"Middle-class" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... concealed beneath these words, and the middle-class air which exhaled from them, Godefroid had, on the afternoon when we found him on the quay, called at four o'clock on the grocer, who told him that Madame de la Chanterie was then dining, and did not ...
— The Brotherhood of Consolation • Honore de Balzac
... chosen to furnish the room in his own style, and it was a style to which Polly could never grow accustomed. It outraged all the instinctive prejudices and conventions inherited from her respectable, lower middle-class forbears. Instead of being good substantial mahogany or walnut, it was some queerly veined light-coloured wood, and decorated with the strangest coloured rectangular designs, and painted—well, with nightmare oddities, that's what she called them! And she was not far wrong, for all down ...
— Good Old Anna • Marie Belloc Lowndes
... she is; a burgomaster's daughter. That means prosperous, narrow-minded, middle-class people. She's convent-bred, devout. She's still young or she'd be married. She's altogether without experience. She's frightened just as a child would be over what's going on in the house. And the prayer ...
— Mary Wollaston • Henry Kitchell Webster
... to be quotidian and contemporary that his claim to a position in the history of the novel mainly consists. Some might add a third audacity, that of being "middle-class." Scarron had dealt with barn-mummers and innkeepers and some mere riff-raff; but he had included not a few nobles, and had indulged in fighting and other "noble" subjects. There is no fighting in Furetiere, and his chief "noble" figure—the rascal who robbed Lucrece of her virtue ...
— A History of the French Novel, Vol. 1 - From the Beginning to 1800 • George Saintsbury
... after a second's thought, "and they are very expensive grocers, Mrs. Salisbury. Of course, what they have is of the best, but they cater to the very richest families, you know—firms like Lewis & Sons aren't very much interested in the orders they receive from—well, from upper middle-class homes, people of moderate means. They handle hotels and the summer colony at ...
— The Treasure • Kathleen Norris
... "to confer with the Viceroy." That was one of his perquisites. The Viceroy knew nothing of Mellishe except that he was "one of those middle-class deities who seem necessary to the spiritual comfort of this Paradise of the Middle-classes," and that, in all probability, he had "suggested, designed, founded, and endowed all the public institutions in Madras." Which proves that His Excellency, though dreamy, had experience ...
— The Works of Rudyard Kipling One Volume Edition • Rudyard Kipling
... for educating the "working-class," there was the scheme for the improvement of middle-class education, which was then going on at Oxford—the beginning of University Extension—supported by the Rev. F. Temple (later Archbishop of Canterbury), and Mr. (afterwards Sir) Thomas Dyke Acland. Ruskin was heartily for them; and in a letter on the subject, he tried to ...
— The Life of John Ruskin • W. G. Collingwood
... nothing striking to a Russian, but to the English student it is sufficiently significant for several reasons. It illustrates how recent a growth was the educated middle-class in pre-revolutionary Russia, and it shows, what is perhaps more significant, the homogeneity of the Russian people, and their capacity for completely changing their ...
— Letters of Anton Chekhov • Anton Chekhov
... feet that pass him, he would probably feel grieved if the strong hand of some clear-headed individual lifted him up out of the gutter's filth and he was informed that much depended upon one's view being from a level, not an incline. We do not Judge our middle-class citizens by our cooks, and it is apt to suggest unwisdom, to express it very mildly, to gauge the men and women workers of the stage by beer-hall ...
— Volume 10 of Brann The Iconoclast • William Cowper Brann
... dish of trout for 6d., and eggs are always to be had for 1d. each. It is extremely interesting to live in a private house and to see the externalities, at least, of domestic life in a Japanese middle-class home. ...
— Unbeaten Tracks in Japan • Isabella L. Bird
... comprises the great army of what may be termed 'middle-class books.' They are bound usually in half-bindings, when they are not in the publisher's cloth, and are good, clean, sound, copies of such works as county histories, antiquarian books, sets of the learned societies' publications and of 'standard authors.' ...
— The Book-Hunter at Home • P. B. M. Allan
... the respectability of a church-ridden community. "Wild Bill" had watched the discussions over "Section Six", the provision in the constitution of the party against sabotage and violence; the very same persons who had been enthusiastic for that bit of middle-class fakery were now trying to line up the local for the defence of the British sea-power! What the hell difference did it make to any working man whether or not the Kaiser got a railroad to Bagdad? Of course, if a man had been to school in Britain, and had a British wife, and ...
— Jimmie Higgins • Upton Sinclair
... Don't go back. It's a bad place, and will be destroyed." Troops on their march towards Andenne announced in villages through which they passed that they were going to burn the town and massacre the inhabitants. At Louvain, a German officer, treated generously by a middle-class family, and appreciating their courtesy, rushed to their house on the 25th at 11 o'clock in the morning,[27] and earnestly pressed his hosts to leave without delay, refusing to give them any explanation. The family, ...
— Their Crimes • Various
... to these nerve-disturbing factors Thompson suffered from the heat. A perverted dignity, nurtured in a hard-shell, middle-class environment, prevented him from stripping to his undershirt. The sun's rays, diffusing abnormal heat through the atmosphere, reflected piercingly upward from the water, had played havoc with him. His first act upon landing was to seat himself upon a flat-topped ...
— Burned Bridges • Bertrand W. Sinclair
... the point to which the authorities are directing their attention. On that river many battles must be fought and heavy risks incurred before any impression can be made on the enemy, all of which could be avoided by using the Tennessee river. This river is navigable for middle-class boats to the foot of the Muscle Shoals, in Alabama, and is open to navigation all the year, while the distance is but two hundred and fifty miles, by the river, from Paducah, on the Ohio. The Tennessee offers many advantages over ...
— A Military Genius - Life of Anna Ella Carroll of Maryland • Sarah Ellen Blackwell
... controller of the Sound tolls, and ultimately committed to her the whole charge of the finances. A bourgeoise herself, it was Sigbrit's constant policy to elevate and extend the influence of the middle classes. She soon became the soul of a middle-class inner council, which competed with Rigsraad itself. The patricians naturally resented their supersession and nearly every unpopular measure was attributed to the influence of "the foul-mouthed Dutch sorceress who ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 6, Slice 3 - "Chitral" to "Cincinnati" • Various
... might be among his neighbours. But they were not, and it was not until he was half through the meal that he descried them at one of the tables on the other side of the room. At his own table there were the usual assorted types of the middle-class tourist, his wife and family, most of them frankly glad that they were homeward bound, with the greatest part of their ...
— The Destroyer - A Tale of International Intrigue • Burton Egbert Stevenson
... the upper classes. In the eighteenth century the spread of education and the appearance of newspapers and magazines led to an immense increase in the number of readers; and at the same time the middle-class people assumed a foremost place in English life and history. These new readers and this new, powerful middle class had no classic tradition to hamper them. They cared little for the opinions of Dr. Johnson and the famous ...
— English Literature - Its History and Its Significance for the Life of the English Speaking World • William J. Long
... father) is much after the fashion of his own correspondence. I confess it has left my own head exhausted; I hope it may not produce the same effect on yours. But I want him to look really into this question (both sides of it, and not the representations of rabid middle-class newspapers, sworn to support all the little tyrannies of wealth), and I know he will be convinced that this is a case of unjust law; and that, however desirable the end may seem to him, he will not be Jesuit enough to think that any end ...
