"Middle class" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... never say "tu" [i.e., "thou"] or speak in the second person, singular or plural, but always in the third person: [thus], "The chief would like this or that." Especially a woman when addressing a man, even though they be equal and of the middle class, never say less than "Sir" or "Master," and that after every word: "When I was coming, sir, up the river, I saw, sir, etc." In writing they make constant use of very fine and delicate expressions of regard, ...
— The Philippine Islands, 1493-1898 - Volume 40 of 55 • Francisco Colin
... of the Middle Class by the Fiscal Oppression of the Curiales.—Leaving aside points of detail, which were only of special application to the circumstances of the time, this cause of Roman decay may, for all purposes of comparison and instruction, be stated ...
— Political and Literary essays, 1908-1913 • Evelyn Baring
... and humour; Russian middle class; The man of the future; Descriptions of nature; Superfluity of detail; The Russian proletaire; Psychology of murder; Artistic inaccuracy; Moujik and ...
— Maxim Gorki • Hans Ostwald
... are the inland suburbs, Toorak, South Yarra, and Kew, all three very fashionable; Balaclava, Elsterwick, and Windsor, outgrowths of St. Kilda, also fashionable; Hawthorn, which is budding well; Richmond, adjacent to East Melbourne, and middle class; and Emerald Hill and Albert Park, with a working-class population. Adjoining the city itself are North Melbourne, Fitzroy, Carlton, Hotham, and East Melbourne, all except the last inhabited by the working-classes. Emerald Hill and Hotham have ...
— Town Life in Australia - 1883 • R. E. N. (Richard) Twopeny
... disorderly, uninviting—after a day's hard work. Glorious independence! No wonder that hundreds of girls are so willing to accept the first offer of marriage, sick and tired of their independence behind the counter, or at the sewing or typewriting machine. They are just as ready to marry as girls of middle class people who long to throw off the yoke of parental dependence. A so-called independence which leads only to earning the merest subsistence is not so enticing, not so ideal that one can expect woman to sacrifice everything ...
— Mother Earth, Vol. 1 No. 1, March 1906 • Various
... by resisting at once the Crown and Commons. Proud nobles reply by rebellion, come down southwards with ignorant Popish henchmen at their backs; will restore Popery, marry the Queen of Scots, make the middle class and the majority submit to the feudal lords and the minority. Elizabeth, with her 'aristocracy of genius,' is too strong for them: the people's heart is with her, and not with dukes. Each mine only blows up its diggers; and there are many ...
— Sir Walter Raleigh and his Time from - "Plays and Puritans and Other Historical Essays" • Charles Kingsley
... like the others, observed this joy, this smiling depression of these people of the middle class, and in her heart there was savage laughter; all her being jeered, but her face maintained its frigid rigidity. Ah! how she deceived these worthy people, and how delighted she was to deceive them with such triumphant impudence. Her sweetheart, at this moment, was like ...
— Therese Raquin • Emile Zola
... had neither the rough openness, characteristic of a peasant, nor yet that indefinable finish which only culture can give. In spite of his jaunty, fashionable attire, you would have put him down at once as belonging to what in the Old World is called "the middle class." His blue eyes indicated shrewdness, and his red cheeks habitual devotion to the national beverage. He was apparently a youth of the sort that Nature is constantly turning out by the thousand—mere weaker copies of progenitors, who by an unpropitious ...
— Ilka on the Hill-Top and Other Stories • Hjalmar Hjorth Boyesen
... arena, tier above tier. There were three divisions of them, separating the rich from the middle class, and these again from the slaves. It was well arranged for the comfort of the audience, having wide aisles and plenty of places of exit. The whole was covered with an awning. In the wall around the arena are ...
— Round-about Rambles in Lands of Fact and Fancy • Frank Richard Stockton
... of a woman being under the legal guardianship of her husband, there is probably no country where women are held in more reverence and respect than in Finland. While in Germany the middle class Hausfrau takes a back seat, hardly speaking before her lord and master, and being in many cases scarcely better than a general servant (of the Jack-of-all-trades and master of none class), doing a little cooking, seeing to the dusting ...
— Through Finland in Carts • Ethel Brilliana Alec-Tweedie
... to the peculiar position of the modern Jews in Germany. German Jewry, by the total disappearance of its laboring class during recent times, has ceased to be a people by itself and has become a part of the middle class of the general German population. Among the native Jews of Germany, if Berlin is to be taken as a typical example of Jewish communities in large cities, there is no organic social body, complete in itself, consisting of ...
— The Menorah Journal, Volume 1, 1915 • Various
... life, so far as they are necessary for this brief introduction to the Pensees, are as follows. He was born at Clermont, in Auvergne, in 1623. His family were people of substance of the upper middle class. His father was a government official, who was able to leave, when he died, a sufficient patrimony to his one son and his two daughters. In 1631 the father moved to Paris, and a few years later took up another government post at Rouen. Wherever he lived, the elder Pascal seems to have mingled ...
— Pascal's Pensees • Blaise Pascal
... bonne compagnie by the mothers, but the daughters did not enjoy that attention, for, at the age of five or six years, they were sent to the convent; there the mother's influence could not have reached them, and they never left the convent except to marry. The middle class imitated the higher class, and family life became practically impossible. All men of any importance had a charge at court or a grade in the army, and lived away from their families. A large number of women were attached to the queen, spending the greater part of their time at Versailles; ...
— Women of Modern France - Woman In All Ages And In All Countries • Hugo P. Thieme
... George Hagar was early at the pump-room. He found it amusing to watch the crowds coming and going—earnest invalids and that most numerous body of middle aged, middle class people who have no particular reason for drinking the waters, and whose only regimen is getting even with their appetites. He could pick out every order at a glance—he did not need to wait until he saw the tumblers at their lips. Now and then a dashing girl came gliding ...
— An Unpardonable Liar • Gilbert Parker
... in the middle class of life always assume that you are a "Mr." I might have been ...
— A Queen's Error • Henry Curties
... cape of our approach, he had set out to walk along the coast and meet us, and was brought back from the first village, fifteen miles away, more dead than alive. Billy was a young man, about twenty-five years old, whose hardships had given him a middle-aged appearance. He belonged to the American middle class and was apparently well educated, and, as I suppress his name, there can be no ...
