"Victorian" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... verses were never written to please the public at all. They were written only for fine scholars, and even the titles of many of them cannot be explained by a person devoid of some Greek culture. So the little book, which appeared quite early in the Victorian Age, was soon forgotten. Being forgotten it ran out of print and disappeared. Then somebody remembered that it had existed. I have told you that it was like the tone of a little pipe or flute as compared with the organ music of the larger poets. ...
— Books and Habits from the Lectures of Lafcadio Hearn • Lafcadio Hearn
... these plans had all been arranged, and the garrison was fully occupied, the mine was opened, and Exsuperius, a soldier of the Victorian legion, sprung out, followed by a tribune named Magnus, and Jovianus, a secretary, and an intrepid body of common soldiers, who, after slaughtering all the men found in the temple into which the mine opened, went cautiously forward and ...
— The Roman History of Ammianus Marcellinus • Ammianus Marcellinus
... the humbler passers-by often called, with approval, "good, plain American," but whose point of departure was Georgian. He had the instinct for that which springs out of the soil. For this reason he did not shrink from an Early Victorian note—the first note of the modern, prosperous New York—in decoration; and the same taste impelled him toward the American in art. While Neighbor Smith displayed his Gainsboroughs, and Neighbor Jones his Rousseaus or Daubignys, Conquest quietly picked up a thing here and ...
— The Wild Olive • Basil King
... is one of the few ladies left who possess this Victorian, accomplishment. "And you advise my leaving my sister's child in his present precarious state of mind alone ...
— The Window-Gazer • Isabel Ecclestone Mackay
... passed the railroad station and the great statue of Rameses the Second, Pharaoh of Egypt. The Nile came into view, and Farid pointed out the row of hotels on the other side. The Shepheard's and the Nile Hilton flanked the older, Victorian bulk of the Semiramis, where they would stay. They sped across a bridge, entered a plaza full of honking horns and speeding cars, then moved to the comparative quiet of a street along the Nile embankment to ...
— The Egyptian Cat Mystery • Harold Leland Goodwin
... built of northern stone, with mullioned windows, twisted chimneys, peaked gables surmounted with stone balls, and a roof of flat slabs of the same yellow-brown stone that formed the walls. A section of black and white timbered Elizabethan work, a Queen Anne wing, and some early Victorian alterations made a strange conglomeration of styles of architecture; but the roses and ivy had climbed up and clothed ancient and modern alike, and Time had softened the jarring nineteenth-century additions, so that the whole now blended into a mellow, brownish ...
— A harum-scarum schoolgirl • Angela Brazil
... Galsworthy seems to me shocking. Surely there can be no difficulty about treating these writers as ordinary citizens of the Republic of Letters—a state, let us try to remember, that not only extends in space beyond the horizons of Tooting but in time beyond the Edwardian and even the Victorian era. ...
— Pot-Boilers • Clive Bell
... you are talking like the worst kind of aristocrat, the early-Victorian Whig, the man who has a strong belief in popular liberty, combined with an equally strong sense of ...
— Beside Still Waters • Arthur Christopher Benson
... at half-past one or at a quarter to two? I really am very fond of Aunt Charlotte, you know, though I find it awfully difficult to educate her. I sometimes despair of ever being able to bring her up properly at all, she is so hopelessly Early Victorian, poor thing. But, then, so many people are, aren't they? Now animals are never Early Victorian; that's why I respect them so. If you weren't a human being, Lubin—and a very nice one, as you are—what sort of an animal would you like ...
— Austin and His Friends • Frederic H. Balfour
... Musical Box On Sturminster Foot-bridge Royal Sponsors Old Furniture A Thought in Two Moods The Last Performance "You on the tower" The Interloper Logs on the Hearth The Sunshade The Ageing House The Caged Goldfinch At Madame Tussaud's in Victorian Years The Ballet The Five Students The Wind's Prophecy During Wind and Rain He prefers her Earthly The Dolls Molly gone A Backward Spring Looking Across At a Seaside Town in 1869 The Glimpse The Pedestrian "Who's ...
— Moments of Vision • Thomas Hardy
... build too much on that. In mid-Victorian days they labelled all sorts of things as unspeakable that we should speak about quite tolerantly. I dare say this particular aunt had only married a Unitarian, or rode to hounds on both sides of her horse, or something of that sort. Anyhow, we can't wait indefinitely for ...
— Reginald in Russia and Other Sketches • Saki (H.H. Munro)
... unmodernized, to Lady Henry's floor. That lady slept at the back of the house, so as to be out of noise. Her room was an old-fashioned apartment, furnished about the year Queen Victoria came to the throne, with furniture, chintzes, and carpet of the most approved early Victorian pattern. What had been ugly then was dingy now; and its strong mistress, who had known so well how to assimilate and guard the fine decorations and noble pictures of the drawing-rooms, would not have a thing in it ...
— Lady Rose's Daughter • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... Europe. 'Miss X' has traced it among early Christians, in early Councils, in episcopal condemnations of specularii, and so to Dr. Dee, under James VI.; Aubrey; the Regent d'Orleans in St. Simon's Memoirs; the modern mesmerists (Gregory, Mayo) and the mid-Victorian spiritualists, who, as usual, explained the phenomena, in their prehistoric way, by 'spirits[8].' Till this lady examined the subject, nobody had thought of remarking that a belief so universal had probably some basis of facts, or nobody if we except ...
— The Making of Religion • Andrew Lang
... breathless and rather frightened, for although of an adventurous spirit, which had led her to slide down the pillars of the verandah at night when her legs were longer than her years, and during the past winter to make a hardly less dignified exit by a side door when her worthy but hopelessly Victorian mother was asleep, this was the first time that she ...
