"Victorian" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... only in the architecture of his town house that he remained conservative, immovable, one might almost say Early-Victorian-Christian. His country house at Dulwich-on-the-Sound was a palace of the Italian Renaissance. But in town he adhered to an architecture which had moral associations, the Nineteenth-Century-Brownstone epoch. It was a symbol ...
— The Mansion • Henry Van Dyke
... it by any undue stretch of the royal prerogative that the name of the monarch has attached itself to the literature of her reign and of the reigns succeeding hers. The expression "Victorian poetry" has a rather absurd sound when one considers how little Victoria counts for in the literature of her time. But in Elisabethan poetry the maiden queen is really the central figure. She is Cynthia, she is Thetis, great queen of shepherds and of the sea; she is Spenser's Gloriana, ...
— Brief History of English and American Literature • Henry A. Beers
... Mrs. Fabian to the best room that opened from the large kitchen, and to their horror they saw that the sofa referred to was a hideous Victorian affair of walnut frame upholstered in ...
— Polly's Business Venture • Lillian Elizabeth Roy
... upstairs. In the hall we stopped dead. Upon the floor was the wretched paper which my Victorian conscience and my twentieth-century caution had ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 158, April 21, 1920 • Various
... it in amazement, trying to determine what was wrong with it. He recalled how it had always stood, foursquare, a solid piece of mid-Victorian architecture. ...
— The Street That Wasn't There • Clifford Donald Simak
... learnt the rest of Captain S———'s story. A year after his lady-love had jilted him he received a letter from her in England. She was in sad trouble, she said. Her husband, a Victorian official, was serving five years for embezzlement. Her letter was suggestive of a desire to hasten to the "protection" of her sailor lover. She wished, she said, that her husband were dead. But dead or alive she would always ...
— The Ebbing Of The Tide - South Sea Stories - 1896 • Louis Becke
... acknowledged that Dickens is not a temporary phenomenon in Victorian letters, but a very solid major fact in the native literature, too large a creative force to be circumscribed by a generation. Looked back upon across the gap of time, he looms up all the more impressively because the years have removed the clutter about the ...
— Masters of the English Novel - A Study Of Principles And Personalities • Richard Burton
... Infantry, and part of the 1st battalion Royal Munster Fusiliers, strengthened at various points by sections of P. battery R.H.A. The Royal Canadian regiment of infantry garrisoned Belmont, and a mixed force of Australians, consisting of a detachment of Victorian Mounted Rifles, and infantry companies from Victoria and South Australia, Tasmania and Western ...
— History of the War in South Africa 1899-1902 v. 1 (of 4) - Compiled by Direction of His Majesty's Government • Frederick Maurice
... been bicycling down to the football field for a punt about on Upper. As I listened to a lecture on the establishment of an infantry brigade, I thought of the sixth form sitting under that fine scholar and Wordsworthian Nowell Smith to a discussion of Victorian poetry. In the evenings on my way to night operations, passing Berkhamsted School and looking at the lighted windows, I would think, "At Sherborne now they are sitting round the games study fire waiting for the bell to ring for hall". Day by day, ...
— The Loom of Youth • Alec Waugh
... most eminent imaginative writers of the Victorian age, differs from most other poets and men of letters in two ways—first, he did great work in many other things as well as in literature; secondly, he had beliefs of his own about the meaning and conduct of life, about all that men think and do and make, ...
— The Story of Sigurd the Volsung • William Morris
... magazines. What the world wants, or, at any rate, what a great many people want, is a daily paper to read on Sundays, not a miscellany, however good. But perhaps Mr. Dicey and I were old-fashioned. Anyway, there was a sort of easygoing, old-fashioned, early-Victorian air about the Observer Office of those days which was very pleasant. Nobody appeared to be in a hurry, and one was given almost complete freedom as to the way in which to treat one's subject. I was also a contributor to the Manchester ...
— The Adventure of Living • John St. Loe Strachey
... ghettoes of eastern Europe. They can be immediately picked out by the peculiar wisps of hair worn on each side of the face, like something between curls and whiskers. Sometimes they look strangely effeminate, like some rococo burlesque of the ringlets of an Early Victorian woman. Sometimes they look considerably more like the horns of a devil; and one need not be an Anti-Semite to say that the face is often made to match. But though they may be ugly, or even horrible, they are not vulgar like ...
— The New Jerusalem • G. K. Chesterton
... whipcord, of a certain fig-tree has crept across the face of the grey rock forming a ridge or barricade against which decayed vegetation accumulates, there the BAEA flourishes, displaying an indeterminate line of mauve flowers above oval, crimpled leaves. Mauve, green and grey—the mauve of the Victorian age, the green of the cowslip, the grey of ...
— The Confessions of a Beachcomber • E J Banfield
... stone in the vale. Examples of cottages can be seen in the village of Great Habton. They are dated 1741 and 1784, and are much less picturesque than those of the seventeenth century, though village architecture had not then reached the gaunt ugliness of the early Victorian Age. ...