— From Paris to New York by Land • Harry de Windt
... We think this was a sound view of affairs, and that the French government of 1841 might have been the French government of 1861, had not the parties to the combination that ruled France in 1841 quarrelled. It was the loss of the support of the middle class that caused Louis Philippe to lose his throne in the most ignominious manner; and that support the monarch would not have forfeited, but for the persistence of M. Guizot in a policy which it would ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 7, No. 44, June, 1861 • Various
... be a working man?" echoed Mr. Godall. "Suppose a rural dean to be unfrocked, does he fall to be a major? suppose a captain were cashiered, would he fall to be a puisne judge? The ignorance of your middle class surprises me. Outside itself, it thinks the world to lie quite ignorant and equal, sunk in a common degradation; but to the eye of the observer, all ranks are seen to stand in ordered hierarchies, and each adorned with its particular aptitudes ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 5 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... housing, and clothing of the 16,000 families above-mentioned [those were the middle class] is much the same as in England; nor is the French elegance unknown in many of them, nor the French and Latin tongues. The latter whereof is very frequent among the poorest Irish, and chiefly in Kerry, most remote from Dublin."—Political Anatomy ...
— An Illustrated History of Ireland from AD 400 to 1800 • Mary Frances Cusack
... Quebec. Mr. Cromering would sooner have been the editor of the English Review than the chief constable of Norfolk. His tastes were bookish; Nature had intended him for the librarian of a circulating library: the safe pilot of middle class ladies through the ocean of new fiction which overwhelms the British Isles twice a year. His particular hobby was paleontology. He was the author of The Jurassic Deposits of Norfolk, with Some Remarks on the Kimeridge Clay—an exhaustive ...
— The Shrieking Pit • Arthur J. Rees
... matter. What do the higher schools, those to which the great middle class of the country sends it children, teach, over and above the instruction given in the primary schools? There is a little more reading and writing of English. But, for all that, every one knows that it is a rare thing to find a boy of the middle or upper classes who can read aloud ...
— Lay Sermons, Addresses and Reviews • Thomas Henry Huxley
... come for. He had a right to talk. He was a member of the Borough Council, an important man, a man (it was said of him) with "ideas." He was a Liberal; and so, for that matter, was Mr. Ransome. Both were of the good, safe middle class, and took ...
— The Combined Maze • May Sinclair
... change is welcomed as a new delight. Their parents, where positive cruelty has not installed fear and cast out love, are the divinities of even the most neglected. They feel towards them much the same, I fancy, as the children of ordinary parents in the middle class—love them more than children given over to nurses and governesses love theirs. Nor do I feel certain that the position of the children of the poor, in all its oppression, is not more favorable to the development of the higher qualities of the human mind, such as make ...
— Weighed and Wanting • George MacDonald
... dripping garments seemed for the moment as glorious as a blood-stained flag. He seemed a simple, frank young fellow of French or German origin, but speaking English remarkably well; he was not high-bred, by any means, but had apparently the culture of an average German of the middle class. Harry fancied that he had seen him before, and at last traced back the impression of his features to the ball for the French officers. It turned out, on inquiry, that he had a brother in the service, and on board the corvette; but he himself was a commercial agent, now ...
— Malbone - An Oldport Romance • Thomas Wentworth Higginson
... care not how they fall, or by whom. But the Pope must not return to Rome. Rome must be mine. The city of a new empire, the conquest of a new Attila! There, every circumstance combines in my favour!—the absence of the Pope, the weakness of the middle class, the poverty of the populace, the imbecile though ferocious barbarism of the Barons, have long concurred to render Rome the most facile, ...
— Rienzi • Edward Bulwer Lytton
... know whether to speak first of this book or the writer of it, but as I know less of him than of it I may more quickly dispatch that part of my introduction. He was born at Valencia in 1866, of Arragonese origin, and of a strictly middle class family. His father kept a shop, a dry-goods store in fact, but Ibanez, after fit preparation, studied law in the University of Valencia and was duly graduated in that science. Apparently he never practiced his profession, but became a journalist almost immediately. He was instinctively a revolutionist, ...
— The Shadow of the Cathedral • Vicente Blasco Ibanez
... Lowe, who was a master of parliamentary eloquence and who managed, in 1866, to wreck Lord John Russell's Reform Bill in the House. But Bright had his revenge in the country. Such meetings as ensued in the great provincial towns had not been seen for twenty years: the middle class and the artisans were fused as in the great Repeal struggle of 1846. At Glasgow as many as 150,000 men paraded outside the town, and no hall could contain the thousands who wished to hear the great Tribune. He claimed that eighty-four per cent. of his countrymen were still excluded ...
— Victorian Worthies - Sixteen Biographies • George Henry Blore
... the others not when it is itself oppressed, but when the conditions of the time, irrespective of its co-operation, create a sociable foundation from which it can on its part practise oppression. Even the moral self-esteem of the German middle class is only based on the consciousness of being the general representative of the philistine mediocrity ...
— Selected Essays • Karl Marx
... the ordinary, small, lean, yellow specimen of the middle class of Cubans, courteously invited the "senors" into the back parlor, where they all seated themselves and entered more fully into the subject, Ishmael acting as interpreter between the judge and the tobacconist, whose name ...
— Self-Raised • Emma Dorothy Eliza Nevitte Southworth
... Duncombe recognized immediately. It was Monsieur Louis. Of the other two one was a Frenchman, a somewhat sombre-looking person, in a black beard and gold-rimmed eyeglasses, the other as unmistakably an Englishman of the lower middle class. His broad shoulders and somewhat stiff bearing seemed to suggest some sort of drill. Looking them over, Duncombe found himself instinctively wondering whether the personal strength of these two, which was obvious, might become a factor ...
— A Maker of History • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... capital, and the democracy are told they have done it all with their hands and sinews. But teaching the democracy to put its trust in achievements of this kind is merely training them to be Philistines to take the place of the Philistines whom they are superseding; and they too, like the middle class, will be encouraged to sit down at the banquet of the future without having on a wedding garment, and nothing excellent can then come from them. Those who know their besetting faults, those who have watched them and listened ...
— Culture and Anarchy • Matthew Arnold
... the revolt and running riot over the country; but there is, nevertheless, in Mexico a class of people as educated, as refined, as honorable as those existing anywhere. And these people—the obreros (skilled working men) and the professional middle class, as well as the better elements of the laboring classes, are supporting Madero—not all in the spirit of his personal adherents, but because they realize the tremendous peril to Mexico of continued revolution. In 1911 the revolution was necessary—the peril had to be incurred, because nothing ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Vol. 21 - The Recent Days (1910-1914) • Charles F. Horne, Editor
... of the British people. In this they too have substantially failed, and the forty or fifty thousand members of the I.L.P. and B.S.P. are roughly no larger a proportion of the working class than the three thousand Fabians are of the middle class. If the advance of Socialism in England is to be measured by the "making of Socialists," if we are to count membership, to enumerate meetings, to sum up subscriptions, the outlook is gloomy. Thirty-four years ago ...