— The Letters of Robert Louis Stevenson - Volume 1 • Robert Louis Stevenson
... so hereafter, let it be Miss Martineau's Deerbrook. It is really very striking; and parts of it are very true and very beautiful. It is not so true, or so thoroughly clear and harmonious, among delineations of English middle-class gentility, as Miss Austen's books, especially as Pride and Prejudice, which I think exquisite; but it is worth reading. The hour and the Man is eloquent, but an absurd exaggeration.—I hold out so valorously against this Scandinavian weather, that I deserve to be ranked with Odin and ...
— The Life of John Sterling • Thomas Carlyle
... the Concordat was in its most flourishing condition, a young man belonging to a wealthy and highly respected middle-class family went to the office of the head of the police at P——, and begged for his help and advice, ...
— Library of the World's Best Mystery and Detective Stories • Edited by Julian Hawthorne
... upholstered in cream, and driven by a chauffeur in a violet and cream livery, created some slight sensation in Spenser Road, S.E. Mollie Gretna's conspicuous car was familiar enough to residents in the West End of London, but to lower middle-class suburbia it came as something of a shock. More than one window curtain moved suspiciously, suggesting a hidden but watchful presence, when the glittering vehicle stopped before the gate of number 67; and the lady at number 68 seized an evidently rare opportunity to come out and ...
— Dope • Sax Rohmer
... The lower middle-class Boers attach great weight to the guesses of native bonethrowers. It is strange sometimes when a Malay charmer is prosecuted for imposing on the public to find Dutch witnesses giving evidence of the healing powers possessed ...
— Native Life in South Africa, Before and Since • Solomon Tshekisho Plaatje
... out to tell not of noblemen's country-seats, but of Rock Park. Rock Park was one of the typical abodes of the English respectable middle-class, and the English middle-class, respectable, or not altogether respectable, is the substance of England. Not until you have felt and smelt and tasted that do you know what England really is. Fifty years ago, the people in question were dull, ignorant, material, selfish, prejudiced, conventional; ...
— Hawthorne and His Circle • Julian Hawthorne
... ROBINSON, three Englishmen who travel together. Their adventures, by Richard Doyle, were published in Punch. In them is held up to ridicule the gaucherie, the contracted notions, the vulgarity, the conceit, and the general snobbism of the middle-class English abroad. ...
— Character Sketches of Romance, Fiction and the Drama, Vol 1 - A Revised American Edition of the Reader's Handbook • The Rev. E. Cobham Brewer, LL.D.
... prevented Flamby from telling Don why she wished to keep in touch with Orlando James. Paul's philosophy was a broad one, and imposed few trammels upon social intercourse between the sexes. He regarded early-Victorian prudery with frank horror, and counted the narrowness of middle-class suburban life as directly traceable to this tainted spring. Don had once declared a suburban Sunday to be "hell's delight. Rock of Ages," he said, "(arrangement for piano) has more to answer for than the entire ritual of the Black Mass." Paul applauded breadth of ...
— The Orchard of Tears • Sax Rohmer
... to be compelled to cast a slur upon the Literary profession, but observation shows me that it still contains within its ranks writers born and bred in, and moving amidst—if, without offence, one may put it bluntly—a purely middle-class environment: men and women to whom Park Lane will never be anything than the shortest route between Notting Hill and the Strand; to whom Debrett's Peerage—gilt-edged and bound in red, a tasteful-looking volume—ever has been and ...
— The Angel and the Author - and Others • Jerome K. Jerome
... of the mob one way or the other," he said. "I despise them utterly; but the troops and the mobiles are sufficient to man the forts and the walls, and I believe that middle-class corps, like the one I have entered, will fight manfully; and the history of Paris has shown over and over again that the mob of Paris, fickle, vain-headed, noisy braggadocios as they are, and always have been, can at least starve well. They held out against Henry of Navarre ...
— A Girl of the Commune • George Alfred Henty
... this liberalism, as Dr. Newman saw it, and as it really broke the Oxford movement? It was the great middle-class liberalism, which had for the cardinal points of its belief the Reform Bill of 1832,[413] and local self-government, in politics; in the social sphere, free-trade, unrestricted competition, and the ...
— Selections from the Prose Works of Matthew Arnold • Matthew Arnold
... a Sunday during the cold weather which did not bring a couple of sportsmen to the bungalow. Samarendra attended personally to their comforts, thus making many friends. Through their influence he secured carte blanche in the matter of guns and ammunition—a boon which seldom falls to the lot of middle-class Indians. At their request he subscribed to various European clubs, winning the reputation of being "not half a bad sort of fellow". All this hospitality, however, was terribly expensive, and it soon exceeded Samarendra's income. But he went on spending ...
— Tales of Bengal • S. B. Banerjea
... nearly all its staff, the whole of the lower and middle-class clergy, cures, vicars, canons and collegiate chaplains, teachers or directors of schools, colleges and seminaries, more than sixty-five thousand ecclesiastics, formed a healthy, well organized body, worthily ...
— The Origins of Contemporary France, Volume 4 (of 6) - The French Revolution, Volume 3 (of 3) • Hippolyte A. Taine
... lady in a little city of the south of Italy, told Paola Lombroso that young middle-class girls there are not allowed to go out except to Mass, and cannot even show themselves at the window except under their mother's eye; yet they do not think it necessary to have a cabin when sea-bathing, and even dispense with a bathing costume ...
— Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 1 (of 6) • Havelock Ellis
... Roman comic poet, flourished about 94 B.C. His comedies chiefly dealt with everyday subjects from Roman middle-class life, and he himself tells us that he borrowed freely from Menander and others. His style was vigorous and correct; his moral tone that ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... genius of inspiration and fertility, Aristotle's the genius of erudition, mastery, and synthesis. In form, Plato's is the gift of expression, Aristotle's the gift of arrangement. Plato was born and bred an aristocrat, and became the lover of the best—the uncompromising purist; Aristotle is middle-class, and limitlessly wide, hospitable, and patient in his interests. Thus while both are speculative and acute, Plato's mind is intensive and profound, Aristotle's extensive and orderly. It was inevitable, then, that Aristotle should find Plato one-sided. The philosophy of the ideal is not worldly ...
— The Approach to Philosophy • Ralph Barton Perry
... come back!" screamed the Rocket, "I have a great deal to say to you;" but the Duck paid no attention to him. "I am glad that she has gone," he said to himself, "she has a decidedly middle-class mind;" and he sank a little deeper still into the mud, and began to think about the loneliness of genius, when suddenly two little boys in white smocks came running down the bank, with ...
— The Happy Prince and Other Tales • Oscar Wilde
... simply sneer at as the stock-in-trade of hypocrites. I will therefore tell you in a couple of words why I have come. All I ask is that you deliver over to me your youngest daughter. I will engage to bring her up honourably as a respectable middle-class girl should be brought up. Her mind is still uncorrupted, she is still in the hands of God, and I will undertake to the day of my death to preserve her reputation. All I require of you is that neither you yourself, nor ...
— A Hungarian Nabob • Maurus Jokai
... her, conscious of a little coldness creeping over his body. She was usually lighter when they were not entirely alone. Just now, in the midst of this commonplace, exceedingly middle-class evening party, with the Larkins, the Downings, and the Burtons chattering, warm, diffuse, and elate, about him, she stirred him with a little horror—not horror of herself, but ...
— In Connection with the De Willoughby Claim • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... inferior to the aristocracies of Europe. Soft hands and exclusive manners were there as elsewhere in the world the evidences of a gentle life; sturdy personal independence and rough ways, here as in England, were the marks of middle-class training, through which recruits to the privileged order had generally come. Openly and on all proper occasions the Southerners announced the break-down of democracy and the benefits of a cultured elite; the few thousand "first families," who lived upon the incomes of plantations, spent their winters ...