— The Evolution Of An English Town • Gordon Home
... Metaphysical Society in 1869 was not without interest as a sign of the times. As in the new birth of thought which put a period to the Middle Ages, so in the Victorian Renaissance, a vast intellectual ferment had taken immediate shape in a fierce struggle with long established orthodoxy. But whereas Luther displaced Erasmus, and the earlier reformers fought out the quarrel with the weapons of the theologian rather than those of the Humanist, the ...
— The Life and Letters of Thomas Henry Huxley Volume 1 • Leonard Huxley
... be admitted, too, that King Arthur, of the "Idylls," is like an Albert in blank verse, an Albert cursed with a Guinevere for a wife, and a Lancelot for friend. The "Idylls," with all their beauties, are full of a Victorian respectability, and love of talking with Vivien about what is not so respectable. One wishes, at times, that the "Morte d'Arthur" had remained a lonely and flawless fragment, as noble as Homer, as polished ...
— Letters on Literature • Andrew Lang
... was rendered with Victorian propriety by a well-known Oxford professor, "What a quantity of perspiration!" etc. Probably Horace had been watching the sowing of barley or oats on a fine March morning, "the peck of March dust," which we know is "worth ...
— Grain and Chaff from an English Manor • Arthur H. Savory
... looked as if made of solid gold and Madame Du Barry herself might have sat on the dainty brocades. The general effect was airy and graceful, gay, frivolous, and subtly vicious. (An emanation to which the chaste Victorian had been impervious.) He understood why Madame Zattiany did not use it. She might be subtly anything, but assuredly she was neither ...
— Black Oxen • Gertrude Franklin Horn Atherton
... REAL PERSON?—A careful search in the registers of Paddington in the early and mid-Victorian period reveals so many Mary Perkinses as to render the task of identification peculiarly difficult. It will be remembered, however, that the heroine of the famous ballad is described as not only "little," but "pretty;" indeed, she is spoken of as being "as beautiful as a butterfly and ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 147, August 19th, 1914 • Various
... going to stay here in your garden," he said musingly. "You think it's better to keep on walking these sunshiny gravel paths between your flower-beds, and growing to look like a pensive garden lady in a Victorian engraving." ...
— The Magnificent Ambersons • Booth Tarkington
... cursing. What does it matter if one eats at half-past one or at a quarter to two? I really am very fond of Aunt Charlotte, you know, though I find it awfully difficult to educate her. I sometimes despair of ever being able to bring her up properly at all, she is so hopelessly Early Victorian, poor thing. But, then, so many people are, aren't they? Now animals are never Early Victorian; that's why I respect them so. If you weren't a human being, Lubin—and a very nice one, as you are—what sort of an animal ...
— Austin and His Friends • Frederic H. Balfour
... for the queen herself, she will be remembered by a state of mind. Already "mid-Victorian" has little or nothing to do with Victoria, and is losing its suggestion, even, of a time-period. It is coming to stand for a mental and moral attitude—in fact, for priggishness and moral timidity. ...
— Penguin Persons & Peppermints • Walter Prichard Eaton
... to place his statue in Westminster Abbey, Samuel Rogers, the poet, cynically said, "Yes, I will gladly give twenty pounds any day to see dear old Tom Campbell stand steady on his legs." It is a matter of congratulation that the most eminent men of the Victorian era have not fallen into some of the unhappy habits of their predecessors at the beginning of the last century. Mrs. Baillie entertained me with lively descriptions of Sir Walter Scott, and of her old friend, Mr. Wordsworth, who was her guest whenever he came up to London. She ...
— Recollections of a Long Life - An Autobiography • Theodore Ledyard Cuyler
... incapacity: one was the invaluable aid of France, and the other the personality of George Washington. Of this great leader, one of the noblest that ever "lived in the tide of time," it is only necessary to quote the fine tribute paid to him by the greatest of the Victorian novelists in ...
— The Constitution of the United States - A Brief Study of the Genesis, Formulation and Political Philosophy of the Constitution • James M. Beck
... of Oakham and Pendules, Temple Gardens, was a little white-haired man of seventy, attired in the sombre black of the Victorian era, with a polished reticent manner befitting the senior partner of a firm of solicitors owning the most aristocratic practice in England; a firm so eminently respectable that they never rendered a bill of costs to a client ...
— The Shrieking Pit • Arthur J. Rees
... stockmen settled down before the big log fire in George's den, aromatically smoky from firewood and tobacco, with its walls papered from odd paperhangers' samples and prints from Victorian journals, and with domestic odds and ends lying here and there. The good lady speedily produced the tea and added cakes and scones, while George brought into action his cheap American machine and its hoary old records; vague, scratching echoes here in the depths ...
— The Tale of a Trooper • Clutha N. Mackenzie
... facts, so much so that she thought statistics positively indecent (though she would never have used the expression). When she was told there were more women than men in England, she would bite her lips and change the subject. She had had all the Victorian intense desire to see her daughter married young, and all the Victorian almost absurd delicacy in pretending she didn't. When, in one week, her only daughter—a girl who was not remarkably pretty, and had only a little money—should ...