— The History of the Fabian Society • Edward R. Pease
... of passionate resentment was accordingly roused in her otherwise tranquil disposition. It was not surprising that this resentment increased as the years went on, and manifested itself in a manner characteristic of a girl sprung from the lower middle class, in whom mere superficial polish had taken the place of any true culture. The real torment of our subsequent life together lay in the fact that, owing to her violence, I had lost the last support I had hitherto found ...
— My Life, Volume I • Richard Wagner
... country, in the conduct, with regard to religious questions, of the classes on whom devolves the work of legislation. There is no real community of feeling and belief in these matters between the two. To the extent to which religion is involved in the legislative enactments of the time, the middle class is in reality not represented, and the upper class does not represent. It may not seem equally obvious, however, how there should be a lack of representation, not only among our members of Parliament, but also among our members of Council. They at least ...
— Leading Articles on Various Subjects • Hugh Miller
... incorruptibility, domestic virtues rare in his day, unbounded faith in the cause for which he stood, and abilities which without wealth or strong connections were destined to place him on the height of power. The middle class, as yet almost voiceless, looked to him as its champion; but he was not the champion of a class. His patriotism was as comprehensive as it was haughty and unbending. He lived for England, loved her with intense devotion, knew her, believed in her, and made her greatness his own; or rather, he ...
— Montcalm and Wolfe • Francis Parkman
... settlers of the middle class were usually dressed in hard wearing, rough clothes made of homespun material, with a slightly better (and perhaps more colorful) costume for Sunday and holiday wear. In 1622 each Englishman who planned to emigrate to Jamestown was advised to supply himself ...
— New Discoveries at Jamestown - Site of the First Successful English Settlement in America • John L. Cotter
... is natural enough." "But," he says, "our masses have an instinctive feeling that their cause is bound up in the prosperity of the States,—the United States. It is true that they have not a particle of power in the direct form of a vote; but when millions in this country are led by the religious middle class, they can go and prevent the governing class from pursuing a policy hostile ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 13, No. 75, January, 1864 • Various
... sly dog, was indeed absurd; but it is fair to say that in comparison with Dickens he felt himself a man of the world. Nevertheless, that world of which he was a man is coming to an end before our eyes; its aristocracy has grown corrupt, its middle class insecure, and things that he never thought of are walking about the drawing-rooms of both. Thackeray has described for ever the Anglo-Indian Colonel; but what on earth would he have done with an Australian Colonel? What can it matter whether Dickens's clerks talked ...
— Appreciations and Criticisms of the Works of Charles Dickens • G. K. Chesterton
... self-respect and reasonable consideration for other peoples' feelings and interests on every point except their dread of losing their own respectability. But when there's a will there's a way. I hate to see dead people walking about: it is unnatural. And our respectable middle class people are all as dead as mutton. Out of the mouth of Mrs Knox I have delivered on them the ...
— Fanny's First Play • George Bernard Shaw
... to characterize the "Modern Times" by one concept, we would have to call this epoch the time of the emergence of a middle class, and it will be remembered that the growth of the middle class in Europe was also the decisive change between the Middle Ages and Modern Times in Europe. The parallelism should, however, not be overdone. The gentry continued to play a role in China during the Modern Times, much more ...
— A history of China., [3d ed. rev. and enl.] • Wolfram Eberhard
... phrase, that the minister of the day sent to him often for the important information which the cabinet could not itself command. Lord Shelburne was the first great minister who comprehended the rising importance of the middle class; and foresaw in its future power a bulwark for the throne against "the Great Revolution families." Of his qualities in council we have no record; there is reason to believe that his administrative ability was conspicuous: his speeches prove that, ...
— Sybil - or the Two Nations • Benjamin Disraeli
... cold or gentle defensiveness. Thus protected by what his wrath called 'airs,' she was a mystery to him, yet a mystery that tamed and curbed him. He had never dreamt that such women existed. His own views of women were those of the shopkeeping middle class, practical, selfish, or sensual. But he had been a reader of books; and through Madame de Pastourelles certain sublimities or delicacies of poetry began to seem to him either less fantastic ...
— Fenwick's Career • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... meet at home. If people are nice in themselves how can it matter who they are or if "fashionable" or not. The whole thing is nonsense and if you belong to a country where the longest tradition is sixteen hundred and something, and your ancestor got there then through being a middle class puritan, or a ne'er-do-weel shipped off to colonise a savage land, it is too absurd to boast about ancestry or worry in the least over such things. The facts to be proud of are the splendid, vivid, vital, successful creatures they are now, no matter what their origin; but just like Hurstbridge ...
— Elizabeth Visits America • Elinor Glyn
... very unjustly disliked people of the bourgeois type—the respectable middle class, quorum pars magna fui! Especially if we were very well off and successful, and thought ourselves of some consequence (as we now very often are, I beg to say), and showed it (as, I'm afraid, we sometimes do). He preferred the commonest artisan to M. Jourdain, the bourgeois gentilhomme, ...
— The Martian • George Du Maurier
... immigration fit in the end to assume the duties and burdens of full American citizenship, and whenever the leaders in the various industries of those islands finally adopt our ideals and heartily join our administration in endeavoring to develop a middle class of substantial citizens, a way will then be found to deal with the commercial and industrial problems which now appear to them so serious. The best Americanism is that which aims for stability and permanency of prosperous ...
— Complete State of the Union Addresses from 1790 to the Present • Various
... his life. Mr. Bryan was born at Salem, Illinois, March 19, 1860. Though he is of Irish descent, his ancestors have lived in this country for more than a hundred years. Through all these years the Bryans have belonged to the middle class. While none of them have been very rich, on the other hand none have been extremely poor. Though members of the family have entered practically every profession, more have engaged in farming than in all the ...
— Modern Americans - A Biographical School Reader for the Upper Grades • Chester Sanford
... without me this morning," she said, with a faint smile. "I must go to that girl, for she needs someone besides Timmie, and Timmie needs rest." At the door she hesitated. "Have I not told you, brother John, that the middle class is our country's safeguard?—that we would be in a sorry ...
— Sunlight Patch • Credo Fitch Harris
... tapestry hangings, Maximilian Robespierre was born in May 1758. He was therefore no more than five and thirty years old when he came to his ghastly end in 1794. His father was a lawyer, and, though the surname of the family had the prefix of nobility, they belonged to the middle class. When this decorative prefix became dangerous, Maximilian Derobespierre dropped it. His great rival, Danton, was less prudent or less fortunate, and one of the charges made against him was that he had styled himself ...