— Expansion and Conflict • William E. Dodd
... the nervous alertness of the Yankee was the spectacle of the middle-class German and his ways. He sat by his plain, stout, ill-dressed Frau, with his back to the scenery, and ate. Occasionally he spoke in monosyllables: more often he drank; but the end and object of his Rhine trip seemed to be that of consuming as much food as lay within the limits of possibility. ...
— A War-time Journal, Germany 1914 and German Travel Notes • Harriet Julia Jephson
... have saved any foreign observer a great deal of trouble in studying America. He was an almost perfect type of the petty small-town middle-class lawyer. He lived in Panama, Pennsylvania. He had never been "captain" of anything except the Crescent Volunteer Fire Company, but he owned the title because he collected rents, wrote insurance, ...
— The Job - An American Novel • Sinclair Lewis
... themselves to themselves. A strain of this kind is sometimes constant, even so far from the fountainhead, with its pleasing proof that such views were once the most general and the most sacred defence of middle-class firesides, and that Thackeray had, after all, a good deal to excuse him. Crossing the Atlantic they doubtless suffered some dilution; but all that was possible to conserve them under very adverse conditions Mrs Milburn and Miss Filkin made it their duty to do. Nor ...
— The Imperialist • (a.k.a. Mrs. Everard Cotes) Sara Jeannette Duncan
... her husband off to Petersburg. She spent two winters in Petersburg (they removed to Tzarskoe Selo for the summer), in a beautiful, light, elegantly furnished apartment; they made many acquaintances in middle-class and even in the higher circles of society, they went out and received a great deal, and gave most charming musical and dancing parties. Varvara Pavlovna attracted guests as a flame attracts moths. Such a dissipated life did not altogether please Feodor Ivanitch. ...
— A Nobleman's Nest • Ivan Turgenieff
... intention of entering on the way of Mysticism, but they may at least allow me to envy it and not inflict on me their middle-class ideal of ...
— En Route • J.-K. (Joris-Karl) Huysmans
... jacket cut at the elbows. A gourd was slung over his shoulder and a pistol was hanging at his belt, his hand grasped a gun, the butt of which rested in a leathern pocket fastened to his saddle-bow—in short, he wore the complete costume of a brigand in a melodrama, or of the middle-class Corsican on his travels. Miss Nevil's attention was first attracted by the woman's remarkable beauty. She seemed about twenty years of age; she was tall and pale, with dark blue eyes, red lips, and teeth like ...
— Columba • Prosper Merimee
... appeal to a certain order of taste, the girl's distinction, to which one of the Miss Mees had alluded earlier in the day, was glaringly patent to Mrs Devitt's sharp eyes; beside this indefinable personal quality, Mrs Devitt observed with a shudder, Victoria seemed middle-class. Mavis's fate, as far as the Devitts were concerned, was decided in the twinkling of an eye. For all this decision, so suddenly arrived at, Mrs Devitt greeted Mavis kindly; indeed, the friendliness that she displayed caused the girl's hopes ...
— Sparrows - The Story of an Unprotected Girl • Horace W. C. Newte
... really. Then there's the middle-class like Mr. Thurston and Miss Avies who pretend to believe all that Mr. Warlock says, but of course, they don't believe a word of it, and they hope that this will prove his ruin. They know there won't be any Second Coming ...
— The Captives • Hugh Walpole
... charm for them they are all ashamed of you. Now, as a believer in woman's rights, do a little talking to the men as to their duties to their wives, or else refrain from urging us women to have children. I am only one of thousands of middle-class respectable women who give their lives to raise a nice family, and then who become bitter from the injustice done us. Don't let this go into the waste-basket, but ...
— Theodore Roosevelt - An Autobiography by Theodore Roosevelt • Theodore Roosevelt
... called it "dramatic scenes," it was a play presenting with spirited rhythm a phase of the spiritual revolution and moral revaluation then taking place, and in the orthodox uncle and the radical nephew he created two figures full of real dramatic life. The well-to-do and well-satisfied middle-class with its somewhat shopworn ideals was a popular topic with these young men who lustily set about to demolish the Mosaic and other codes of life. Otto Erich Hartleben was hailed as the Juvenal of the ...
— The German Classics, v. 20 - Masterpieces of German Literature • Various
... Heaven, all's right with the world.' No good, Mr. McCunn. All back numbers. Poetry's not a thing of pretty round phrases or noisy invocations. It's life itself, with the tang of the raw world in it—not a sweetmeat for middle-class women in parlours." ...
— Huntingtower • John Buchan
... recognise that, creatures of rags and shavings as they were, they had their feelings? Not he! they were all alike, these politicians, directly they got into office. How long, he asked them, were Guys to be chivied, and harried, and moved along into back-streets by the brutal minions of a corrupt middle-class? If they wanted to get their rights, they must make themselves a nuisance to the Authorities, like other people. It was all very fine to talk about the Franchise, and "One Guy, one vote!" and all the rest ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 103, November 5, 1892 • Various
... she? No mate for a man like you, I feel sure. In the first place, she is not rich; I could tell that by the querulous complaints of her middle-class mother. She's just fit to be some pious Quaker's wife, or a Sister of Charity, or a governess, or a hospital nurse, or a nun—no companion for a man destined ...
— The Martian • George Du Maurier
... a plain, stocky-looking man, came out on the platform dressed in an ordinary garb of black coat, vest, and trousers. It was a vast audience of what might be called middle-class people. Mr. Spurgeon's sermon was a plain, direct, and exceedingly forcible appeal to their judgment and emotions. There was no attempt at rhetoric, but hard, hammerlike blows. As he rose in his indignation and denunciation of some current evils, and illustrated his argument with the Old Testament ...
— My Memories of Eighty Years • Chauncey M. Depew
... English people are so afraid of co-education. To this day schools like Bedales, King Alfred's, Harpenden, and Arundale are reckoned as crank schools. The great middle-class of England believes in segregation. Even Dr. Ernest Jones, the most prominent Freudian psycho-analyst in England, appears to be afraid ...
— A Dominie in Doubt • A. S. Neill
... the Bradley blood! Sarah feared for the pollution of that sacred fluid derived from English yeomen (at best), filtered through the middle-class expatriates of a nation itself hopelessly middle class beside the pure strain of a race of kings that was old and majestically forgotten ere Romulus was dreamed of! Back, back through those mysterious Etruscans, back to the very gods themselves, an absolutely ...
— Margarita's Soul - The Romantic Recollections of a Man of Fifty • Ingraham Lovell
... drove on to Monceaux. It was like being children over again, with a slight sense of being out of bounds. I had never seen confectionery eaten wholesale in that fashion. Such bonbons were expensive, too. Trained in the personal economy of English middle-class life, it would never have occurred to me to buy several francs' worth of sugar-plums and to eat them by the handful. But as the fair American sat before me, smiling, laughing, petting Amy and saying fascinating ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. XXVI., December, 1880. • Various
... founded in the latter years of Henry than in the three centuries before. The impulse only grew the stronger as the direct influence of the New Learning passed away. The grammar schools of Edward the Sixth and of Elizabeth, in a word the system of middle-class education which by the close of the century had changed the very face of England, were the outcome of Colet's foundation ...
— History of the English People, Volume III (of 8) - The Parliament, 1399-1461; The Monarchy 1461-1540 • John Richard Green
... brought home with a brutal and physical directness utterly foreign to the spirit of the regular pastoral. This is, on the whole, what one would expect. The coarse realism that gave life and vitality to the novel, that characteristic product of middle-class cynicism and humour, finds no place in the pastoral of literary tradition. The conventional grace of the pastoral could offer no material to the novel. It is true that when we speak of the bourgeois spirit of the novella ...