— Bird of Paradise • Ada Leverson
... 'There, Miss Lavish, is one who can confute you better than I,' and pointed to that beautiful picture of Lord Tennyson. Then Miss Lavish said: 'Tut! The early Victorians.' Just imagine! 'Tut! The early Victorians.' My sister had gone, and I felt bound to speak. I said: 'Miss Lavish, I am an early Victorian; at least, that is to say, I will hear no breath of censure against our dear Queen.' It was horrible speaking. I reminded her how the Queen had been to Ireland when she did not want to go, and I must say she was dumbfounded, and ...
— A Room With A View • E. M. Forster
... laughter, has rushed, like a stream of molten gold, to the utmost reaches of the auditorium, and not an ear that has not jumped for joy of it. For he is Rudolfo, the poet; in private life, Enrico Caruso, Knight of the Order of San Giovanni, Member of the Victorian Order, Cavalier of the Order of Santa Maria, and many ...
— Nights in London • Thomas Burke
... Victorian era our ideas of what constitutes an act of rudeness have been modified. Then it would have been unthinkable that a woman should remain standing in a coach while men were seated. Now it is possible for a man to keep his place while a woman swings from a strap and defend himself on the grounds ...
— The Book of Business Etiquette • Nella Henney
... a quick movement, and a confusion of brilliant fabrics poured out over his knees. "You lived, Sire, in a period essentially cylindrical—the Victorian. With a tendency to the hemisphere in hats. Circular curves always. Now—" He flicked out a little appliance the size and appearance of a keyless watch, whirled the knob, and behold—a little figure in white appeared kinetoscope fashion on the dial, walking and turning. The tailor ...
— When the Sleeper Wakes • Herbert George Wells
... own which yet remains to be detected and chastised. In one epoch lubricity, in another fanaticism, in a third dulness and a dead-alive copying of the past, are the faults which criticism finds to attack. None of these affected the Victorian era. It was pure—though tainted with a profound hypocrisy; it was singularly free from violence in its judgments; it was certainly alive and new: but it had this grievous defect (a defect under which we still labour heavily) that thought was restrained upon every side. Never ...
— Froude's Essays in Literature and History - With Introduction by Hilaire Belloc • James Froude
... latitude, and had only been forced to retreat by the hostility of the natives, the South Australian Parliament voted a sum of 2500 pounds for a larger, better-armed, and more perfectly organized party, of which he was to be the leader. The ill-fated Victorian expedition, under Burke and Wills, had already started from Melbourne, on the previous 20th of August, amid all the excitement of a popular ovation, but a messenger was instantly despatched by the Victorian Government ...
— Explorations in Australia, The Journals of John McDouall Stuart • John McDouall Stuart
... made up of American residents of Melbourne and members of the Victorian Cricket Association, met us with four-in-hand drags appropriately trimmed with the American colors, and as we entered them and drove up Collins street we felt that we were the observed of all observers. At the Town Hall we ...
— A Ball Player's Career - Being the Personal Experiences and Reminiscensces of Adrian C. Anson • Adrian C. Anson
... to prove convincing for it was agreed that one may as well offer Luther in the original German or Latin as expect the American church-member to read any translations that would adhere to Luther's German or Latin constructions and employ the Mid-Victorian type of English characteristic of the translations ...
— Commentary on the Epistle to the Galatians • Martin Luther
... and hearing these stories of English painters. It was strange to look at the battered figure of Pancrazio, and think how much he had been crucified through the long years in London, for the sake of late Victorian art. It was strangest of all to see through his yellow, often dull, red-rimmed eyes these blithe and well-conditioned painters. Pancrazio looked on them admiringly and contemptuously, as an old, rakish tom-cat might look on such frivolous ...
— The Lost Girl • D. H. Lawrence
... Poems—of which above he himself wrote—makes the collection and publication of the Prose a duty to all who regard WILLIAM WORDSWORTH as one of the supreme intellects of the century—as certainly the glory of the Georgian and Victorian age as ever SHAKESPEARE and RALEIGH were of the Elizabethan and Jacobean—will not ...
— The Prose Works of William Wordsworth • William Wordsworth
... abandoned. Its three aisles were without ornament or architecture; there was no tower, but beside it stood a peculiar and unexplained erection, shaped like a pagoda, in three tiers of black and battered tar-boarding. It had a slight cant towards the church, and suggested nothing so much as a disreputable Victorian widow, in tippet, mantle and crinoline, seeking the support of a stone wall ...
— Joanna Godden • Sheila Kaye-Smith
... exaggerated methods of humour and caricature; perverse, even wrong-headed at times, but possessed of a true pathos and largeness of heart, and when all has been said—though the Elizabethan ran to satire, the Victorian to sentimentality—leaving the world better for the art that they ...
— Cynthia's Revels • Ben Jonson
... this time that an event happened which greatly agitated the social life of Adelaide. The wife of a Victorian country resident had arrived in Adelaide and had taken a house in the city. She was good-looking and charming. She appeared to be quite well off. Her house became a pleasant resort. She entertained well. She delighted in giving excellent supper parties. She was quite ...