— Critical Miscellanies (Vol. 1 of 3) - Essay 1: Robespierre • John Morley
... of the two poets' lives had been not unlike. Like Virgil, Horace sprang from the ranks of the provincial lower middle class, in whom the virtues of industry, frugality, and sense were generally accompanied by little grace or geniality. But he was exceptionally fortunate in his father. This excellent man, who is always spoken of ...
— Latin Literature • J. W. Mackail
... charm the sterner sex cannot long withstand continual drudgery. One is tempted to believe that such men married to save the expense of hiring a housekeeper, that they hoped by sleeping with their laundress to avoid wash bills. Take the great middle class of America (which is the social and moral cream of the country) and you will find that, as a rule, the men have abundant leisure in which to recuperate from the exhaustion of labor, and are robust as Jove's Phoenician bull, while their wives slave ...
— Volume 1 of Brann The Iconoclast • William Cowper Brann
... organised Plutocracy, which are at present grinding the last penny in the pound out of them."[1201] It is estimated that there are in England 500,000 clerks.[1202] With the object of permeating this large section of the middle class with Socialism, a new monthly paper, the "Clerk," has recently ...
— British Socialism - An Examination of Its Doctrines, Policy, Aims and Practical Proposals • J. Ellis Barker
... weekly. But the boycott is rigid and therefore the supply is intermittent. It is not only a boycott of advertisement: it is a boycott of quotation. Most of the governing class know the Free Press. The vast lower middle class does not yet know ...
— The Free Press • Hilaire Belloc
... coveted and otherwise unattainable bit of jewelry. The work is done secretly, since they have not the simplicity either of the real ouvriere or of the grande dame, both of whom sew openly, the one for charity, the other for a living. But this middle class, despising the worker and aspiring always toward the luxurious side of life, feels that embroidery or tapestry of some description is the only suitable thing for their fingers, and busy on this, preserve the appearance of the dignity they covet. Often their yearly gains are not more than one ...
— Prisoners of Poverty Abroad • Helen Campbell
... was the attitude of England. Her upper classes and financial interests were all on the side of slavery and the South. Her great middle class were largely in favour of liberty. Her working people were naturally on the side of free labour and the North, but they were weakened by starvation till their endurance and fortitude were almost gone. And then it was that Beecher entered the scene, returning from the Continent ...
— The Battle of Principles - A Study of the Heroism and Eloquence of the Anti-Slavery Conflict • Newell Dwight Hillis
... have served the nation's unity in the aftermath that shall follow war. What rancors it will have appeased! What jealousies it will have blotted out! What petty prejudices it will have conquered! These society women and women of the middle class who have leaned over the beds of sick or wounded peasants, and these young girls who have tended their hurts, bound up their wounds, and calmed their sufferings have, with their delicate hands, so expert in the worst treatments, laid ...
— Fighting France • Stephane Lauzanne
... are told, the mass of the English people were extraordinarily credulous. And this fact was true, not only of the densely ignorant class, but also of the more intelligent and better educated middle class, who were ready to believe everything that appeared in print.[227:2] Hence was afforded an ideal field for the exercise of the wily charlatan's activities. And the glowing advertisements of quack remedies appealed ...
— Primitive Psycho-Therapy and Quackery • Robert Means Lawrence
... who think themselves a privileged class, born with a right to live in everlasting idleness upon the toil of those who are not thus well born. This division into the aristocracy, the proletariat, and the middle class struggling to become the aristocracy, does not make a republic. It is an ancient falsehood and injustice established by absurd laws of inheritance (as absurd as the Hindoo castes), which have cursed the world, and will ...
— The Arena - Volume 4, No. 20, July, 1891 • Various
... "gentlemen" nowadays,' her stepmother answered in the tones of arch concern that so well became her ugliness. 'We have handed over "gentlemen" to the lower middle class, where the word is still to be heard at tradesmen's balls and provincial tea-parties, I believe. It is done ...
— A Pair of Blue Eyes • Thomas Hardy
... before he found them. And when they were adjusted, the light was so dim that it took him at least three minutes more to decipher the missive. Chupin had spent this time in scrutinizing—in appraising the man, as it were. "What is this venerable gentleman doing here?" he thought. "He's a middle class man, that's evident from his linen. He's married—there's a wedding-ring on his finger; he has a daughter, for the ends of his necktie are embroidered. He lives in the neighborhood, for, well dressed as he is, he wears a cap. But what was ...
— Baron Trigault's Vengeance - Volume 2 (of 2) • Emile Gaboriau
... intended by the constitution as a kind of barrier between the prince and the people, are the greatest oppressors of the latter, who have seldom any means of redress, or of conveying their complaints to the Imperial ear. There is no middle class of men in China: men whose property and ideas of independence give them weight in the part of the country where they reside; and whose influence and interest are considered as not below the notice of the government. In fact, there are no other than the governors and the governed. ...
— Travels in China, Containing Descriptions, Observations, and Comparisons, Made and Collected in the Course of a Short Residence at the Imperial Palace of Yuen-Min-Yuen, and on a Subsequent Journey thr • John Barrow
... therefore gives great insight into the lives of upper middle class families of the mid nineteenth century. No one in families these days talks to the rest of the family in the polite, perhaps over-polite, terms used in this book. For this reason, though it was not meant to be taken as such, this book is a true ...
— Deerbrook • Harriet Martineau
... the democratization of Germany and the growing force of the Socialist party"; "others who consider war as necessary for economic reasons found in over-population and over-production, the need of markets and outlets"; the great bourgeoisie, "which also has its reasons of a social nature—the upper middle class being no less affected than the nobility by the democratization of Germany ... and, finally, the gun and armour-plate manufacturers, the great merchants who clamour for greater markets, and the bankers who speculate on the ...
— The Healing of Nations and the Hidden Sources of Their Strife • Edward Carpenter
... had a troubled face, His furniture was commonplace— The sort of Peer who well might pass For someone of the middle class. I do not think you want to hear About this unimportant Peer, So let us leave him to discourse About LORD ...
— More Peers Verses • Hilaire Belloc
... Corentin; "the right of these young men to the estate of Gondreville will render them doubly criminal in the eyes of the middle class. I'd like to see them put faith in God and not ...
— An Historical Mystery • Honore de Balzac
... of Rome at the beginning of the Augustan age was not less than half a million of people, and probably exceeded this number. There was no middle class, a comparatively small number of gentry, a very numerous plebs or populace, and many slaves. The Emperor Augustus boasted that after the war with Sextus Pompeius he handed over 30,000 slaves, who had been ...