— Pastoral Poetry and Pastoral Drama - A Literary Inquiry, with Special Reference to the Pre-Restoration - Stage in England • Walter W. Greg
... fear of debt, the dear society of weans and wife, of brothers and sisters, proud of each other, knowing so few, and finding amends for want and obscurity in books and thought. What a love of nature! and—shall I say it?—of middle-class nature. Not great, like Goethe, in the stars, or like Byron, on the ocean, or Moore, in the luxurious East, but in the homely landscape which the poor see around them—bleak leagues of pasture and stubble, ice, and ...
— Modern Eloquence: Vol II, After-Dinner Speeches E-O • Various
... matter-of-fact tone. 'I don't know why, I'm sure, but everybody seems to think it is, and if it would help matters—I mean, if Miss Donne would consider that a respectable marriage with a solid, middle-class man would settle the question, I suppose I could manage it. I could always divorce, you know, if ...
— Fair Margaret - A Portrait • Francis Marion Crawford
... and in the dwellings of the middle-class, the creche is placed always in the living-room, and so becomes an intimate part of the family life. On a table set in a corner is represented a rocky hill-side—dusted with flour to represent snow—rising in terraces tufted with moss and grass and little trees and broken by ...
— The Christmas Kalends of Provence - And Some Other Provencal Festivals • Thomas A. Janvier
... at the Villa Joos, and am beginning to enjoy a study of middle-class provincial life. The ladies do all the house-work. We have breakfast (a bite) in the kitchen at 8.30 a.m., then I go to make soup, and when I come back after lunch for a rest, "the family" are dressed and sitting round a stove, ...
— My War Experiences in Two Continents • Sarah Macnaughtan
... marriages for each decade from 1831 to 1890 have been taken consecutively from those families who have held their title to nobility for at least two preceding generations, thus excluding the more modern commercial middle-class element in the present Peerage, which can be better dealt with elsewhere. We then get the full effect of hereditary stability and a secure position, and do away with any disturbing influence that might occur from a ...
— Birth Control • Halliday G. Sutherland
... ordered room, polished to perfection, steadfast in its shining Sunday state, appeared as the irremovable seat of middle-class tradition, of family virtue, of fidelity and cleanliness, of sacred immutable propriety. And into the bosom of these safe and comfortable sanctities Ranny had brought horror and defilement ...
— The Combined Maze • May Sinclair
... of that? And those are the kind of people Switzerland was full of. Some were alone, and some were impersonally conducted in a very loose sort of way. Wherever you wanted to go they were sure to be ahead, and kicking up a middle-class dust that choked you. The loud sound of their incessant talk echoed from snow peak to snow peak. And their terrible clothes, chosen evidently "not to show the dirt" (but they did), came between your eyes and any beauty of scenery there might be, even if you cared to ...
— The Smart Set - Correspondence & Conversations • Clyde Fitch
... mats, fitted upon the floor of every Japanese room, are always six feet long by three feet broad. The largest room in the ordinary middle-class house is a room of eight mats. A room of one hundred mats is ...
— Glimpses of an Unfamiliar Japan - First Series • Lafcadio Hearn
... cronies had organized a small supper at a middle-class restaurant on the previous night in honor of his return, and as a natural consequence Mr. Benjamin Levy walked down the Strand at about half-past ten on the following morning, on his way to the office, a little paler than usual, and with a suspicion ...
— The New Tenant • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... is in the particular nature of their specific and deep experience that they differ one from another. Although in range and sweep of general knowledge Sir Walter Scott was far more vast than Jane Austen, he confessed amazement at the depth of her specific knowledge of every-day English middle-class society. Most of the great novelists have made, like Jane Austen, a special study of some particular field. Hawthorne is an authority on Puritan New England, Thackeray on London high society, Henry James on cosmopolitan super-civilization. It would seem, therefore, that a young ...
— A Manual of the Art of Fiction • Clayton Hamilton
... inherited a large fortune made by commerce, and had increased it by the same means. He was a middle-class Whig, had faithfully supported that party in his native town during the days they wandered in the wilderness, and had well earned his share of the milk and honey when they had vanquished the promised land. In the springtide of Liberalism, when the world was not analytical ...
— Coningsby • Benjamin Disraeli
... up, grinning. "There you go again with that middle-class word, mother. But I'll forgive you this once on condition that you never use it again. People in our walk of life never borrow anything but trouble, you know. We don't borrow money. We arrange for it occasionally, but God forbid that we ...
— From the Housetops • George Barr McCutcheon
... forms and ceremonies were made for man, not man for forms and ceremonies. He took sabbatarianism as a type of the things that should be set at nought. The cold philanthropies, the ostentatious public charities, the tedious formalisms so dear to the middle-class mind, he exposed with utter and relentless scorn. To us, what is termed orthodoxy is merely a facile unintelligent acquiescence; but to them, and in their hands, it was a terrible and paralysing tyranny. Christ swept it ...
— De Profundis • Oscar Wilde
... digestion, contribute to the character which belongs to active brains and disordered livers. The Italians conceive great plans, but they cannot digest them. The English common-people drink beer, and the beerish character is stolid, rude, but stubborn and enduring. The English middle-class imbibe port and sherry; and with these strong potations their ideas become obfuscated. Their character has no liveliness; amusement is not one of their wants; they sit at home after dinner and doze away the ...
— The Parisians, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... thoroughfare of Europe went the absurd pale blue tweed tailleurs and the lavender tweed cape suits of America's wives and daughters. Usually, after the first month or two, they shed these respectable, middle-class habiliments for what they fondly believed to be smart Paris costumes; and you could almost invariably tell a good, moral, church-going matron of the Middle West by the fact that she was got up like a demimondaine of the second class, ...
— Gigolo • Edna Ferber
... H. C. Bailey, who is best known by his spirited historical romances, has deserted the past for the present. He tells a story of modern London. The scenes are laid in poor middle-class life, in the worlds of journalism and theoretical revolutionaries and business. His hero is one of the most ordinary of men, fighting his way up from the borders of poverty to respectable suburban comfort. With him is contrasted a much more brilliant creature, an apostle of the newest creeds ...
— Werwolves • Elliott O'Donnell
... leaders: Christian and Socialist Trade Unions; Federation of Belgian Industries; numerous other associations representing bankers, manufacturers, middle-class artisans, and the legal and medical professions; various organizations represent the cultural interests of Flanders and Wallonia; various peace groups such as the Flemish Action Committee Against Nuclear ...
— The 1997 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency.
... not the honour to be a prince, have no reason to despise the mercanti di campagna. Quite the contrary. I have solid ones for esteeming them highly. I have found them full of intelligence, kindness, and cordiality: middle-class men in the best sense of the term. My sole regret is that their numbers are so few, and that their scope of action ...
— The Roman Question • Edmond About
... is to Maria; and Maria, portrayed under the features and character of the heroine, was, we learn, an agreeable girl, of middle-class origins, who, in the year of 1833, attached herself to Balzac and bore him ...
— Balzac • Frederick Lawton
... his people with taxes but dazzling them with festivities; infuriating them by his disregard of the public welfare, but fascinating them by his good looks, his tolerance of old abuses, his ridicule of the monks, and by the careless libertinage which had founded the fortunes of more than one middle-class husband and father—for the Duke always paid well for what he appropriated. He had grown old in his pleasant sins, and these, as such raiment will, had grown old and dingy with him; but if no longer splendid he was still splendour-loving, and drew to his court the most brilliant ...