— The Sisters-In-Law • Gertrude Atherton
... sea-defying rock. Here, like the shells of long-dead limpets, was armour that men encased themselves in long ago; here, too, were tapestries of many colours, beautiful as seaweed; no modern flotsam ever drifted hither, no early Victorian furniture, no electric light. The great trade routes that littered the years with empty meat tins and cheap novels were far from here. Well, well, the centuries will shatter it and drive its fragments on to distant shores. Meanwhile, while it yet stood, I ...
— The Sword of Welleran and Other Stories • Lord Dunsany
... properly place her in the front, was his wife—and to Queen Alexandra was given the first honour of the new reign in her creation, under special statute, on February 12th, as Lady of the Most Noble Order of the Garter—the greatest order of Knighthood in the world. Three days later the Royal Victorian Order in its highest form—G.C.V.O.—was given to the Duke of Argyll and the Duke of Fife. Lord Edward Pelham-Clinton, Major-General Sir John Carstairs McNeill, V.C., Sir Fleetwood Edwards and Sir Arthur J. Bigge, for many years ...
— The Life of King Edward VII - with a sketch of the career of King George V • J. Castell Hopkins
... intervention or assistance of a third party. But—and this is where the poignant touch comes in—she never had a love affair of her own. I could not understand why. It isn't that she's unattractive, being quite pretty in that feminine clinging way which we generally connect with the Victorian era. ...
— Our Elizabeth - A Humour Novel • Florence A. Kilpatrick
... undivided possession of the large indifferent apartment in which the nervous and mental troubles of the outer world eddied for a time on their way to the distinguished specialist. A bowl of daffodils, a handsome bookcase containing bound Victorian magazines and antiquated medical works, some paintings of Scotch scenery, three big armchairs, a buhl clock, and a bronze Dancing Faun, by their want of any collective idea enhanced rather than mitigated ...
— The Secret Places of the Heart • H. G. Wells
... of complete materialism which passed over Europe during what we call the Victorian period discouraged any personal investigation of forces beyond what could actually be proved by the senses. Numberless examples of natural phenomena were laughed to scorn as the illusions of the ignorant. People read their Bibles, ...
— Three Things • Elinor Glyn
... There was something splendidly barbaric about the girl, and yet the mixture of her childishness and her cynicism affected him unpleasantly rather than otherwise. His ideal woman—the woman of the early Victorian period—was submissive and clinging. He was perfectly assured that she would have borne her wrongs, and even her mother's wrongs, with humility. Meekness had always seemed to him the becoming mental ...
— The Miller Of Old Church • Ellen Glasgow
... when he wanted money to buy prints that were offered him, which was the only pleasure he had. The Musical Shepherdess at Hertford House is a good example of his style, and the description of it in Smith's catalogue shows in what estimation the artist was held in early Victorian days:—"This beautiful pastoral scene represents a bold rocky coast under the appearance of the close of day. The rustics have ended their labours and are recreating with music and dancing. A group composed of two peasants and a like ...
— Six Centuries of Painting • Randall Davies
... his man, came to clear away the breakfast things he found that the bacon and eggs had not been eaten. Barker was a stone-grey personage who looked like a mid-Victorian Liberal statesman. His gravity often passed into an air of despondent responsibility. "Mr. Jardine hasn't eaten his breakfast," he said to his wife, who was Gregory's cook. "It's this engagement of Miss Armytage's. He was more taken with her than ...
— Tante • Anne Douglas Sedgwick
... flat was situated; then a rather superior block, where the rents were much cheaper because they were called "dwellings"; and beyond that, the huddled small houses of a quarter with which no builder had interfered since early Victorian days. ...
— Finn The Wolfhound • A. J. Dawson
... qualification. It is quite conceivable, however, that circumstances might arise which would render such action not merely desirable but absolutely essential to the national well-being; indeed it is at least arguable that such circumstances have already arisen. The popular doctrine of the early Victorian era, that the welfare of the community could best be secured by allowing every man to seek his own interests in the way chosen by himself, has been greatly modified or wholly abandoned. So far are we from believing ...
— Cambridge Essays on Education • Various
... the stock simplified histories of the schools practically never heard of such a thing as a burgher, until he appears in a shirt with a noose round his neck. They certainly do not imagine anything of what he meant in the Middle Ages. And Victorian shopkeepers did not conceive themselves as taking part in any such romance as the adventure of Courtrai, where the mediaeval shopkeepers more than won their spurs—for they won the spurs of ...
— A Short History of England • G. K. Chesterton
... a man," I said, "an early Victorian Whig, whose chief ambitions were to reform the criminal law and abolish slavery. Well, this dull, estimable man in his leisure moments was Emperor of Byzantium. He fought great wars and built palaces, and then, when the time for fancy was past, went into the House of Commons ...
— The Moon Endureth—Tales and Fancies • John Buchan
... quite a new idea of poetry even in America, where the great American poet Poe introduced it into his compositions before Longfellow studied the "Kalevala." I told you that the work of Poe, small as it is, had influenced almost every poet of the great epoch, including Tennyson and the Victorian masters. But the work even of Poe was rather instinctive than the result of any systematic idea. The systematic idea was best illustrated when the study of the ...
— Books and Habits from the Lectures of Lafcadio Hearn • Lafcadio Hearn
... the butler, discreet, precise, incapable of error. Tomlinson had recovered his breath and his dignity. He was in his own domain. The very sight of the Mid-Victorian furniture gave him confidence. His skilled glance traveled to the decanter and the empty glass. He knew to a minim how much brandy had evaporated since his last survey ...
— The Strange Case of Mortimer Fenley • Louis Tracy
... The policeman will attend to the gas-man. We don't often get a chance to talk to a genuine antiquarian. I think, Mr. Blair, that you will be greatly interested in the architectural restoration of our parish church. It exemplifies the worst excesses of the mid-Victorian period. The church itself is one of the finest examples of the cruciform type. The south transept dates from the thirteenth century; the nave, clerestory, and north transept from the fifth. The chancel was restored in 1865, but I must confess that the treatment of the clerestory seems to me barbarous. ...