— The Chronicles of a Gay Gordon • Jose Maria Gordon
... any kind and to noise being made about his name, that he neglected the most honest means of having it brought forward to public notice; for instance, he had been asked in November, 1881, for notes on his life for a book to be entitled "The Victorian Era of English Literature," and had forgotten all about it. He had to be reminded in 1882 that he had promised to ...
— Philip Gilbert Hamerton • Philip Gilbert Hamerton et al
... extraordinary difficulty. The cause for which he stood was one affecting the interests of only a small minority of the total electorate concerned in the struggle which now spread over both islands. The Irish problem belonged in reality to the Victorian era; those in the British electorate whom it could stir to enthusiasm were stirred by a memory, not by a new gospel. Normally, but for the chance of Parnell's overthrow, it would have been solved in Gladstone's last ...
— John Redmond's Last Years • Stephen Gwynn
... realistic holes in its masonry; through one of them you could put a key to wind up the clock, and through the other you could put a key to wind up the secret musical box, which played sixteen different tunes. He had bought this handsome relic of the Victorian era (not less artistic, despite your scorn, than many devices for satisfying the higher instincts of the present day) at an auction sale in the Strand, London. But it, too, had been supplanted in his esteem by the ...
— The Regent • E. Arnold Bennett
... minutes late, the guard came running up to the front with his 'Hurry up, Missis,' when the old dame, with her two baskets, an umbrella, similar in size to a modern camping tent, and a crinoline fashionable in mid-Victorian days, got firmly wedged in the door way, whereupon some wag suggested that, to expedite departure, a break-down gang and crane should be sent for and the lady hoisted ...
— The Story of the Cambrian - A Biography of a Railway • C. P. Gasquoine
... McKinlay. The third from Rockhampton, under Mr. Walker; and the fourth from Brisbane, under Mr. Landsborough. These several expeditions were organised and started within a short period of each other. The steamship Victoria, Commander Norman, was despatched by the Victorian Government to the Gulf of Carpentaria to assist the explorers in ...
— Journal of Landsborough's Expedition from Carpentaria - In search of Burke and Wills • William Landsborough
... In the Victorian age, of course, which was one of specialisation based upon peace and plenty, one simply sent for a door-handle replacer and he put it right. But nowadays the Door-handle Replacers' Union is probably affiliated to an amalgamation which is discussing sympathetic action with somebody who ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 159, September 22, 1920 • Various
... the gardens of the Nymphenburg Palace where the mad king used to play. We visited the State Theatre, where Wagnerian opera still holds the patient ear, and there we heard, not Wagner, but Shakespeare's "Lear," done in a jog-trot, uninspired, later-Victorian style. One felt as if the theatre had slept for thirty years and then, awakening, had resumed in the same style as before. It is often said reproachfully in Germany that Queen Victoria would never have made the late war, and that Victorian England was much nearer to Germany. ...
— Europe—Whither Bound? - Being Letters of Travel from the Capitals of Europe in the Year 1921 • Stephen Graham
... contains nearly 20 per cent. of water is a food of high heat-value and is certainly more easily digested than fat, such as dripping, with a higher melting-point. Ours was fresh Victorian butter, packed in the ordinary export boxes, and carried to the Antarctic on the open bridge of the Aurora. With a sheath-knife, the sledging cook cut off three small chunks of two ounces each from the frozen butter every day at lunch. To ...
— The Home of the Blizzard • Douglas Mawson
... smooth, and divided down the middle. Acerbity spoke in every line of her face, which was of a dusky yellow, where it did not rather verge on the faint hues of a violet past its prime. She wore thread gloves, and she carried a battered reticule of early Victorian days, in which Merton suspected that tracts were lurking. She had an anxious peevish mouth; in truth she was not the kind of client ...
— The Disentanglers • Andrew Lang
... rouge from some other domestic, who remained (like all true Christian benefactors) anonymous. The harlequin, already clad in silver paper out of cigar boxes, was, with difficulty, prevented from smashing the old Victorian lustre chandeliers, that he might cover himself with resplendent crystals. In fact he would certainly have done so, had not Ruby unearthed some old pantomime paste jewels she had worn at a fancy dress party as the Queen of Diamonds. Indeed, her uncle, James Blount, was getting ...
— The Innocence of Father Brown • G. K. Chesterton
... whose Early Victorian mind a wedding was still an occasion for tears, sighed over her niece's engagement because Jane never came to her room at night to water her couch with tears, nor had doubts ...
— Peter and Jane - or The Missing Heir • S. (Sarah) Macnaughtan
... nice eyes and ears. Already I'd had time to notice that; for even in these days, when men aren't supposed to be as indispensable to females as they were in Edwardian or Victorian and earlier ages, I don't think it's entirely obsolete for a girl to learn more about a man's looks in three seconds than she picks up about another woman's frock ...