— The Valley of Decision • Edith Wharton
... year!" he thought, looking at the flower-stands bright with bloom, and thinking of the social enjoyments that were about to gratify his vanity. "She was made to be the wife of a minister. When I think of his Excellency's wife, and how little she helps him! the good woman is a comfortable middle-class dowdy, and when she goes to the palace or into society—" He pinched his lips together. Very busy men are apt to have very ignorant notions about household matters, and you can make them believe that a hundred thousand ...
— Bureaucracy • Honore de Balzac
... fastidious eye; he had no pride in his business nor any initiative; his only virtues were not doing certain things and hard work. "Your uncle," said my mother—all grown-up cousins were uncles by courtesy among the Victorian middle-class—"isn't much to look at or talk to, but he's a Good Hard-Working Man." There was a sort of base honourableness about toil, however needless, in that system of inversion. Another point of honour was to rise at or before dawn, and then laboriously ...
— Tono Bungay • H. G. Wells
... foresaw a certain narrowness and hardness. She herself had made her fight against the characteristics of Sir Isaac and—perhaps she was lacking in that aristocratic feeling which comes so naturally to most successful middle-class people in England—she could not believe that what she had found bad and suffocating for herself could be agreeable and helpful for ...
— The Wife of Sir Isaac Harman • H. G. (Herbert George) Wells
... the many middle-class individuals whom he knew, who had money, would get into trouble, he would shake his head. It didn't do to talk about those things. If it came up for discussion among such friends as with him passed for close, he would deprecate the folly of the thing. ...
— Sister Carrie • Theodore Dreiser
... restaurant garden; there were so many young people there and so much light-heartedness, and so many lovers. They had got into their carriage again and were now driving slowly past the garden, so they saw all the light-coloured blouses and the gaily trimmed hats, all the finery of the lower middle-class. ...
— The Son of His Mother • Clara Viebig
... trying manner. If the gentle little widow had not cast a halo round her relatives, he could have preached that sermon upon the home-keeping duties of women, or have been too much offended to accept any service from the Curtis family; and he could have done without them, for he had a wide middle-class popularity; his manners with the second-rate society, in which he had been bred, were just sufficiently superior and flattering to recommend all his best points, and he obtained plenty of subscriptions from visitors, and of co-operation ...
— The Clever Woman of the Family • Charlotte M. Yonge
... near the fire is a screen of the first tapestry ever made in England, representing a map of Surrey and Middlesex; a notion of utility combined with ornament, which we see still exhibited in the Sampler in old-fashioned, middle-class houses; that poor posthumous, base-born child of the tapestry, almost defunct itself; and ...
— The Wits and Beaux of Society - Volume 2 • Grace & Philip Wharton
... yielded to the demands of the times and adapted itself to the new desires and growing needs of men. Its aristocratic prejudices have not been allowed longer to confine its privileges and its operations to one class alone of the community,—and in identifying itself with the system of middle-class education, Oxford has won new claims to gratitude and to respect, and now exercises a wider and more confirmed authority over the thought of England than ever before. To us, who take pride in her ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. IV, No. 26, December, 1859 • Various
... hands of composers who were entirely unable to do justice to its possibilities. The romantic movement touched it into new life, and a school arose which contrived by dint of graceful melody and ingenious orchestral device to invest with real musical interest the simple stories in which the German middle-class delights. The most successful of these composers were Kreutzer ...
— The Opera - A Sketch of the Development of Opera. With full Descriptions - of all Works in the Modern Repertory • R.A. Streatfeild
... II marked the beginning of an important step in the evolution of the civil rights movement. Until then the struggle for racial equality had been sustained chiefly by the "talented tenth," the educated, middle-class black citizens who formed an economic and political alliance with white supporters. Together they fought to (p. 124) improve the racial situation with some success in the courts, but with little progress in the executive ...
— Integration of the Armed Forces, 1940-1965 • Morris J. MacGregor Jr.
... the make of the chairs, they are to be found in plenty of English middle-class drawing-rooms even now. The shape may be named the 'deformed.' The back is carved out into various contortions of a horse-shoe, with a bar across the middle which just catches you in the small of the ...
— Town Life in Australia - 1883 • R. E. N. (Richard) Twopeny
... readiness to take up the reference to himself. As he walked beside the others, his slender elegance, his handsome head, and fashionable clothes marked him out from the rugged force of Barton, the middle-class alertness of McEwart, the rubbed apostolicity of Lankester. But the ...
— The Testing of Diana Mallory • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... about to put forward are based almost entirely on my own twenty years' experience as a housemaster. My house contains forty-eight boys, who vary in age from ten to nineteen and come from comfortable middle-class homes. ...
— Youth and Sex • Mary Scharlieb and F. Arthur Sibly
... learning. In England we have a method that for obtaining the least possible result at the greatest possible expenditure of time and money is perhaps unequalled. An English boy who has been through a good middle-class school in England can talk to a Frenchman, slowly and with difficulty, about female gardeners and aunts; conversation which, to a man possessed perhaps of neither, is liable to pall. Possibly, if he be a bright exception, he may be able to tell the time, or make a few guarded ...
— Three Men on the Bummel • Jerome K. Jerome
... with it, for though she had begun to grow accustomed to respectable middle-class meals, life at the Callow still seemed the homelier. Reddin looked up from cutting bacon to say with unwonted thoughtfulness, 'Like some tea and toast?' He felt that toast was a triumph of imagination. He was rather dubious about asking ...
— Gone to Earth • Mary Webb
... (Palmer & Hayward, 1918) should also be read, as well as various pamphlets published by the National Guilds League. The attitude of the Syndicalists to Guild Socialism is far from sympathetic. An article in "The Syndicalist'' for February, 1914, speaks of it in the following terms: a Middle-class of the middle-class, with all the shortcomings (we had almost said 'stupidities') of the middle- classes writ large across it, 'Guild Socialism' stands forth as the latest lucubration of the middle-class mind. It is a 'cool ...
— Proposed Roads To Freedom • Bertrand Russell
... Frederick-Charles, Prince French people self-centred attitude of conventions in dress of girls interest of women in their children lack of regard for, on part of Northern races defence of fine qualities of difficulties of interpreting conversation, cramped lives of middle-class women religious question among Freycinet, M. de appointed Minister of Public Works ability displayed by, as a Republican statesman excellent qualities of succeeds M. Waddington as premier official changes ...
— My First Years As A Frenchwoman, 1876-1879 • Mary King Waddington
... be their home. They rented a comfortable, seven-room house in a comfortable, middle-class neighborhood, and Terry dropped the red velvet turbans and went in for picture hats. Orville bought her a piano whose tone was so good that to her ear, accustomed to the metallic discords of the Bijou instrument, it sounded out of tune. She played ...
— One Basket • Edna Ferber
... 9-1/2' x 8', with posts and testers complete, meant for Rajas and Zemindars. Can also accommodate 4 middle-class people comfortably. Going for Rs. 500."—Advt. ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 156, June 18, 1919 • Various
... auctioned. No one ever removes his goods from Con-naught, because the cost of getting things to any other part of Ireland is exorbitant, and also because tables and chairs fetch very high prices at auctions. Thus it happens that a certain historic interest attaches to the furniture of most middle-class houses west of the Shannon. The dispensary doctor dines off a table which once graced the parlour of a parish priest. The inspector of police boasts of the price he paid for his easy-chair, recently upholstered, at the auction of a departing bank manager, the same mahogany frame having once ...