— Kathleen • Christopher Morley
... than to their acquaintance with the native mind, and it is eloquent of the regard in which His Excellency was held that, although he was a Knight Commander of St. Michael and St. George, a Companion of a Victorian Order, a Commander of the Bath, and the son of a noble house, he was known familiarly along the coast to all administrators, commissioners, even to the ...
— Bones - Being Further Adventures in Mr. Commissioner Sanders' Country • Edgar Wallace
... play may be obtained from any theatrical supply house. They must be of the style prevalent at the date of the play; Colonial clothes in a Mid-Victorian setting foredoom the play to failure. A curtain may also be hired from a theatrical supply house, but it is very simple to adjust one made at home by means of brass rings such as are used in hanging portieres. There should be a separation in the center so that the ...
— Book of Etiquette • Lillian Eichler
... celebrated and religiously observed by the Pythagoreans. Several great princes and emperors have formerly made good use of it. Octavianus Augustus, second emperor of the Romans, meeting on a day a country fellow named Eutychus —that is, fortunate—driving an ass named Nicon—that is, in Greek, Victorian—moved by the signification of the ass's and ass-driver's names, remained assured of all prosperity ...
— Gargantua and Pantagruel, Complete. • Francois Rabelais
... course, merely blunder into beauty; his methods are far from being accidental; by deliberate aims and principles he holds himself close to the regions of the decorative. He likes the rococo and the Victorian, ornament without any obvious utility, grace without any busy function. He refuses to feel confident that the passing of elegant privilege need be a benefit: "A maze of clipped box, old emerald sod, represented a timeless striving for superiority, for, at least, the illusion ...
— Contemporary American Novelists (1900-1920) • Carl Van Doren
... sum of its achievement be? What will it leave of things visible? Will it leave a London preserved and beautified, or will it but add abundantly to the lumps of dishonest statuary, the scars and masses of ill-conceived rebuilding which testify to the aesthetic degradation of the Victorian period? Will a great constellation of artists redeem the ambitious sentimentalities and genteel skilfulness that find their fitting mausoleum in the Tate Gallery? Will our literature escape at last from pretentiousness and timidity, ...
— An Englishman Looks at the World • H. G. Wells
... the situation, it would be desirable for the Government to promote special legislation along the lines of the Victorian Police Offences ...
— Report of the Special Committee on Moral Delinquency in Children and Adolescents - The Mazengarb Report (1954) • Oswald Chettle Mazengarb et al.
... street," as Tennyson calls it, is holy ground to the lover of literature: for at Number 67 lived Arthur Henry Hallam, and diagonally opposite, at Number 50, lived Elizabeth Barrett. This street—utterly commonplace in appearance—is forever associated with the names of our two great Victorian poets: and the association with Tennyson ...
— Robert Browning: How To Know Him • William Lyon Phelps
... with other countries she was immeasurably rich and prosperous. Her population during the long peace, interrupted only by the Crimean War and the Indian Mutiny, had multiplied beyond men's wildest dreams. Her manufacturers were amassing fortunes, her industry had no rival. The Victorian age was thought of as the beginning of a wonderful new era, in which, among the nations, England was first and the rest nowhere. The temporary effort of the French to create a modern navy disturbed the sense of security which existed and gave rise to the Volunteer movement, which ...
— Britain at Bay • Spenser Wilkinson
... architecture of his town house that he remained conservative, immovable, one might almost say Early-Victorian-Christian. His country house at Dulwich-on-the-Sound was a palace of the Italian Renaissance. But in town he adhered to an architecture which had moral associations, the Nineteenth-Century-Brownstone epoch. It was a symbol of his social position, his religious doctrine, and ...
— The Mansion • Henry Van Dyke
... are not necessarily expensive. Simple pine pieces, made by the village cabinet-maker or, sometimes, by an ingenious farmer in his leisure hours; Windsor and slat-back chairs; low four-post beds; trestle or tuckaway tables; even an occasional Victorian piece; all, if on simple lines, fit into such a house ...
— If You're Going to Live in the Country • Thomas H. Ormsbee and Richmond Huntley
... novelists, Bulwer (1805-1873), whose later stories are free from the immorality that stains the earlier, is one of the most widely read. The novels of Charles Kingsley (1819-1875) are among the justly popular productions in this department. Among the novelists of the late Victorian Era were Charles Keade, Blackmore, Stevenson, Kipling, Meredith, Hardy, and Mrs. ...
— Outline of Universal History • George Park Fisher
... In the true winter months deep sea fishing is not much favoured, except during the prevalence of westerly winds, when for days at a time the Pacific is as smooth as a lake; but in the rivers, from Mallacoota Inlet, which is a few miles over the Victorian boundary, to the Tweed River on the north, the stranger may fairly revel, not only in the delights of splendid fishing, but in the charms of beautiful scenery. He needs no guide, will be put to but little expense, for the country hotel accommodation is good and ...
— Ridan The Devil And Other Stories - 1899 • Louis Becke
... in any town, at almost any hour of the day. They are grey-haired, and sad, and grim, and they hold the more tenaciously to the promise of happiness in After Life because they have sacrificed, or permitted to pass by, the happiness of this. To a great extent it is a "Victorian" sacrifice. They are victims of that passing Belief which was convinced that a girl of gentle birth ought to administer to her parents, pay calls, uphold the Church, and do a little needlework all her life, unless some man came along to marry ...