— Outlines of Greek and Roman Medicine • James Sands Elliott
... Revolutionary Socialism meant, under those circumstances, to break with the bourgeoisie, their own and that of the Allies. And we have already said that the political helplessness of the intellectual and semi-intellectual middle class sought shelter for itself in a union with bourgeois liberalism. This caused the pitiful and truly shameful attitude of the middle-class leaders towards the war. They confined themselves to sighs, phrases, ...
— From October to Brest-Litovsk • Leon Trotzky
... of to the pit or boxes. He would, indeed, have repudiated the maxim: "Everything for the people, and nothing by the people"; he was fully prepared to place the house of commons in the hands of the people, or at least of the great middle class, but he regarded the crown and the house of lords as almost equal powers, and he never doubted that property and education would practically continue to rule the government of ...
— The Political History of England - Vol XI - From Addington's Administration to the close of William - IV.'s Reign (1801-1837) • George Brodrick
... that even through the terrible years of Stephen's reign England had its share in the universal movement by which the squalor and misery of the Middle Ages were giving place to a larger activity and a better order of things A class unknown before was fast growing into power,—the middle class of burghers and traders, who desired above all things order, and hated above all things the medieval enemy of order, the feudal lord. Merchant and cultivator and wool-grower found better work ready to their hand than fighting, and the appearance of mercenary ...
— Henry the Second • Mrs. J. R. Green
... of the middle class is next to impossible. They've been bowing and scraping until there's a permanent kink in ...
— Broken to the Plow • Charles Caldwell Dobie
... whole hog, more in search of a desperate ideal than by way of impetuous sin. Mr. WILKINSON treats the affair with deliberate, cold-blooded, even cynical analysis; and his portrayal of the snobbery and humbug of the upper-middle class, social and intellectual, in which his creatures move is searching and disturbing. But, I ask myself, are people really like that? Or rather are there enough of these unnaturals, extremists, moral Bolshevists or whatever you like to call them, to ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 159, September 1st, 1920 • Various
... the Puritan immigration consisted of men of the middle class, artisans and husbandmen, the most useful members of a new colony. But their leaders were clergymen educated at the universities, and especially at Emanuel College, Cambridge, the great Puritan college; their civil magistrates were also in great part gentlemen of education and ...
— Brief History of English and American Literature • Henry A. Beers
... an ideal place for Eleanor," Beulah wailed. "It's deadly respectable and middle class, but it was just the kind of atmosphere for her to accustom herself to. She was learning to manage herself so prettily. This morning when I went to the studio—I wanted to get the lessons over early, and take Eleanor to see that exhibition of Bavarian dolls at Kuhner's—I found ...
— Turn About Eleanor • Ethel M. Kelley
... (styled The Elder to distinguish him from his famous nephew of the same name) was a native of New Jersey (U.S.A.), where he was born in 1739. His parents were well-to-do people of the middle class who are believed to have emigrated at the beginning of the eighteenth century from the West of England, and to have been related to Matthew Henry, the Bible commentator. Their son, Alexander, received a good education, and after some commercial apprenticeship at Albany ...
— Pioneers in Canada • Sir Harry Johnston
... with injustice".[316] In March, 1643, he affixed his signature to a law allowing appeals from the Quarter Courts to the Assembly. This right, which seems not to have been acknowledged by Sir John Harvey, was of the very highest importance. It gave to the middle class a share in the administration of justice and afforded an effectual check upon the abuse of the courts ...
— Virginia under the Stuarts 1607-1688 • Thomas J. Wertenbaker
... means the possibility of living like human beings, and of bringing up children to be members of a society better than ours, whilst the "right to work" only means the right to be always a wage-slave, a drudge, ruled over and exploited by the middle class of the future. The right to well-being is the Social Revolution, the right to work means nothing but the Treadmill of Commercialism. It is high time for the worker to assert his right to the common inheritance, and to enter ...
— The Conquest of Bread • Peter Kropotkin
... you, in strict confidence, that they reveal to us urgent pressure on the part of the emperor to induce England to intervene with France in our sad war. The English cabinet, most fortunately, is not unanimously hostile, and Lord John Russell is hesitating. Our friends are the queen and the great middle class of dissenters, and, strange to say, the Lancashire operatives. The aristocracy, the church, finance, and literature are all our enemies, and at home, you know, things are not altogether as one could wish. Just now no general, no, not the President, is of such ...
— A Diplomatic Adventure • S. Weir Mitchell
... was the head of one of the great princely houses of France. The author of the "Caracteres" was the type of the plebeian citizen of Paris. If La Rochefoucauld offers us the quintessence of aristocracy, La Bruyere is not less a specimen of the middle class. His reputation as an honest man long suffered from his own joke about his ancestry. He wrote, "I warn everybody whom it may concern, in order that the world may be prepared and nobody be surprised, that if ever it should happen that one of the mighty of the earth should deem me worthy of his care, ...
— Three French Moralists and The Gallantry of France • Edmund Gosse
... make the mistake; yet not more fatally prone than your Gigadibs, the literary man, who sees his unliterary (even illiterate) neighbours not as they are, but as a clever novelist would present them to amuse an upper or middle class reader. Stevenson (a greater man than Gigadibs) frankly confessed that he could ...
— From a Cornish Window - A New Edition • Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... Buttesthorn was of that middle class who fared in the old fashion, and his great oak supper-table groaned beneath the generous pastries, the mighty joints and the great flagons. Below were the household, above on a raised dais the family table, with places ever ready for those frequent guests ...
— Sir Nigel • Arthur Conan Doyle
... Poor laws would have been unnecessary. Unfortunately Henry and his counsellors did not appreciate the consequence of the suppression of retainers and liveries. By the course he adopted to secure the influence of the Crown, he compensated the nobles, but destroyed the agricultural middle class. ...
— Landholding In England • Joseph Fisher
... a difficulty in coming to the point: many clients had. To approach a total stranger on the most intimate domestic affairs (even if his ancestor and yours were in a big thing together three hundred years ago) is, to a sensitive patrician, no easy task. In fact, even members of the middle class were, as clients, occasionally ...
— The Disentanglers • Andrew Lang
... soldier. He stands there boldly unruffled and more than life size, with a shadowy army of tiny little figures winding off into the landscape behind. Nor it seems are great men oblivious to these expectations. M. de Pierrefeu tells of a photographer's visit to Joffre. The General was in his "middle class office, before the worktable without papers, where he sat down to write his signature. Suddenly it was noticed that there were no maps on the walls. But since according to popular ideas it is not possible to think of a general ...