— Hyacinth - 1906 • George A. Birmingham
... English people, were perfectly right. All those dear old men who happened to be born peers were at that moment, and upon that question, the precise counterpart of all the dear old men who happened to be born paupers or middle-class gentlemen. That mob of peers did really represent the English people—that is to say, it was honest, ignorant, vaguely excited, almost unanimous, and obviously wrong. Of course, rational democracy is better as an expression of the public will than the haphazard ...
— Heretics • Gilbert K. Chesterton
... opinion, its public policy, its flag and almost, as I have said, its frontier. It is not a question of persuading weak and wavering voters, at a vague parliamentary election, to vote on the other side for a change, to choose afresh between two middle-class gentlemen, who look exactly alike and only differ on a question about which nobody knows or cares anything. It is a question of contrasts that will almost certainly remain contrasts, except under the flood of some spiritual ...
— The New Jerusalem • G. K. Chesterton
... also, and the horde more caddish than in Holland - and in imagination I often see the Neapolitan tramp and loafer stand out as a prince or nobleman among the inmates of a Dutch village inn, or hall for more respectable entertainment. But your purse and your life are safer and the average standard of middle-class respectability higher here below the sea level than in ...
— The Bride of Dreams • Frederik van Eeden
... Paris, like many rich middle-class people do, mixing with their own particular set, without going among other people, and proud of knowing a Deputy, who might perhaps be a Minister some day, while two Chiefs of Division ...
— The Works of Guy de Maupassant, Vol. 1 (of 8) - Boule de Suif and Other Stories • Guy de Maupassant
... and if Queen Victoria's morning drum beats round the world, its beat is certain to be echoed before the day is over by the popping of champagne-corks. Now-a-days the exhilarating wine graces not merely princely but middle-class dinner-tables, and is the needful adjunct at every petit souper in all the gayer capitals of the world. It gives a flush to beauty at garden-parties and picnics, sustains the energies of the votaries of Terpsichore until the hour of dawn, and imparts to many a young gallant ...
— Facts About Champagne and Other Sparkling Wines • Henry Vizetelly
... that bore the boys was soon driving through the streets of Radford. Jack held in his hand a list of the better grade and middle-class hotels that Colonel Totten ...
— The Submarine Boys for the Flag - Deeding Their Lives to Uncle Sam • Victor G. Durham
... whether the male population is celibate, and if so, why there are so many women. Closer observation shows that the wives, daughters, and sisters are there, only their attire and manner are those of what Europeans would call middle-class and not working-class people. This is partly due to the fact that Western men affect a rough dress. Still one may say that the remark so often made, that the masses of the American people correspond to the middle class of Europe, ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol 6 • Various
... the passing of the first Reform Bill. It was a moderate measure to have brought the country to the verge of political revolution; roughly, it disfranchised a number of poor voters, but enfranchised the mass of the middle and lower middle-class. Absolutely rotten boroughs were abolished, but a large number of very small ones were retained, and the representation of the new towns was somewhat grudging and restricted. A more drastic measure, giving the vote to most of the town ...
— The History of England - A Study in Political Evolution • A. F. Pollard
... for a whole day under the obsession of her inept fancies. She would find life ill-ordered, she would see things and people rawly and overwhelm Christophe with her jeremiads; and it seemed hardly worth while to have broken away from the gloomy middle-class people with whom he lived to find once more the eternal enemy: ...
— Jean-Christophe, Vol. I • Romain Rolland
... of Antoinette. Why can't she cook in a middle-class, unedifying way? All this comes from having in the house a woman whose soul ...
— The Morals of Marcus Ordeyne • William J. Locke
... middle-class schools the advent of the "Oxford and Cambridge Schools Examination Board" is regarded with no small anxiety by principals, masters and scholars alike. It marks an epoch in their lives, and is the only period of the year in which there is anything ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, Vol. 22, September, 1878 • Various
... His impulse was to say, "Wife! My Winifred!" to take her in his arms as any clerk might take his little middle-class spouse, to kiss her lips, and, in doing it, fancy he drew near to the prison in which every soul eternally dwells on earth. Finely human he felt, as the dullest, the most unknown, the plainest, the most ...
— The Folly Of Eustace - 1896 • Robert S. Hichens
... family that day. The whole town was ringing with the news of the business trick just played by Grandet, the failure of his brother, and the arrival of his nephew. Obeying the desire to gossip over their mutual interests, all the upper and middle-class wine-growers in Saumur met at Monsieur des Grassins, where terrible imprecations were being fulminated against the ex-mayor. Nanon was spinning, and the whirr of her wheel was the only sound heard beneath the gray ...
— Eugenie Grandet • Honore de Balzac
... melodramatic nature, in the sublime of Salvator Rosa, in the desperate, wild, and strange. His very prayers, as reported by himself to the Secretary, distressed the Society because they were "passionate." True, he could sometimes, under the inspiration of the respectable Secretary, write like a perfect middle-class English Christian. He condemned the Sunday amusements of Hamburg, for example, remarking that "England, with all her faults, has still some regard to decency, and will not tolerate such a shameful display of vice" (as rope-dancing) ...
— George Borrow - The Man and His Books • Edward Thomas
... possible. He had habits of reckless extravagance, or what seemed to me reckless extravagance, and a lordly manner (when he forgot himself) of speaking of things, which absolutely appalled my economical burgher soul. I had certain habits, too, the outcomes of my training, and my sparing, middle-class way of living, which I saw puzzled him very much. To cite only one insignificant incident. We were both great readers, and, despite our sometimes arduous work, contrived to get through a good amount of books in the year. One evening he came home with a brand-new novel, ...
— The First Violin - A Novel • Jessie Fothergill
... TOO silly in my apprehension for Vernon. I, as before when I wrote, continue to see them a little; Not that I like them much or care a bajocco for Vernon, But I am slow at Italian, have not many English acquaintance, And I am asked, in short, and am not good at excuses. Middle-class people these, bankers very likely, not wholly Pure of the taint of the shop; will at table d'hote and restaurant Have their shilling's worth, their penny's pennyworth even: Neither man's aristocracy this, nor God's, God knoweth! Yet they are fairly descended, they give you to know, well connected; ...
— Amours de Voyage • Arthur Hugh Clough
... "[in] middling case" (halet[an] mustewessitet[an]). Burton translates, "as middle-class folk," adding in a note, "a phrase that ...
— Alaeddin and the Enchanted Lamp • John Payne
... always amuse ourselves by trying to guess from appearances. Well, the cloak comes from a good dress-maker, but not from a great one. It is fine and well-made, but it has no style. I think they are middle-class people, prince. But how stupid I am! You know M. Palmer—well, a little while ago he came to see the ...
— Parisian Points of View • Ludovic Halevy
... Tom couldn't overcome that argument, but in the long run, our cause will not be won permanently and definitely by the bread and butter and taxes argument, except as that sort of argument proves the justice of our cause and arouses love in the hearts of you middle-class people." ...
— In the Heart of a Fool • William Allen White
... door of the hall opening on to the main staircase. He was listening.... He had explored the flat. It was empty. He had found water in the kitchen, had washed his face, and removed every trace of blood from his person. It was a flat suitable for a middle-class household. There were three large rooms, decorated with ...
— Messengers of Evil - Being a Further Account of the Lures and Devices of Fantomas • Pierre Souvestre
... himself." But a Society, human or animal, cannot exist without certain rules and moral habits springing up within it; religion may go, morality remains. If we were to come to consider that a man did well in lying, deceiving his neighbours, or plundering them when possible (this is the middle-class business morality), we should come to such a pass that we could no longer live together. You might assure me of your friendship, but perhaps you might only do so in order to rob me more easily; you might promise to do a certain thing for me, only to deceive me; you ...
