Chancellor called upon ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 99., October 25, 1890 • Various
... when the Concordat was in its most flourishing condition, a young man belonging to a wealthy and highly respected middle-class family went to the office of the head of the police at P——, and begged for his help and advice, which was ...
— Library of the World's Best Mystery and Detective Stories • Edited by Julian Hawthorne
... a burgomaster's daughter. That means prosperous, narrow-minded, middle-class people. She's convent-bred, devout. She's still young or she'd be married. She's altogether without experience. She's frightened just as a child would be over what's going on in the house. And the prayer she says when she goes to bed would be just the nice little prayer a child would say, ...
— Mary Wollaston • Henry Kitchell Webster |