— Public Opinion • Walter Lippmann
... untruthfulness. And as yet little has been done to ameliorate this degradation. Ignorance prevails everywhere. Even of the young people of the peasant class more than eighty per cent. can neither read nor write. There is no middle class. The gulf between the upper class and the lower is so wide as to be absolutely impassable. And for the most part the upper class is quite content to have ...
— Up To Date Business - Home Study Circle Library Series (Volume II.) • Various
... international payment obligations without rescheduling its debt. Production, trade, and investment reforms since 1991 have provided new opportunities for Indian businessmen and an estimated 200 million plus middle class consumers. New Delhi has always paid its foreign debts on schedule and has stimulated exports, attracted foreign investment, and revived confidence in India's economic prospects. GDP growth in 1992-95 ...
— The 1996 CIA Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency.
... Romans, Pontius Cominius, of the middle class of citizens, but with an honourable ambition to distinguish himself, undertook the adventure. He would not take any writing to the garrison, for fear that if he were taken the enemy might discover ...
— Plutarch's Lives, Volume I (of 4) • Plutarch
... is most prevalent amongst the upper, middle, or lower classes it is difficult to say; the priest in the text seems to think that it is exhibited in the most decided manner in the middle class; it is the writer's opinion, however, that in no class is it more strongly developed than in the lower: what they call being well born goes a great way amongst them, but the possession of money much farther, whence Mr. Flamson's ...
— The Romany Rye - A Sequel to 'Lavengro' • George Borrow
... French nobility and the middle class of citizens were reduced to a servile attendance on the court, as the only means of advancement and reward. Every species of industry and merit in these classes was sedulously discouraged; and the motive of honorable competition for honorable things, being ...
— Life, Letters, and Epicurean Philosophy of Ninon de L'Enclos, - the Celebrated Beauty of the Seventeenth Century • Robinson [and] Overton, ed. and translation.
... Her name was Madame Paris; probably an assumed name, but it was good enough for the purpose. Protected by the police, she was far enough from Paris to be certain that those who visited her liberally appointed establishment were above the middle class. Everything was strictly regulated in her house and every pleasure was taxed at a reasonable tariff. The prices were six francs for a breakfast with a nymph, twelve for dinner, and twice that sum to spend a whole night. I found the house even better ...
— The Memoires of Casanova, Complete • Jacques Casanova de Seingalt
... explain this singular unanimity in a race which rarely acts together—but rather after their watchword, each for himself—by the fact that Robert Burns, the poet of the middle class, represents in the mind of men to-day that great uprising of the middle class against the armed and privileged minorities—that uprising which worked politically in the American and French Revolutions, and which, ...
— Modern Eloquence: Vol II, After-Dinner Speeches E-O • Various
... the hidebound conventions of an effete society. Easterners in turn count themselves fortunate in having a highly developed civilization, and they usually attain real pity for those who seem to live upon a psychic, if not a geographic, frontier. The middle class have a philosophy with which they protect themselves against the insidious suggestions that come from the life of the conspicuous rich. These, on the other hand, half expecting that simplicity and domesticity may have some virtue, speak superciliously ...
— Introduction to the Science of Sociology • Robert E. Park
... ill advices. A man stored with much knowledge would never have let Madame de Grantmesnil's denunciations of marriage rites, or Louis Blane's vindication of Robespierre as the representative of the working against the middle class, influence his practical life. He would have assessed such opinions at their real worth; and whatever that worth might seem to him, would not to such opinions have committed the conduct of his life. Opinion ...
— The Parisians, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... of power had passed away from the aristocracy and the privileged ranks to the middle and lower middle classes. The Conservative party were looking eagerly out for young men of promise to stiffen their ranks in the new parliament, the first elected under the Reform Bill, the first which the middle class had their due share in creating; the first in which such cities as Manchester and Liverpool and Birmingham were allowed ...
— Great Men and Famous Women. Vol. 4 of 8 • Various
... eight to six behind six floors of counters, would have revealed empty crannies, worn thin in places with the grind of routine. The eight-thirty-to-six business of muslin underwear, crash toweling, and skirt-binding. The great middle class of shoppers who come querulous with bunions and babies. The strap-hanging homeward ride. Supper, but usually within range of the range that boils it. The same smells of the same foods. The, cinematograph or ...
— Gaslight Sonatas • Fannie Hurst
... narrative is rather homely. Many of the characters seem to have that exaggerated awe of rank which used to be characteristic of the tales in the London Journal. The book should, however, be welcome in the homes of some of the lower middle class. ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 98, February 22nd, 1890 • Various
... in Spain jojana, hokano, and in English hukni. It is practised in various ways, all very similar; the defrauding of some simple person of money or property being the object in view. Females are generally the victims of the trick, especially those of the middle class, who are more accessible to the poor woman than those of the upper. One of the ways, perhaps the most artful, will be found described in ...
— Romano Lavo-Lil - Title: Romany Dictionary - Title: Gypsy Dictionary • George Borrow
... section. The uniforms of the regular Greek soldiers are very similar to those worn by the soldiers of our own country. The officers we met were handsome men and especially well uniformed. The well-to-do and middle class Athenian people whom we saw on the streets were dressed in ...
— A Trip to the Orient - The Story of a Mediterranean Cruise • Robert Urie Jacob
... rule, hideous and artificial doggrel. The little book, Wee Macgregor, written in what may be called the Scotch Cockney dialect, was a brave and amusing attempt to phonograph the talk of a Glasgow boy of the lower middle class. The unlovely speech employed by the author is, happily, quite unlike the careful and deliberate speech of the educated citizen of Glasgow or Paisley. The main differences between the educated Scot and the educated Englishman are that the vowel sounds of the former are pure and that r ...
— Literary Tours in The Highlands and Islands of Scotland • Daniel Turner Holmes
... bargaining for the day's supplies. From a view of the market place at Cottbus in Brandenburg you may get a better idea of the people at a German market; the servants with their umbrellas, their big baskets, their baggy blouses and no hats, the middle class housewife with a hat or a bonnet, and a huge basket on her arm, a nursemaid in peasant costume stooping over her perambulator, other peasants in costume at the stalls, and two of the farm carts that are in some districts yoked oftener with oxen than ...
— Home Life in Germany • Mrs. Alfred Sidgwick
... probabilities, not at fancies and predilections. I am afraid "leases" is the likelier word. It has also a special fitness, which has not been hitherto remarked. Many of the wealthy people of Elizabeth's reign, particularly in the middle class, were "fellows that had had leases." It will be recollected that extravagant leases or fines were among the methods by which the possessions of the church were so grievously dilapidated in the age of the Reformation. ...