— Over the Fireside with Silent Friends • Richard King
... of superheated fat (rarely renewed), and of the all-pervading gravy fabricated by chemical treatment of yeast, as that which we ourselves have acquired in regard to the old-established and painstaking cookery of the early Victorian and ...
— More Science From an Easy Chair • Sir E. Ray (Edwin Ray) Lankester
... Irish-American playwright, whose jovial prolixity enriched the American stage of the '60's and '70's. His "London Assurance" is included in the present Editor's collection of "Representative British Dramas: Victorian and Modern." ...
— Representative Plays by American Dramatists: 1856-1911: - Introduction and Bibliography • Montrose J. Moses
... [LXIX]. When we remember early and mid-Victorian conditions in English mills and the conditions of the sweat shops in New York and other American cities (vide "Susan Lenox"), we shall be less inclined to take a harsh view of industrial Japan during a period ...
— The Foundations of Japan • J.W. Robertson Scott
... politely. Now that Abdul is deposed from 'his infernal throne,' it is taken as a matter of course that the King will visit his successor. Well, let His Majesty betake himself and his tact and a full cargo of Victorian Orders to Constantinople, by all means. But, on the way, nestling in the very heart of Europe, perfectly civilised and strifeless, jewelled all over with freedom, is another country which he has not visited ...
— Yet Again • Max Beerbohm
... Adelaide, under Mr. McKinlay. The third from Rockhampton, under Mr. Walker; and the fourth from Brisbane, under Mr. Landsborough. These several expeditions were organised and started within a short period of each other. The steamship Victoria, Commander Norman, was despatched by the Victorian Government to the Gulf of Carpentaria to assist the explorers ...
— Journal of Landsborough's Expedition from Carpentaria - In search of Burke and Wills • William Landsborough
... Passing English of the Victorian Era. A dictionary of heterodox English, slang and phrase. ...
— Introduction to the Science of Sociology • Robert E. Park
... great novelist lending her Mrs. Behn, found the Novels and Plays too loose for her perusal, albeit in the heyday of the lady's youth they had been popular enough. As one might expect, Miss Julia Kavanagh, in the mid-Victorian era[17] (English Women of Letters 1863), is sad and sorry at having to mention Mrs. Behn— 'Even if her life remained pure,[18] it is amply evident her mind was "tainted to the very core. Grossness was congenial to her.... Mrs. Behn's indelicacy was useless and ...
— The Works of Aphra Behn, Vol. I (of 6) • Aphra Behn
... average conversation of average men throughout the whole of modern civilization in every class or trade is such as Zola would never dream of printing. Nor is the habit of writing thus of these things a new habit. On the contrary, it is the Victorian prudery and silence which is new still, though it is already dying. The tradition of calling a spade a spade starts very early in our literature and comes down very late. But the truth is that the ordinary ...
— Heretics • Gilbert K. Chesterton
... superior class which Providence or some unseen power has mercifully provided to govern, to rule, and to dominate. They are kind, charitable, and patronizing, and expect gratitude and subservience in return. As a mid-Victorian writer puts it: "What one wants to see is a kind and cordial condescension on the one side, and an equally cordial but still respectful devotedness on the other." But these are voices from a time ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Vol. 21 - The Recent Days (1910-1914) • Charles F. Horne, Editor
... thought of her imaginatively, this secluded rare thing so happily come to him, who was so young, so frank and fresh and so unhappily married (he was sure) to a husband at least happily mortal. Yes, dear Reader, even on that opening morning Mr. Brumley's imagination, trained very largely upon Victorian literature and belles-lettres, leapt forward to the very ending of this story.... We, of course, do nothing of the sort, our lot is to follow a more pedestrian route.... He lapsed into a vague series of meditations, slower perhaps but ...
— The Wife of Sir Isaac Harman • H. G. (Herbert George) Wells
... when Victorian standards and ideals began to dance an increasingly rapid jig before amazed lookers-on, who presently found themselves dancing as madly as the rest—in these years, there lived in Mayfair, in a slice of a house, Robert Gareth-Lawless and his ...
— Robin • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... the reign of Queen Anne that the sun began to rise on English cabinet work; it shone gloriously through the eighteenth century, and sank in early Victorian clouds. ...
— Furnishing the Home of Good Taste • Lucy Abbot Throop
... Borrow in temperament—said, that his appearance before the public as a devout agent of the Bible Society excited a 'burst of laughter from all who remembered the old Norwich days'; what matter if another 'scribbling woman,' as Carlyle called such strident female writers as were in vogue in mid-Victorian days—Frances Power Cobbe—thought him 'insincere'; these were unable to comprehend the abnormal heart of Borrow, so entirely at one with Goethe ...
— George Borrow and His Circle - Wherein May Be Found Many Hitherto Unpublished Letters Of - Borrow And His Friends • Clement King Shorter
... pastoral and Biblical dream: that a child was the most innocent and the wisest of us all. Wordsworth hailed him as "Mighty Prophet! Seer blest!" And in the next generation Victorian novelists took that dream seriously enough to make children the heroes and heroines of their most searching fictions. There had been no "children's literature" to speak of before, except for the oral and "popular" tradition, including lullabies and Mother Goose, some ...
— Songs of Childhood • Walter de la Mare
... Victorian era our ideas of what constitutes an act of rudeness have been modified. Then it would have been unthinkable that a woman should remain standing in a coach while men were seated. Now it is possible for a man to ...
— The Book of Business Etiquette • Nella Henney
... settled in 1609 by shipwrecked English colonists headed for Virginia. Tourism to the island to escape North American winters first developed in Victorian times. Tourism continues to be important to the island's economy, although international business has overtaken it in recent years. Bermuda has developed into a highly successful offshore financial center. A referendum on independence was ...