— The Place of Anarchism in Socialistic Evolution - An Address Delivered in Paris • Pierre Kropotkin
... the American Sterne. He did not seek a vehicle for his wit in the oddities and mishaps of English middle-class domestic life, but in the contrasts and incongruities of a Boston boarding-house. He informs us at the outset that he much prefers a family with an ancestry— one that has had a judge or a governor in it, with old family portraits, old ...
— Cambridge Sketches • Frank Preston Stearns
... is a strong element of class antagonism. The Dunces were middle-class and Whiggish, their spirit capitalist. Pope, though middle-class by birth, was aristocratic in his sympathies, Tory in a loose sense, and firmly anti-Walpole. Perhaps verse satire is essentially aristocratic. ...
— Two Poems Against Pope - One Epistle to Mr. A. Pope and the Blatant Beast • Leonard Welsted
... expert in these cases, and better constituted for going into these commercial details than the parliaments which have always been more occupied with the laws of the kingdom than with finance. As the state was at that time going bankrupt, it would have been too hard to punish the poor middle-class bankrupts. ...
— Voltaire's Philosophical Dictionary • Voltaire
... hotel, and the signs in front of it and the legends painted on great lanterns proclaim it as a first-chop Casa de Jogo, and a gambling-house that is "No. 1" in all respects. The gamesters whose garments proclaim them to be middle-class Chinamen pack themselves like sardines into the room where the table is situated, for they obviously believe in watching their interests at close hand. The floor above, by reason of the rail-protected opening in the center, is little more than a spacious gallery; but it is there that ...
— East of Suez - Ceylon, India, China and Japan • Frederic Courtland Penfield
... was, like his contemporary Stephen Gosson, a Kentish man born[4]; and with this clue to help them both Mr Bond and Mr Baker are inclined to accept much of the story of Fidus as autobiographical[5]. If their inference be correct, our author would seem to have been the son of middle-class, but well-to-do, parents. But it is with his residence at Oxford that any authentic account of his life must begin, and even then our information is very meagre. Wood tells us that he "became a student in Magdalen College in the beginning of 1569, aged 16 or thereabouts." "And since," adds ...
— John Lyly • John Dover Wilson
... the wealthy ones, seemed to have enough money for their necessities or desires. If they had four servants, they needed six; if they had one motor, they must have two; and the new idea of country houses had simply doubled or trebled domestic budgets. It wasn't merely in the homes of ambitious middle-class folk that the cry went up,—"We must have more!" Isabelle herself had begun to feel that the Colonel might very well have given her a package of stocks and bonds at her wedding. Even with her skilful management, and John's excellent salary, there was so much they could not ...
— Together • Robert Herrick (1868-1938)
... ordinary, middle-class house, wherein sudden illness brings so much strain and upset, Pixie would have expended herself in service, and have found comfort in so doing, but in the great ordered house all moved like a well-oiled ...
— The Love Affairs of Pixie • Mrs George de Horne Vaizey
... morality was that of Dickens's 'Christmas Carol,' and the political aim that of sentimental socialism. Thus, though all three candidates promised to support Mr. Gladstone's Government, one of Fitzjames's rivals represented the stolid middle-class prejudices, and a second the unctuous philanthropic enthusiasm, which he had denounced with his whole force in 'Liberty, Equality, Fraternity.' No combination could have been contrived which would have set before him ...
— The Life of Sir James Fitzjames Stephen, Bart., K.C.S.I. - A Judge of the High Court of Justice • Sir Leslie Stephen
... a hundred training-ship lads, fifty of the Legion of Frontiersmen, and a number of volunteers all in full uniform. There will be a tremendous number of society people, but the mass will be leavened, and I should say one-half the people will be middle-class folk. For to-night, no tickets have been issued. The attendance will depend to some extent on the success of this afternoon, but, to judge from the newspapers and the talk one hears, I should ...
— The Message • Alec John Dawson
... literary vigor, exact scholarship, and rare insight into Oriental modes of thought and feeling, can under any shadow of presence be classed with 'the garbage of the brothels.' In the lack of lucidity, which is supposed to distinguish English folk, our middle-class censores morum strain at the gnat of a privately circulated translation of an Arabic classic, while they daily swallow the camel of higher education based upon minute study of Greek and Latin literature. When English versions of Theocritus and Ovid, of ...
— Supplemental Nights, Volume 6 • Richard F. Burton
... homes embraced only homes of two sorts—the middle-class, conventional sort to which she had been accustomed, and the few poorly furnished frontier dwellings she had entered since coming to the hinterlands of British Columbia. She had a vague impression that any dwelling occupied exclusively by a ...
— North of Fifty-Three • Bertrand W. Sinclair
... Revolution was the work of the rabble from the Paris slums. It was nothing of the kind. The mob appears often upon the revolutionary stage, but invariably at the instigation and under the leadership of those middle-class professional men who used the hungry multitude as an efficient ally in their warfare upon the king and his court. But the fundamental ideas which caused the revolution were invented by a few brilliant minds, and they were at first ...
— The Story of Mankind • Hendrik van Loon
... discern the outlines of a numerous and commonplace middle-class family. The father had nine brothers, who were all married. The grandparents on his father's side and the uncles on his mother's side attained to a very great age. It is strange that a host of cousins—their progeny—has ...
— Erasmus and the Age of Reformation • Johan Huizinga
... charge, no debt, no incumbrance of any kind under that important head. It is, in short, proposed simply to establish a new self-supporting public school, in a rapidly increasing neighbourhood, where there is a large and fast accumulating middle-class population, and where property in land is fast rising in value. But, inasmuch as the project is a project of the Royal Dramatic College, and inasmuch as the schools are to be built on their estate, it is proposed evermore to give their schools the ...
— Speeches: Literary and Social • Charles Dickens
... the examination that a man who had purchased tenant-right, and paid a fine of 10 l. an acre on getting a lease, would have to pay a similar fine over again when getting the lease renewed. The result of these heavy advances was that the middle-class farmers lived in constant pecuniary difficulties. They were obliged to borrow money at six per cent. to pay the rent, but they borrowed it under circumstances which made it nearly 40 per cent., for it was lent by dealers in oatmeal and other ...
— The Land-War In Ireland (1870) - A History For The Times • James Godkin
... At middle-class party I play at ECARTE - And I'm by no means a beginner; To one of my station The remuneration - Five guineas a night and my dinner. I write letters blatant On medicines patent - And use any other you mustn't; And ...
— Songs of a Savoyard • W. S. Gilbert
... at best, most significantly, your lives are narrow. You are wives and mothers, living in ruts as well-defined as those of your most prosaic middle-class women. What do you know of the inner world, its moving affairs? Who of you can read the significance, open though it may be, of the cabled statement or speech of a prime minister, in ...
— Prince or Chauffeur? - A Story of Newport • Lawrence Perry
... use of terror. However, many terrorist organizations that have little in common with the poor and destitute masses exploit these conditions to their advantage. The September 11 terrorists, for instance, came predominantly from the ranks of the educated and middle-class and served in an organization ...
— National Strategy for Combating Terrorism - February 2003 • United States
... Lenegre and the two women were ready to go. Already milor and his gallant English friends were busy once more transforming themselves into grimy workmen or seedy middle-class professionals. ...