— Notes and Queries, No. 181, April 16, 1853 • Various
... regions and different social classes. The mortality rate from syphilis for males above fifteen is highest for unskilled labour, then for the group intermediate between unskilled and skilled labour, then for the upper and middle class, followed by the group intermediate between this class and skilled labour, while skilled labour, textile workers, and miners follow, and agricultural labourers come out most favourably of all. These differences do ...
— Essays in War-Time - Further Studies In The Task Of Social Hygiene • Havelock Ellis
... now enjoy. At the close of this period national power was no longer in the hands of the aristocracy, nor in those of kings; it had passed into the third social stratum, variously designated as the middle class, the burghers or bourgeoisie, and the third estate, a body of men as little willing to share it with the masses as the kings had been. Nevertheless, the transition once begun could not be stopped, and the advance of manhood suffrage has ever since been proportionate to the capacity of the laboring ...
— The Life of Napoleon Bonaparte - Vol. I. (of IV.) • William Milligan Sloane
... he thought it over more soberly, Dave could not help thinking that he must have had as parents persons in that broad, and altogether desirable, middle class. ...
— Cowboy Dave • Frank V. Webster
... small establishment, where Romans, pure blood, of the middle class, and the nobility who did not hang on to foreigners, were to be found. Giuseppina Gassier, who has since sung in America, was prima-donna there, ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 2, No 3, September, 1862 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy. • Various
... have won in fashionable society a reputation for extreme politeness and gallantry toward women; which may be true, as neither under such conditions costs any earnest sacrifice. But the rank and file of the middle class of Austrians, the class with which travellers have naturally most to do, are most brusque and ungracious in manner as well as in deed, unembellished with any ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Volume 22. July, 1878. • Various
... middle class (from which England's greatness springs), claims thee as its own, tell to all around the truth which tells of Britain's shame—that the Irishwoman is forced to herd with cattle! Plead, and say—Am I not a woman, and is she not my sister? ...
— Facts for the Kind-Hearted of England! - As to the Wretchedness of the Irish Peasantry, and the Means for their Regeneration • Jasper W. Rogers
... volcanic explosion in this direction. The current literature of 1865 was much more prudish and less outspoken than it is at the present day; the gentlemanly licentiousness of Byron's time had been completely suppressed; the moral tone of the middle class was still outwardly Puritanic. English folk were by no means prepared to rebuild the altars of the primitive deities who presided over man's unquenchable desire, or to be otherwise than somewhat aghast at the invocations ...
— Studies in Literature and History • Sir Alfred Comyn Lyall
... is, I say, typical of a turning-point in the century. For the fundamental fact of early Victorian history was this: the decision of the middle classes to employ their new wealth in backing up a sort of aristocratical compromise, and not (like the middle class in the French Revolution) insisting on a clean sweep and a clear democratic programme. It went along with the decision of the aristocracy to recruit itself more freely from the middle class. It was ...
— The Victorian Age in Literature • G. K. Chesterton
... adventurousness and plain common sense which marked their movements by sea and shore. The stock was intensely provincial, intensely unambitious; it would be difficult to find anywhere a specimen of the lower middle class more consistent than the Ibsens had been in preserving their respectable dead level. Even in that inability to resist the call of the sea, generation after generation, if there was a little of the dare-devil there was still more of the conventional citizen. It is, in fact, a vain attempt to detect ...
— Henrik Ibsen • Edmund Gosse
... one who has not labored at the task of trying to commend the Church of the Prayer Book to the working class, as it is represented in our large manufacturing towns, can know how lamentable that failure is. We gather in the rich and the poor, but the great middle class that makes the staple and the strength ...
— A Short History of the Book of Common Prayer • William Reed Huntington
... social unrest must seek for its source in all three classes of society! Two classes are employer and employee, the third is the great middle class, looking on. What is the relationship between the dominating employing figure in American industrial life and the ...
— An American Idyll - The Life of Carleton H. Parker • Cornelia Stratton Parker
... shelter, proper medical care, and proper education. More, give them the luxuries, too—let no man be without anything that is poorer in quality or less in quantity than the possessions of any other. There was no longer any middle class simply because there were no other classes for it to ...
— The Highest Treason • Randall Garrett
... clothier, as he was called—who in his turn disposed of it to the mercantile middleman, who was called a draper. The clothiers grew rapidly in wealth and importance, and in certain parts of the country became the backbone of the middle class. They pursued their activities in country villages, rather than in the old corporate towns, for they wished to avoid the restrictions of the gilds, and gradually the cloth industry migrated almost entirely to the country. In the west of England and in East Anglia ...
— Medieval People • Eileen Edna Power
... the literature of a nation is usually a reflection of the social class which possesses the preponderant influence from a political or economic standpoint or which is marked by the strength of its numbers. The preponderance of the upper middle class in England has impressed on all the literature of that country the seal of morality belonging to that class; while in France, where aristocracy predominated, one still feels the influence of the aristocratic traditions which are so brilliantly manifested in the pseudo-classic ...
— Contemporary Russian Novelists • Serge Persky
... just begun the "Marseillaise" afresh, was still marching down as though lashed on by the sharp blasts of the "Mistral." The men of La Palud were followed by another troop of workmen, among whom a goodly number of middle class folks in ...
— The Fortune of the Rougons • Emile Zola
... intervals by the establishment of other Wesleyan chapels. In its circuit there are now between 800 and 900 persons known as members, who are going on their way rejoicing; at the chapel itself there are between 300 and 400 individuals similarly situated. Viewed in the aggregate, the congregation is of a middle class character both in regard to the colour of the hair and the clothes worn. There are some exceedingly poor people at the place, but the mass appear to be individuals not particularly hampered in making provision for their general meals. Lune-street chapel is the fashionable Wesleyan tabernacle ...
— Our Churches and Chapels • Atticus
... and evidence of the character of British influence and effort, if we can distil from modern India some of the new ideas prevailing, particularly in the new middle class. Where shall we find evidence reliable of what British influence has been? Government Reports, largely statistical, of "The Moral and Material Progress of India," are so far serviceable, but only as crude ...
— New Ideas in India During the Nineteenth Century - A Study of Social, Political, and Religious Developments • John Morrison
... Mayors and Sheriffs, p. 59. "A similar uprising of the middle class of citizens was taking place about this period in other towns. They are spoken of by chroniclers of the same stamp as Fitz-Thedmar as ribald men who proclaimed themselves 'bachelors,' and banded themselves together to the prejudice of the chief men of ...
— London and the Kingdom - Volume I • Reginald R. Sharpe
... pursues the Judge, rising as Mr. Sharp sits down, "are noble fellows, and with us. To the middle class-the grocers and shopkeepers-we must, however, hold out flattering inducements; such as the reduction of taxes, the repeal of our oppressive license laws, taking the power out of the hands of our aristocracy-they are very tender ...