— The 2005 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency
... re-write it,' I said to myself, and I have already submitted to this eminent man of letters my rough scenario of the lines on which FIELDING'S novel should be brought home to the Georgian mind. In reply he has made a counter-suggestion that the characters should be rearranged on a Victorian basis, CHARLOTTE BRONTE replacing Sophia, THACKERAY Mr. Allworthy, while the title-role should be assigned to an enterprising publisher. But I am not without hope that ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 158, May 19, 1920 • Various
... such prices in England in early Victorian days are no longer valued, having suffered an eclipse similar to that undergone by the pictures of certain early Victorian Royal Academicians, and the loss of the shawl trade was a severe blow to Kashmir. With the exception of occasional specimens of these shawls, which, however, can be bought ...
— A Holiday in the Happy Valley with Pen and Pencil • T. R. Swinburne
... Mrs. Fabian to the best room that opened from the large kitchen, and to their horror they saw that the sofa referred to was a hideous Victorian affair of walnut frame upholstered in ...
— Polly's Business Venture • Lillian Elizabeth Roy
... reaching the house door until it had wandered in curves over the entire garden. That was the Georgian touch! The modern touch was shown in Councillor Cotterill's bay windows, bath-room and garden squirter. There was stabling, in which were kept a Victorian dogcart and a Georgian horse, used by the Councillor in his business. As sure as ever his wife or daughter wanted the dogcart, it was either out or just going out, or the Georgian horse was fatigued and needed repose. ...
— The Card, A Story Of Adventure In The Five Towns • Arnold Bennett
... with Stopford A. Brooke's Primer of English Literature. For more full and detailed treatment, Taine's History of English Literature, or Chambers' Cyclopaedia of English Literature, two volumes, with specimens of the writers of every period, are the best. E. C. Stedman's Victorian Poets is admirable, as is also his Poets of America. For a bird's eye view of American authors and their works, C. F. Richardson's Primer of American Literature can be studied to advantage, while for more full reference ...
— A Book for All Readers • Ainsworth Rand Spofford
... and stated that the alterations had destroyed the symmetry of the building so that it was no longer a monument to his ability. As a result his name was removed from the foundation stone, and today the building, which was said to be the finest example of Victorian Gothic in the country, does not bear the ...
— Report of the Chief Librarian - for the Year Ended 31 March 1958: Special Centennial Issue • J. O. Wilson and General Assembly Library (New Zealand)
... full-length portraits of an early Victorian date. The artist had spent a couple of months at Barracombe fifty years since, and had painted three generations of the Crewys family, who were then gathered together beneath its hospitable roof. His diligence had been more remarkable than his ability. At any other time John Crewys would ...
— Peter's Mother • Mrs. Henry De La Pasture
... of a multitude of things, while gems are individual things, for the most part, to be looked at separately. But I would not lay down a rule even about gems. Certainly the universal, awkward, faceting of all precious stones—which is a relic of the mid-Victorian period—is a vulgarity that one is glad to be rid of; but if one wants for any reason the special sparkle, here or there, which comes from it, why not use it? I would use it in stained-glass—have done so. If I have got my window already brilliant and the ...
— Stained Glass Work - A text-book for students and workers in glass • C. W. Whall
... with a quick movement, and a confusion of brilliant fabrics poured out over his knees. "You lived, Sire, in a period essentially cylindrical—the Victorian. With a tendency to the hemisphere in hats. Circular curves always. Now—" He flicked out a little appliance the size and appearance of a keyless watch, whirled the knob, and behold—a little figure in white appeared kinetoscope fashion on the dial, walking and turning. The tailor ...
— When the Sleeper Wakes • Herbert George Wells
... Davis and his partner, Jud Rush, who was once a cowboy in California, were picturesque in themselves because of the furnishings, as quaint and dusty as those pictured by Dickens. The furniture was mid-Victorian, the rugs and carpets worn by the feet of countless clients, and a musty odor of old books and papers permeated the air. It was like stepping back fifty years to enter ...
— Spring Street - A Story of Los Angeles • James H. Richardson
... year the export of gold from Victoria alone had very nearly reached half a million in value. In two years the population of the Victorian gold-fields almost equalled the whole population of the colony at the close of 1850. Most of the diggers lived in tents, and had absolutely no interest in the colony beyond the mere hope of profit from the diggings. If a more profitable ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Vol. 17 • Charles Francis Horne
... street—through all the beauty and freshness of the new city project the bones of the old: the lofty ruins, ivy-hung, of a huge Nob Hill Palace here; the mere foundation, bush-encircled, of a big old family mansion there; elaborate rusty fences of Mid-Victorian iron which enclose nothing; wide low steps of Mid-Victorian marble which lead nowhere. The San Franciscan speaks always with a tender, regretful affection of that dead city, but, as is natural, he speaks of it ...
— The Californiacs • Inez Haynes Irwin
... she admitted, "but you must remember that Mr. Ledsam is my only alternative, and I am not at all sure that he likes me. I am not sufficiently Victorian for his taste." ...
— The Evil Shepherd • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... the tool and finished product shared. The later period, however, presents a striking contrast. Hand-tool design, with few exceptions, continued vigorous and functional amidst the confusion of an eclectic architecture, a flurry of rival styles, the horrors of the jigsaw, and the excesses of Victorian taste. In conclusion, it would seem that whether seeking some continuous thread in the evolution of a national style, or whether appraising American contributions to technology, such a search must ...
— Woodworking Tools 1600-1900 • Peter C. Welsh
... who played his own part, Pierrot, with a fine sincerity and a sense of the great tradition in this genre, got his effect across to us with an admirable directness. Miss PHYLLIS PINSON looking charming in a mid-Victorian Latin-Quarterly sort of way (which is a very nice way), danced seriously, fantastically, delightfully, and with quite astonishing command of her technique—the sort of thing that nine infallible managers out of ten who know what the public wants would condemn ...