— Secret History Revealed By Lady Peggy O'Malley • C. N. Williamson and A. M. Williamson
... Marius is whispered among the black tents as that of some fabulous hero. But what interests me most is the style of Sallust himself. How ultra-modern this historian reads! His outlook upon life, his choice of words, are the note of tomorrow; and when I compare with him certain writers of the Victorian epoch, I seem to be unrolling a papyrus from Pharaoh's tomb, or spelling out the elucubrations of some maudlin ...
— Fountains In The Sand - Rambles Among The Oases Of Tunisia • Norman Douglas
... matter. It is a curious side-light on the intelligence of men that they almost universally seem to think that women, by a special Providence, are exempt from these natural laws; and almost all women are still too Early Victorian to insist upon some change. Many of the old theatres in London and the provinces suffer from want of proper ventilation; and many of them are appallingly, incredibly dirty. In the provinces dressing-rooms are sometimes dripping with damp; and it is not an uncommon experience ...
— Women Workers in Seven Professions • Edith J. Morley
... then being celebrated all over the English-speaking world, with that of George the Third, which was "a jubilee of the great folks, a jubilee of corporations and of authorities, a jubilee of the upper classes." On the other hand, he continued, the Victorian Jubilee was one when "the population are better fed, better clothed, and better housed—and by a great deal—than they were fifty years ago, and the great mass of these happy and blessed changes is associated with the name ...
— The Grand Old Man • Richard B. Cook
... promiscuous, eleemosynary institutions. It would be against all my principles to contribute money to any such philanthropy. I know too much about them—but he didn't. He could have disposed of his money to any one of a dozen of these mid-Victorian charities, but no—he was just one of those old parties that want to shift their responsibilities on to young shoulders, and ...
— Outside Inn • Ethel M. Kelley
... Melbourne. It is thus difficult to determine with certainty whether or not Esmond was in reality the first discoverer; but, at any rate, he received honours and emoluments as such; and in after years the Victorian Parliament presented him with ...
— History of Australia and New Zealand - From 1606 to 1890 • Alexander Sutherland
... undoubtedly are, because I think that the value of his social teachings was concealed from most of us at that time by reaction against his religious mediaevalism, and indifference to his gospel of art. Books so eminently adapted for young ladies at mid-Victorian schools did not appeal to modernists educated ...
— The History of the Fabian Society • Edward R. Pease
... Italian Renaissance by Dante, Petrarch and Camoens, it was chased and ornamented during the Elizabethan period by Shakespere, and filled with its most stimulating draughts of song and love during the Victorian era by Rossetti, Browning and Meredith. And now, in this first year of the new century, the historic cup is refilled and tossed off in a radiant toast ...
— The Love Sonnets of a Hoodlum • Wallace Irwin
... Elizabethan period in the significance and interest of its work. The Elizabethan literature to be sure, in its imaginative and spiritual enthusiasm, is the expression of a period more profoundly great than the Victorian; but the Victorian literature speaks for an age which witnessed incomparably greater changes than any that had gone before in all the conditions of life—material comforts, scientific knowledge, and, absolutely speaking, in intellectual and spiritual enlightenment. ...
— A History of English Literature • Robert Huntington Fletcher
... these plans had all been arranged, and the garrison was fully occupied, the mine was opened, and Exsuperius, a soldier of the Victorian legion, sprung out, followed by a tribune named Magnus, and Jovianus, a secretary, and an intrepid body of common soldiers, who, after slaughtering all the men found in the temple into which the mine opened, ...
— The Roman History of Ammianus Marcellinus • Ammianus Marcellinus
... her anguish of soul by daily letters to Cecily, which the faithful and obliging Judy Pineau brought up for her. These epistles were as gushingly underlined as if Sara had been a correspondent of early Victorian days. ...
— The Story Girl • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... situation, it would be desirable for the Government to promote special legislation along the lines of the Victorian Police Offences ...
— Report of the Special Committee on Moral Delinquency in Children and Adolescents - The Mazengarb Report (1954) • Oswald Chettle Mazengarb et al.
... no book that can compare with Stopford A. Brooke's Primer of English Literature. For more full and detailed treatment, Taine's History of English Literature, or Chambers' Cyclopaedia of English Literature, two volumes, with specimens of the writers of every period, are the best. E. C. Stedman's Victorian Poets is admirable, as is also his Poets of America. For a bird's eye view of American authors and their works, C. F. Richardson's Primer of American Literature can be studied to advantage, while for more full reference to our authors, with specimens of each, Stedman's Library of American ...
— A Book for All Readers • Ainsworth Rand Spofford
... lower, and does not appeal to a surface reading of the code of an aboriginal in discussing morals. That, I think is only fair. Your artistic sense is finely developed, but it is none the less firmly based, although there are Victorian back parlors and ...
— Memoirs of My Dead Life • George Moore
... women and the wives of all defective men are sterilized, a greater improvement will take place in the race in the next 50 years, than has been accomplished by all the sanitation of the Victorian era. ...
— The Fertility of the Unfit • William Allan Chapple
... sweep of Chester Terrace. "I like this neighbourhood with its early Victorian atmosphere," she said. "It always makes me feel quiet and good. ...