— Justice in the By-Ways - A Tale of Life • F. Colburn Adams
... instinct of brave, active, able men, throughout the middle class everywhere, has pointed out ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... some particulars; for general rules, founded on the soundest reason, demand individual modification; but, if I can persuade any of the rising generation to exercise their reason on this head, I am content. My advice will probably be found most useful to mothers in the middle class; and it is from them that the lower imperceptibly gains improvement. Custom, produced by reason in one, may safely be the effect of imitation in the other.— — — — — ...
— Posthumous Works - of the Author of A Vindication of the Rights of Woman • Mary Wollstonecraft
... the poor. Of these, poor Irish form far the larger proportion, a German or French pauper being almost an anomaly. Thrift seems the birthright of both the French and German peasant, as well as of the middle class, and their careful habits, joined to the better rate of wages in America, soon make them prosperous and well-to-do citizens. It is in the tenement-houses that we must seek for the mass of the poor, and it is in ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 26, September 1880 • Various
... Hanseatic states of the middle ages, all endeavoured to enrich themselves by trading in commodities so eagerly and universally desired. As industry and skill increased, and as the means as well as the desire of purchase and enjoyment spread, by the rise of a middle class in Europe, the demand for these commodities extended. The productions and manufactures of the north, as well as of the south of Europe, having been increased and improved, enabled the inhabitants of these countries to participate in those articles ...
— Robert Kerr's General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Volume 18 • William Stevenson
... otherwise than as long;" the "half-accented" which "must be regarded as ambiguous, or common;" and the "accentless," which "are in their nature short."—See Noehden's Gram., p. 87. His middle class, however, our prosodists in general very properly dispense with. In Fiske's History of Greek Literature, which is among the additions to the Manual of Classical Literature from the German of Eschenburg, are the following passages: "The tone [i.e. accent] in Greek is placed upon ...
— The Grammar of English Grammars • Goold Brown
... no doubt, in fact, that an independent, respectable, and, I believe, trustworthy middle class is rapidly forming.... If the real object of emancipation was to place the freedman in such a position that he might work out his own advancement in the social scale, and prove his capacity for the full ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 4, No. 1, July, 1863 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... there was some atrocious architecture perpetrated. In that time, too, every one put bow windows on his house, to catch all of the morning sunlight that was coming through the fog, and those little houses, with bow windows and fancy work all down their fronts, were characteristic of the middle class residence district. ...
— Complete Story of the San Francisco Horror • Richard Linthicum
... prosperity of the times. The wrong which had been done by the degradation of the free landowner into a feudal dependant was partially redressed by the degradation of the bulk of the English lords themselves into a middle class as they were pushed from their place by the foreign baronage who settled on English soil; and this social change was accompanied by a gradual enrichment and elevation of the class of servile and semi-servile cultivators which had lifted them at the close of this period into ...
— History of the English People, Volume I (of 8) - Early England, 449-1071; Foreign Kings, 1071-1204; The Charter, 1204-1216 • John Richard Green
... unimportant modifications of the feudal system took place, by allowing the breaking of entails. These and other measures, and other occurrences, were making way for a new class of society to emerge, and show itself, in a military and feudal age; a middle class, between the barons or great landholders and the retainers of the crown, on the one side, and the tenants of the crown and barons, and agricultural and other laborers, on the other side. With the rise and growth of this ...
— The Great Speeches and Orations of Daniel Webster • Daniel Webster
... eminently favourable to its operations in Manchester. Its leaders were able, well-informed, and upright men, profoundly convinced that their cause was just, and that the welfare of the people was involved in their success or failure. They were men of the middle class, acquainted intimately with the needs and doings of the trading community to which they belonged, and therefore at once better qualified to argue on questions affecting commerce, and less directly interested in the prosperity of agriculture, than the more aristocratic leaders of ...
— Great Britain and Her Queen • Anne E. Keeling
... in the surroundings of 'er own 'ome, 'er ladyship soon began to see that she had taken too romantic a view of 'im previous, your lordship. 'E was one of the lower middle class, what is sometimes termed the bourjoisy, and 'is 'abits were not the 'abits of the class to which 'er ladyship belonged. 'E 'ad nothing in common with the rest of the 'ouse-party, and was injudicious in 'is choice of forks. The very first night ...
— A Damsel in Distress • Pelham Grenville Wodehouse
... intoxicate—is here about twenty years behind its present position in the United States. I think there are not more absolute drunkards here than in our American cities, but the habit of drinking for drink's sake is all but universal. The Aristocracy drink almost to a man; so do the Middle Class; so do the Clergy; so alas! do the Women! There is less of Ardent Spirits imbibed than with us; but Wines are much cheaper and in very general use among the well-off; while the consumption of Ale, Beer, Porter, &c. (mainly by the Poor) is enormous. Only think ...
— Glances at Europe - In a Series of Letters from Great Britain, France, Italy, - Switzerland, &c. During the Summer of 1851. • Horace Greeley
... noticeable that the Teli has a much better position in Bengal than elsewhere. Sir H. Risley says: "Their original profession was probably oil-pressing, and the caste may be regarded as a functional group recruited from the respectable middle class of Hindu society. Oil is used by all Hindus for domestic and ceremonial purposes, and its manufacture could only be carried on by men whose social purity was beyond dispute." This is, however, quite exceptional, and Mr. ...
— The Tribes and Castes of the Central Provinces of India - Volume IV of IV - Kumhar-Yemkala • R.V. Russell
... For the first time since the establishment of the kingdom of France, the town deputies were called to sit in a body in a national assembly, alongside of prelates and barons; this great event was the official acknowledgment of the middle class as the "Third Estate," and attested that henceforth the villages, the towns, the communities formed a collective ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 07 • Various
... City life goes to extremes; country life, while varied, is more even. In the country there is little of large wealth, luxury, and ease; little also of extreme poverty, reeking crime, unutterable filth, moral sewage. Farmers are essentially a middle class and no comparison is fair that does not keep this ...
— Chapters in Rural Progress • Kenyon L. Butterfield
... lieutenant who could not show four generations of nobility on his father's side, counting himself. Thus were all members of families recently ennobled excluded from the service, and no door was left open to the military ambition of people belonging to the middle class; although that class was yearly increasing in importance. Moreover, strict genealogical proofs were required, the candidate for a commission having to submit his papers to the royal herald. Exceptions were made in favor of the sons of members of the military order of Saint Louis. [Footnote: ...
— The Eve of the French Revolution • Edward J. Lowell |