— Punch, 1917.07.04, Vol. 153, Issue No. 1 • Various
... England, however, we should not forget to mention what will appear to some the least desirable of them all. The fact that this particular feature is omitted by the most successful English poets of the Victorian School, as by other sentimentalists, would not excuse us in failing to give it at least a passing reference here; for Victorian, alas! does not by any means signify Alexandrian in regard to the periods of English poetry; and even if it be a sin to mention this ...
— Too Old for Dolls - A Novel • Anthony Mario Ludovici
... and the wives did not worry at their own little affairs, all went smoothly. Now, since going out there and fighting, they have come back giving themselves great airs, and talking about wounded honor, and ridiculous things of that sort that one reads of in early Victorian books. One does not know where it ...
— The Reflections of Ambrosine - A Novel • Elinor Glyn
... grizzled military moustache, but his hair was singularly black for a man of his years. He made no allusion in his conversation to the numerous campaigns in which he had distinguished himself, and the reason usually given for his reticence was that they dated back to such early Victorian days that he had to sacrifice his military glory at the shrine ...
— A Desert Drama - Being The Tragedy Of The "Korosko" • A. Conan Doyle
... of Westminster Hall, attributed to barristers of the Georgian and Victorian periods, are traceable to a much earlier date. There is the story of Serjeant Wilkins, whose excuse for drinking a pot of stout at mid-day was, that he wanted to fuddle his brain down to the intellectual standard of a ...
— Law and Laughter • George Alexander Morton
... a pre-Victorian, sentimentalist, looking out of an upstairs window, I believe, at a street—perhaps Fleet Street itself—full of people, is reported, by an admiring friend, to have wept for joy at seeing so much life. These arcadian ...
— Notes on Life and Letters • Joseph Conrad
... morning from his elder brother George, who was an officer in a line regiment. It had been written in the trenches before Sebastopol, for these events took place in the mid-Victorian period towards the end of the Crimean War. Or rather the letter had been begun in the trenches and finished in the military hospital, whither George had been conveyed, suffering from "fever and severe ...
— Smith and the Pharaohs, and Other Tales • Henry Rider Haggard
... was quite admirable as a Scots bank manager; Miss BLANCHE STANLEY, a really sound combination of essential good-nature and wounded dignity as a cook on the verge of giving notice. Miss GERTRUDE STERROLL tackled a vicaress of the Mid-Victorian era (authors' responsibility this) with a courage which deserves both ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 153, Aug 29, 1917 • Various
... secret agent, as an ingenious plotter in the interests of his country, he was a genius. He was a discovery of the late Lord Salisbury in the last days of the Victorian Era. At that time he had been a Foreign Office clerk, a keen-eyed young man with a lock of black hair hanging loosely across his brow. Lord Salisbury recognised in him a man of genius as a diplomat, and with his usual bluntness ...
— The White Lie • William Le Queux
... idea of the purpose of comedy is a combination of Aristotelian and mid-Victorian ideals: "die Sitten der Zuschauer zu bilden und zu bessern, ... wenn sie naemlich das Laster allezeit ungluecklich und die Tugend am Ende gluecklich sein laesst."[22] It is on the basis of this premise that he awards the comic crown to the Cap.[23] His extravagant encomium called ...
— The Dramatic Values in Plautus • Wilton Wallace Blancke
... Its three aisles were without ornament or architecture; there was no tower, but beside it stood a peculiar and unexplained erection, shaped like a pagoda, in three tiers of black and battered tar-boarding. It had a slight cant towards the church, and suggested nothing so much as a disreputable Victorian widow, in tippet, mantle and crinoline, seeking the support of a stone ...
— Joanna Godden • Sheila Kaye-Smith
... door upon them and Starmidge and Easleby glanced round before taking the chairs to which Mr. Stipp had pointed. There was little to see. A big, roomy desk, middle-Victorian in style, some heavy middle-Victorian chairs, a well-worn carpet and rug, a book-case filled with peerages, baronetages, county directories, Army lists, Navy lists, and other similar volumes of reference to high life, a map or two on the walls, a heavy safe in a corner—these ...
— The Chestermarke Instinct • J. S. Fletcher
... silly of her to lose her temper," replied Maisie. "She stalked out of the room like a queen of tragedy. Miss Maitland can't bear girls who give way to their impulses; she despises what she calls 'early Victorian hysterics', and I quite agree ...
— The New Girl at St. Chad's - A Story of School Life • Angela Brazil
... old. But Cynthia was not a good housekeeper and she did not re-cover the furniture when it got dingy, or re-paper the walls, or mend the carpets and bedclothes, and she never thought of such a thing as making new clothes for the doll family, so that of course their early Victorian frocks and capes and bonnets grew in time to be too shabby for words. You see, when Queen Victoria was a little girl, dolls wore queer frocks and long pantalets and boy dolls wore funny frilled trousers and coats which it would almost make ...
— Racketty-Packetty House • Frances H. Burnett
... whipcord, of a certain fig-tree has crept across the face of the grey rock forming a ridge or barricade against which decayed vegetation accumulates, there the BAEA flourishes, displaying an indeterminate line of mauve flowers above oval, crimpled leaves. Mauve, green and grey—the mauve of the Victorian age, the green of the cowslip, the grey of glistering, ...
— The Confessions of a Beachcomber • E J Banfield
... the world, a decisive way of stating what pass at the moment for facts, a quick manner of speaking—and the rest comes tout seul. This cocksureness is in the atmosphere of the day, just as fainting and curls and an appealing helplessness were in the atmosphere of an earlier Victorian period. ...