— All Roads Lead to Calvary • Jerome K. Jerome
... English novelists, Bulwer (1805-1873), whose later stories are free from the immorality that stains the earlier, is one of the most widely read. The novels of Charles Kingsley (1819-1875) are among the justly popular productions in this department. Among the novelists of the late Victorian Era were Charles Keade, Blackmore, Stevenson, Kipling, Meredith, Hardy, and Mrs. ...
— Outline of Universal History • George Park Fisher
... Historical Outline. The Victorian Poets. Tennyson. Browning. Elizabeth Barrett Browning. Matthew Arnold. The Pre-Raphaelites. Rossetti. Morris. Swinburne. Minor Poets and Songs in ...
— Outlines of English and American Literature • William J. Long
... taken in the past no little pride in my appearance, not only in a bathing outfit, but also in the water. However, the suit they provided me with on this occasion did not show me up in a very alluring light. It was quite large and evidently built according to a model of the early Victorian Era. I was swathed in yards of cloth much in the same manner as is a very young child. It delighted Mr. Fogerty, who expressed his admiration by attaching himself to the lower half of my attire and remaining there until I had waded through several colonies of barnacles far out ...
— Biltmore Oswald - The Diary of a Hapless Recruit • J. Thorne Smith, Jr.
... and purple patches," said Lawson. "Besides, damn the Great Victorians. Whenever I open a paper and see Death of a Great Victorian, I thank Heaven there's one more of them gone. Their only talent was longevity, and no artist should be allowed to live after he's forty; by then a man has done his best work, all he does after that is repetition. Don't you ...
— Of Human Bondage • W. Somerset Maugham
... fetched such prices in England in early Victorian days are no longer valued, having suffered an eclipse similar to that undergone by the pictures of certain early Victorian Royal Academicians, and the loss of the shawl trade was a severe blow to Kashmir. ...
— A Holiday in the Happy Valley with Pen and Pencil • T. R. Swinburne
... them was full of furniture, walnut wood, mid-Victorian in design, upholstered in rep, which had faded from crimson to an agreeable old rose. Rep curtains over Nottingham lace hung from the two windows. There was a davenport between them, and, opposite, a cabinet with a looking-glass back in three arches. It was Mr. Ransome's ...
— The Combined Maze • May Sinclair
... devout agent of the Bible Society excited a 'burst of laughter from all who remembered the old Norwich days'; what matter if another 'scribbling woman,' as Carlyle called such strident female writers as were in vogue in mid-Victorian days—Frances Power Cobbe—thought him 'insincere'; these were unable to comprehend the abnormal heart of Borrow, so entirely at one with Goethe in Wilhelm ...
— George Borrow and His Circle - Wherein May Be Found Many Hitherto Unpublished Letters Of - Borrow And His Friends • Clement King Shorter
... in 1609 by shipwrecked English colonists headed for Virginia. Tourism to the island to escape North American winters first developed in Victorian times. Tourism continues to be important to the island's economy, although international business has overtaken it in recent years. Bermuda has developed into a highly successful offshore financial center. A referendum on independence ...
— The 2002 CIA World Factbook • US Government
... it that said—in the Victorian era probably, and a man of course—"The only mechanical tool ever needed by a woman is a hair-pin"? He might have added that with a hair-pin and a visiting card, she is ready ...
— Etiquette • Emily Post
... review is being made of the long Victorian Age, and people are reckoning up the wonderful changes in life and manners that have taken place within the past sixty years. These have been so imperceptibly made that they are likely to escape our ken, ...
— Pickwickian Manners and Customs • Percy Fitzgerald
... portrayal of the reaction of experience upon personality. Their realism has rescued her from the sentimentality surrounding an impossible Camille quite as their fellow-craftsmen in realism have replaced the weeping Amelias of the Victorian period by reasonable women ...
— A New Conscience And An Ancient Evil • Jane Addams
... Garden Theatre on the 26th May 1837; runs for five nights; the author's comments; the drama issued by Messrs. Longman & Co.; the performance in 1886; estimate of "Strafford"; Browning's dramas; comparison between the Elizabethan and Victorian dramatic eras; Browning's soul-depictive faculty; his dramatic method; estimate of his dramas; Landor's acknowledgment of the dedication to ...
— Life of Robert Browning • William Sharp
... century the spirit seems to enter one of those prodigious periods of incubation for a type of which we turn automatically to the age that saw the last infirmity of Roman imperialism and of Hellenistic culture. About Victorian men and movements there is something uneasy. It is as though, having seen a shilling come down "tails," one were suddenly to surprise the ghost of a head—you could have sworn that "heads" it was. It doesn't matter, but it's disquieting. And after all, perhaps it does matter. Seen ...
— Art • Clive Bell
... Ford cars which might have been duplicates of Henry's first model—with trailers containing the overflow of children—together with the larger cars of the more prosperous or more extravagant, as happened. Top buggies were in evidence, relics of the Victorian period, shipped out from Iowa and Nebraska—serviceable vehicles that had done duty when their owners were "keeping company." Lumber wagons were plentiful, with straw and quilts in the bottom to serve as shock-absorbers, while ...