— The League of the Scarlet Pimpernel • Baroness Orczy
... of modern types of character, but he has more humour. He has been compared with such Dutch painters of low life as Teniers. His talent reached its height in the novel called Little Folk (1880), a most admirable study of lower middle-class life in Copenhagen. He was for a while, without doubt, the leading living novelist, and he went on producing works of great force, in which, however, a certain monotony is apparent. The three leaders had meanwhile been joined by certain younger men who took a prominent position. ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 8, Slice 2 - "Demijohn" to "Destructor" • Various
... Duke of Bedford, the Duke of Devonshire, and many others. They have estates in Ireland; many of them, I dare say, are just as well managed as any other estates in the country; but what you want is to restore to Ireland a middle-class proprietary of the soil; and I venture to say that if these estates could be purchased and could be sold out farm by farm to the tenant occupiers in Ireland, that it would be infinitely better in a conservative sense, than that they should belong ...
— Speeches on Questions of Public Policy, Volume 1 • John Bright
... new influences which have been brought to bear on the middle-class mind, with respect to Art, may be sufficiently seen in the great rise in the price of pictures which has taken place (principally during the last twenty years) owing to the interest occasioned by national exhibitions, ...
— On the Old Road Vol. 1 (of 2) - A Collection of Miscellaneous Essays and Articles on Art and Literature • John Ruskin
... more restricted. The truly scientific romance writer, proposing to paint a certain class, will attain his end more effectively if he incarnate personages of the middle order, and, consequently, paint traits common to that class. And not only middle-class traits, ...
— Selected Writings of Guy de Maupassant • Guy de Maupassant
... given various checks, including one to certify that they need not have their heads cropped; and when they had given their thumb-marks, learnt the number corresponding thereunto, and exchanged their shabby middle-class clothes for duly numbered blue canvas suits, they repaired to the huge plain dining-room for their first meal under these new conditions. Afterwards they were to return to her for instructions ...
— Tales of Space and Time • Herbert George Wells
... are sure to differ sooner or later. And that was exactly what happened at Fetter Lane. The members came from various stations in life. Some, like the Wesleys, were university men; some, like Hutton, were middle-class tradesmen, of moderate education; some, like Bray, the brazier, were artizans; and all stood on the same footing, and discussed theology with the zeal of novices and the confidence of experts. John Wesley ...
— History of the Moravian Church • J. E. Hutton
... last century the clouds began to lift. For a while the good Lord Shaftesbury seemed to be crying in the wilderness of middle-class plutocracy, but it was not long before the crying of the children in their factories stirred the national conscience. The health of nations was allowed to be considered as well as their wealth. Social and political science rose up in protest against both the economists and the manufacturers. There ...
— The Rural Life Problem of the United States - Notes of an Irish Observer • Horace Curzon Plunkett
... very typical lower middle-class, nothing-in-particular young man, but there was a certain truculence indicated by his square jaw, and that sort of self-possession which sometimes accompanies physical strength was evidenced in his manner as, tossing the paper aside, ...
— Tales of Chinatown • Sax Rohmer
... which had been so worth while, so like a draught of wine on the cold journey through middle-class pauperism, now appeared stripped of their carnival trappings. It was only folly which stared back at him now, and she had become ugly; sickening and wholly undesirable. Folly was utter trash. He replied to Marie in a voice so studied as to rivet her ...
— Married Life - The True Romance • May Edginton
... Minister of the Interior. Though an aristocrat of the bluest blood, he was extremely liberal in his views. Never had he been an autocrat, even in sympathy. Paul Milukov, the leader of the Constitutional Democrats, was Minister of Foreign Relations. He represented the middle-class liberals or progressives, constituting what in this country would be called the business men and professional class, as Lvov represented the broad-minded country gentry. Alexander Kerensky, the radical Socialist, an old ...
— The Story of the Great War, Volume VI (of VIII) - History of the European War from Official Sources • Various
... sickened him on this last voyage.... All its repose was sordid, all its passion was calculated. England and its queen mourned the sudden death of the prince consort, but it mourned him with a sort of middle-class domesticity, and no majesty. So a grocer's family might have mourned, remembering how well papa cut the mutton.... He was so damned good at everything, Albert was, and he approved of art and science—within reason.... There was a contest ...
— The Wind Bloweth • Brian Oswald Donn-Byrne
... would never have entered their minds. Hauptmann's men and women are themselves. No trick of speech, no lurking similarity of thought unites them. The nearer any two of them tend to approach a recognisable type, the more magnificently is the individuality of each vindicated. The elderly middle-class woman, harassed by ignoble cares ignobly borne, driven by a lack of fortitude into querulousness, and into injustice by the selfishness of her affections, is illustrated both in Mrs. Scholz and Mrs. Kramer. But, in the former, bodily suffering and nervous terror have slackened the moral fibre, ...
— The Dramatic Works of Gerhart Hauptmann - Volume I • Gerhart Hauptmann
... compared with the inexorable seriousness of the American telephone. Many otherwise highly civilized Europeans are as timid in addressing a telephone as they would be in addressing a royal sovereign. The average European middle-class householder still speaks of his telephone, if he has one, in the same falsely casual tone as the corresponding American is liable to speak of his motor-car. It is naught—a negligible trifle—but somehow it comes into ...
— Your United States - Impressions of a first visit • Arnold Bennett
... two, the nobleman was least at his ease, for the welcome of both Mr. and Mrs. Halifax, though courteous, was decidedly cold. They did not seem to feel—and, if rumour spoke true, I doubt if any honest, virtuous, middle-class fathers and mothers would have felt—that their house was greatly honoured or sanctified by the presence ...
— John Halifax, Gentleman • Dinah Maria Mulock Craik
... Hoogh painted people in their own houses. In the pictures of Terborch ladies in satin dresses play the spinet and the guitar. Jan Steen depicted peasants revelling on their holidays or in taverns. Peter de Hoogh was the painter of middle-class life, and discovered in ...
— The Book of Art for Young People • Agnes Conway
... necessary to explain what seamen are. They are "these brave, watchful fellows who have our lives in their hands." At this, the chairman looks at the table stewards, who stand about the walls with their napkins and their middle-class grins; brave, watchful fellows trying to look as if they really held our lives and not our dinners in ...
— Ship-Bored • Julian Street
... for volunteers, twenty young and middle-aged men came upon the stage. They evidently belonged to the great middle-class. The entertainment commenced by Dr. Flint passing around the group, who were seated on the stage in a semicircle facing the audience, and stroking each one's head and forehead, repeating the phrases, "Close your eyes. Think of nothing but sleep. You are very tired. You ...
— Complete Hypnotism: Mesmerism, Mind-Reading and Spiritualism • A. Alpheus
... that name until August, 1884; the Fabian Society can therefore claim technical priority, and consequently it has never had to seek acceptance by the rest of the Socialist movement. At any later date it would have been impossible for a relatively small middle-class society to obtain recognition as an acknowledged member of the Socialist confraternity. We were thus in a position to welcome the formation of working-class Socialist societies, but it is certain that in the early days they would never ...
— The History of the Fabian Society • Edward R. Pease
... guardians, in a high extravagance of speculation and dissipation that had left this exquisite being her black dress, her white face and her vivid hair as the mere last broken link: such a picture quite threw into the shade the brief biography, however sketchily amplified, of a mere middle-class nobody in Bayswater. And though that indeed might be but a Bayswater way of putting it, in addition to which Milly was in the stage of interest in Bayswater ways, this critic so far prevailed that, ...
— The Wings of the Dove, Volume 1 of 2 • Henry James |