— Roden's Corner • Henry Seton Merriman
... and despair, are elaborated by a precision of truth and with a perfection of harmony worthy of Shakespeare himself, and minutely studied from the natural scenes in which the poet was born. If these verses alone survived out of the wreck of Victorian literature, they would demonstrate the greatness of the author as clearly as do the fragments of Sappho. Isabel (a study of the poet's mother) is almost as remarkable in its stately dignity; while Recollections ...
— Alfred Tennyson • Andrew Lang
... the character of typical Englishmen, Mr. Pendyce and Mr. Barter thought themselves far from the old beef and beer, port and pigskin types of the Georgian and early Victorian era. They were men of the world, abreast of the times, who by virtue of a public school and 'Varsity training had acquired a manner, a knowledge of men and affairs, a standard of thought on which it ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... century had its fling at the artificiality of the eighteenth century, and treated it with contempt as the age of doctrinaires. And now that the twentieth century is coming to the age of discretion, we hear a new term of reproach, Mid-Victorian. It expresses the sum of all villainies in taste. For some fifty years in the nineteenth century the English-speaking race, as it now appears, was under the sway of Mrs. Grundy. It was living in a state of most reprehensible respectability, and Art was tied to the apron-strings ...
— Humanly Speaking • Samuel McChord Crothers
... look much beyond Addington," said Jeff. "I believe I'm dotty over the old girl. I don't want her to go back to being Victorian, but I want her to be right—honest, you know, and standing for decent things. That's why you're going to ...
— The Prisoner • Alice Brown
... smaller doings are recorded in the perishable print of fading paper, and we have no care to stamp what little we have left of character upon our buildings. No one, at least it may be fervently hoped, will try in the future to reconstruct the ideals or the life of the Victorian Era from its architecture. Yet we are the heirs of all that is noblest in that greatest of all arts; and if you would test that, you need only look at any mediaeval French Cathedral with a seeing eye. You will find no meaningless mass of bricks and mortar, but the speaking record of ...
— The Story of Rouen • Sir Theodore Andrea Cook
... attention of the public towards the Gypsies; but he hopes to be able to do so without any romantic appeals on their behalf." He is far from having a romantic tone. He wields, as a rule, with any amount of dignity the massive style of the early Victorian "Quarterly Review" and Lane's so-called "Arabian Nights." Thus, speaking of Gypsy fortune- tellers, he says: "Their practice chiefly lies among females, the portion of the human race most given to curiosity and credulity." Sentences like this ...
— George Borrow - The Man and His Books • Edward Thomas
... miscellaneous knowledge outside lesson hours, yet she did not know the difference between Sheraton and Hepplewhite. Chairs and sideboards and settees of Georgian days and earlier had been relegated to this vast pound of unwanted things, while their places were dishonourably filled downstairs by mid-Victorian monstrosities which Mrs. MacDonald instinctively approved, no doubt because they could offer no temptation to the eye. Barrie might have felt the beauty of the graceful lines if she had given her attention to these scattered relics of a past before there was a Grandma; but a group of very different ...
— The Heather-Moon • C. N. Williamson and A. M. Williamson
... the sun came out suddenly at five o'clock and threw a golden bar into the deep Victorian gloom of the front parlour. On the window-sill, midway between the white curtains, a pot of blue hyacinths stood in a cracked china plate, and as the sunlight shone into the room, the scent of the blossoms ...
— Life and Gabriella - The Story of a Woman's Courage • Ellen Glasgow
... Street, in a very interesting paper in Putnam's Monthly for November (1906), points out that the most significant contrast between our time and Early Victorian days is a decrease in idealism. "The most characteristic note," he tells us, "in the mental attitude of the forties and fifties in England, and that in which they contrast most sharply with our own times, was confidence.... In party politics this confidence was almost without ...
— Socialism: Positive and Negative • Robert Rives La Monte
... the so-called "fallen" woman through a skilful portrayal of the reaction of experience upon personality. Their realism has rescued her from the sentimentality surrounding an impossible Camille quite as their fellow-craftsmen in realism have replaced the weeping Amelias of the Victorian period by reasonable women ...
— A New Conscience And An Ancient Evil • Jane Addams
... 36 scarce varieties, including Newfoundland, New South Wales, St. Vincent, South Australia, Trinidad, and a really grand lot of Victorian. Price 10/-; post-free, 10/1. ...
— Stamp Collecting as a Pastime • Edward J. Nankivell
... sometimes to take a look back, to try to count over the changes for good or for evil which have taken place in this country of ours; to try to understand clearly why the reign of a great Queen should have left its mark upon our history in such a way that men speak of the Victorian Age as one of the greatest ages that ...
— Queen Victoria • E. Gordon Browne
... remembered that a year ago I had been bicycling down to the football field for a punt about on Upper. As I listened to a lecture on the establishment of an infantry brigade, I thought of the sixth form sitting under that fine scholar and Wordsworthian Nowell Smith to a discussion of Victorian poetry. In the evenings on my way to night operations, passing Berkhamsted School and looking at the lighted windows, I would think, "At Sherborne now they are sitting round the games study fire waiting for the bell to ring for hall". Day by day, ...
— The Loom of Youth • Alec Waugh
... shore, in the serene morning atmosphere, voices carried with peculiar distinctness. Every word of the brief colloquy had reached Tom Verity; and one word at least possessed an Elizabethan flavour forbidden to ears Victorian, feminine and polite. Noting it Tom reddened and glanced uneasily at his companion, all inclination to tease giving place to a laudable desire to shield her from annoyance. But Damaris, judging by her demeanour, was unaware of any cause of offence; whence, with relief he concluded ...
— Deadham Hard • Lucas Malet
... thought, be amply demonstrated. A glorious galaxy of talent adorned the years 1850-60. There were two great poets, two great novelists, and two great historians. The two great poets were Alfred Tennyson and Robert Browning. The first named would always stand at the head of the literature of the Victorian period. There was no poet in the whole course of our history whose works were more likely to live as a complete whole than he, and there was not a line which his friends would wish to see blotted out. Robert ...