— The Dude Wrangler • Caroline Lockhart
... Emmeline "twice as plump." Like the baby in the "Pig and Pepper," Hannah sneezes at the first sight of Dicky. The novel is artfully littered with references to wonder, curiosity, and strangeness—all evidence of Stacpoole's conscious effort to invoke and honor his Victorian predecessor. ...
— The Blue Lagoon - A Romance • H. de Vere Stacpoole
... like fireflies in a gold dusk. One imagined him saying to himself: "A perfect woman! A perfect woman—God bless her!" Saying "God bless" any one, mind you, with a distinct warming of the heart, but a thoroughly late-Victorian disbelief in any god to bless.... At least, ...
— O. Henry Memorial Award Prize Stories of 1920 • Various
... Bagot's year of office. In the same way, the private correspondence, carried on between Earl Grey and the Earl of Elgin from {ix} 1847 to 1852, takes precedence of all other Canadian material of that period; and is, indeed, the most enlightening series of documents in existence on mid-Victorian Colonial policy. ...
— British Supremacy & Canadian Self-Government - 1839-1854 • J. L. Morison
... railroad station and the great statue of Rameses the Second, Pharaoh of Egypt. The Nile came into view, and Farid pointed out the row of hotels on the other side. The Shepheard's and the Nile Hilton flanked the older, Victorian bulk of the Semiramis, where they would stay. They sped across a bridge, entered a plaza full of honking horns and speeding cars, then moved to the comparative quiet of a street along the Nile embankment ...
— The Egyptian Cat Mystery • Harold Leland Goodwin
... true to feudal traditions, hardly spoke a word the whole evening. I was struck, as I have sometimes been, at the attainments of these country priests; they certainly knew our Gargantuan novelists of the Victorian epoch uncommonly well. Can it be that these great authors are more readable in Italian translations than in the original? One of them took to relating, in a strain of autumnal humour, experiences of his life in the wilds of Bolivia, where he had spent many years ...
— Old Calabria • Norman Douglas
... conducted, succeeds in destroying much budding appreciation of poetry. Why endow these would-be interpreters of poetry, to the neglect of the class of artists whose work they profess to interpret? What should we think of England if her Victorian poets had all happened to be penniless, and she had packed them off to Grub Street and invested, instead, in a few more professors ...
— The Joyful Heart • Robert Haven Schauffler
... on the map that evening I was little wiser. Hawkin's Old Farm appeared to be the survey title of the place, and the old County Gazetteer, generally so ample, did not allude to it. The big house of those parts was Hodnington Hall, Georgian with early Victorian embellishments, as an atrocious steel engraving attested. I carried my difficulty to a neighbour—a deep-rooted tree of that soil—and he gave me a name of a family ...
— Traffics and Discoveries • Rudyard Kipling
... Georgian Squire as to believe that he, from his own observation and acute reasoning on facts which he had noticed when a boy in school, would ever have given to the world the famous wave-line bow to be a pattern on which all nations should model their vessels. Yet this our Victorian Squire has done, and he loses no credit by the fact that Mr. Scott Russell, the great naval architect, had at nearly the same time, working from entirely different premises, arrived at the ...
— Atlantic Monthly Volume 6, No. 37, November, 1860 • Various
... note in English music," said Charmian, in her clear and slightly authoritative voice. "The Hallelujah Chorus era has gone at last to join all the Victorian relics. And the nation is drifting musically. Of course we have a few composers who are being silly in the attempt to be original, and a few others who still believe that all the people can stand in the way of home-grown products is a ballad or a Te Deum. But what we want ...
— The Way of Ambition • Robert Hichens
... a blush to the cheek of innocence." In other words, the presence of a specific audience, accustomed to certain Anglo-Saxon and Puritanic restraint of topic and of speech, has from the beginning of our imaginative literature cooperated with the instinct of our writers. That Victorian reticence which is so plainly seen even in such full-bodied writers as Dickens or Thackeray—a reticence which men like Mr. Bernard Shaw and Mr. Galsworthy and Mr. Wells think so hypocritical and dangerous to society ...
— The American Mind - The E. T. Earl Lectures • Bliss Perry
... hard pressed by the problems of the Revolutionary Era with those of a peaceful age when the standard of legislative effort had been greatly raised is unfair; and the criticism of Pitt by a distinguished historian evinces partiality towards the Victorian statesman rather than an adequate appreciation of the difficulties besetting a Minister of George III in those times of turmoil.[790] It is true that Pitt did not inaugurate Factory legislation; that was the work of the Addington Cabinet in 1802; ...
— William Pitt and the Great War • John Holland Rose
... Now that Abdul is deposed from 'his infernal throne,' it is taken as a matter of course that the King will visit his successor. Well, let His Majesty betake himself and his tact and a full cargo of Victorian Orders to Constantinople, by all means. But, on the way, nestling in the very heart of Europe, perfectly civilised and strifeless, jewelled all over with freedom, is another country which he has not visited since his accession—a country which, oddly enough, none but I seems to expect him to visit. ...