— Poems: New and Old • Henry Newbolt
... Wagner. Any understanding of English civilization would be similarly incomplete without the semi-historic figure of King Arthur, glorified through the accumulated legends of the Middle Ages and made to live again in the melodic idylls of the great Victorian laureate. And so one might go on. In many ways the mythology and folklore of a country are a truer index to the life of its people than any of the pages of actual history; for through these channels the imagination and the heart speak. All the chronicles ...
— Myths and Legends of All Nations • Various
... Are names alone Free from all change? Your word "Victorian" Could bite and sting in ninety one But now—it's deader than ...
— The New Morning - Poems • Alfred Noyes
... countenance. I wondered if for the moment his mind had wandered to the past, and to his mother's table, with Sunday waffles, omelet, broiled bacon. Yet—there had been no bits of gay brocade to light the mid-Victorian dullness of his mother's dining-room, no daffodils on a radiant morning, no white lilacs on a purple twilight, no slender goddess, mysterious ...
— The Gay Cockade • Temple Bailey
... one of the first Sanskrit poems to be rendered into English—Sir William Jones publishing a mellifluous version in Asiatick Researches in 1792. Later in the nineteenth century it was translated into Victorian verse by Sir Edwin Arnold. The present translation from which all the extracts are taken is by George Keyt, the foremost modern artist of Ceylon. It is greatly to be hoped that the entire translation, hitherto available ...
— The Loves of Krishna in Indian Painting and Poetry • W. G. Archer
... be admitted, too, that King Arthur, of the "Idylls," is like an Albert in blank verse, an Albert cursed with a Guinevere for a wife, and a Lancelot for friend. The "Idylls," with all their beauties, are full of a Victorian respectability, and love of talking with Vivien about what is not so respectable. One wishes, at times, that the "Morte d'Arthur" had remained a lonely and flawless fragment, as noble as Homer, as polished as ...
— Letters on Literature • Andrew Lang
... Elwes I have consistently capitalized the term Nature, in accordance with Spinoza's Latin text; White and Elwes capitalize it only desultorily. I have made some slight changes in Elwes' mid-Victorian punctuation and White's all-too-faithful paragraphing. The Latin paragraphs of the Ethics are extremely long. These changes are all external and as far as I can see thoroughly legitimate as well as justified. The very slight and very occasional internal ...
— The Philosophy of Spinoza • Baruch de Spinoza
... vetted, there's no question of that," she agreed thoughtfully. They were at tea in her own drawing-room, which was crowded with articles handsome and hideous, Victorian lace tidies holding their own with really fine old furniture, and exquisite bits of oil or water colour sharing the walls with old steel engravings in cumbersome frames. Now Ivy leaned back in her chair, and stirred her tea, not ...
— The Story Of Julia Page - Works of Kathleen Norris, Volume V. • Kathleen Norris
... and clutched Nick's coat sleeve, like a girl of early Victorian days. But, after all, women have not changed in essentials. They are much the same now in the dark, when pale things stir or shine unexpectedly; and they are still glad to have with them at such times a man, preferably a handsome man, they happen ...
— The Port of Adventure • Charles Norris Williamson and Alice Muriel Williamson
... "You're an Early-Victorian Sparrow! A fox is more fun than a sheep! I shall show that my mind is not narrow And give ...
— It Can Be Done - Poems of Inspiration • Joseph Morris
... Historical Outline. The Victorian Poets. Tennyson. Browning. Elizabeth Barrett Browning. Matthew Arnold. The Pre-Raphaelites. Rossetti. Morris. Swinburne. Minor Poets and Songs in ...
— Outlines of English and American Literature • William J. Long
... seem to feel safely alone and not in the carriage shopping. The room was very long, and very wide, and immensely high, with three tall windows down one side and substantial furniture purchased in the heyday of the Victorian epoch. The slim, fair-haired figure was quite lost in the space considered suitable by an early nineteenth-century architect for the accommodation of a Scottish lady; and the fire made much more of a display, glowing in the gloom ...
— The Prodigal Father • J. Storer Clouston
... this has happened elsewhere, to a certain degree. In Victorian England there lived a woman whose love-affair was wrecked and whose mind automatically closed itself against everything associated with her tragedy, or subsequent to it. In her madness she, too, protected herself against pain by living in expectation ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1920 - and the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various
... Pendules, Temple Gardens, was a little white-haired man of seventy, attired in the sombre black of the Victorian era, with a polished reticent manner befitting the senior partner of a firm of solicitors owning the most aristocratic practice in England; a firm so eminently respectable that they never rendered a bill of costs ...
— The Shrieking Pit • Arthur J. Rees
... owing to Lord Palmerston's personal influence from 1860 to 1865; but this political interregnum was less marked than the social still-stand during the same years. The Prince Consort was dead; the Queen had retired; the Prince of Wales was still a boy. In its best days, Victorian society had never been "smart." During the forties, under the influence of Louis Philippe, Courts affected to be simple, serious and middle class; and they succeeded. The taste of Louis Philippe was bourgeois beyond any taste except that of Queen Victoria. Style lingered ...
— The Education of Henry Adams • Henry Adams
... becoming merely weekly magazines. What the world wants, or, at any rate, what a great many people want, is a daily paper to read on Sundays, not a miscellany, however good. But perhaps Mr. Dicey and I were old-fashioned. Anyway, there was a sort of easygoing, old-fashioned, early-Victorian air about the Observer Office of those days which was very pleasant. Nobody appeared to be in a hurry, and one was given almost complete freedom as to the way in which to treat one's subject. I was also a contributor to the Manchester Guardian. For that distinguished ...
— The Adventure of Living • John St. Loe Strachey |