— Yet Again • Max Beerbohm
... predecessors—the Vavasours—whose feudal presence seemed to be still brooding over the village. With little chuckles of laughter, she gave instance after instance of the tyranny with which they had lorded it over the country-side in early Victorian days: how the "Madam Vavasour" of those days had pulled the feathers from the village-girls' hats, and turned a family who had offended her, with all their belongings, out into the village street. But when Diana rejoiced that such days ...
— The Testing of Diana Mallory • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... front room on the same floor, the room whence those woman's screams had emanated. It was a big bare drawing-room, furnished in the ugly Early Victorian style, musty-smelling and moth-eaten. The dirty holland blinds fitted badly and had holes in them; therefore sufficient light was admitted to afford me a good view of ...
— Hushed Up - A Mystery of London • William Le Queux
... a secret agent, as an ingenious plotter in the interests of his country, he was a genius. He was a discovery of the late Lord Salisbury in the last days of the Victorian Era. At that time he had been a Foreign Office clerk, a keen-eyed young man with a lock of black hair hanging loosely across his brow. Lord Salisbury recognised in him a man of genius as a diplomat, and with his usual bluntness called him one day to Hatfield and gave ...
— The White Lie • William Le Queux
... Edward Dowden. Makers of Literature, by George Edward Woodberry (New York, 1901). Boston Browning Society Papers. A Handbook to the Works of Robert Browning, by Mrs Sutherland Orr. Robert Browning: Personalia, by Edmund Gosse. Life of the Spirit in Modern English Poets, by Vida D. Scudder. Victorian Poetry, by Edmund Clarence Stedman. Studies of the Mind and Art of Robert Browning, by James Fotheringham. Browning Society Papers. Our Living Poets, by H. Buxton Forman. Browning's Message to ...
— Browning's Shorter Poems • Robert Browning
... highest aspiration of his time; Browning, the greatest dramatic poet since Shakespeare; Charles Lamb, one of the tenderest of essayists; George Meredith, the most brilliant and suggestive novelist of the Victorian age; Stevenson, the best beloved and most artistic story-teller of his day; Hardy, the master painter of tragedies of rural life; and Kipling, the interpreter of Anglo-Indian life, the singer of the new age of science and discovery, the laureate of the gospel ...
— Modern English Books of Power • George Hamlin Fitch
... that this book is not put forward as an authoritative history of Victorian literature. It is a free and personal statement of views and impressions about the significance of Victorian literature made by Mr. Chesterton at the ...
— The Victorian Age in Literature • G. K. Chesterton
... Writers quite ignoring him—he has been equally unfortunate in his critics. There are hardly any good and distinctive appreciations in print of Borrow's works. While other great names in the great literature of the Victorian Period have been praised by a hundred pens, there has scarcely been any notable and worthy praise of Borrow, and if I were in an audience that was at all sceptical as to Borrow's supreme merits, which happily I am not; if I were among those who declared that they could see but small merit ...
— Immortal Memories • Clement Shorter
... moonlight to the month, and more sunlight to the acre;—when the scent of the blossoming hawthorn was sweeter in the morning, and the song of the nightingale more melodious in the twilight;—when, in short, you and I, and the glorious Victorian ...
— Queen Victoria, her girlhood and womanhood • Grace Greenwood
... complete materialism which passed over Europe during what we call the Victorian period discouraged any personal investigation of forces beyond what could actually be proved by the senses. Numberless examples of natural phenomena were laughed to scorn as the illusions of the ignorant. People read their Bibles, wherein there are countless instances shown of the ...
— Three Things • Elinor Glyn
... Clara Vere de Vere)! Let me remind you that by allowing an idea to take hold of our animosity we may be as truly 'possessed' by it as though it claimed our allegiance. The notion that culture may be drilled to march in step with a trade or calling endured through the Victorian age of competition and possessed the mind not only of Samuel Smiles who taught by instances how a bright and industrious boy might earn money and lift himself out of his 'station,' but of Ruskin himself, who in the first half of "Sesame and Lilies," in the lecture "Of Kings' Treasuries," discussing ...
— On The Art of Reading • Arthur Quiller-Couch
... goods to give him comfort of body and suave gravity of manner, the figure he cut was becoming to his Quaker origin and profession. No one suspected the dynamic possibilities of his nature till a momentous day in August, in the middle Victorian period, when news from Bristol came that an uncle in chocolate had died and left him the third of a large fortune, without ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... "It sounds very Victorian and nice," said Jay, wondering if he could still see her through her veil of bad temper. "But, you know, in spite of Secret Worlds, and secret souls, and centuries of secret knowledge, we still have to keep up this 1916 farce, and leave something of ourselves ...
— This Is the End • Stella Benson
... cottage are not necessarily expensive. Simple pine pieces, made by the village cabinet-maker or, sometimes, by an ingenious farmer in his leisure hours; Windsor and slat-back chairs; low four-post beds; trestle or tuckaway tables; even an occasional Victorian piece; all, if on simple lines, fit into such a house as though ...
— If You're Going to Live in the Country • Thomas H. Ormsbee and Richmond Huntley
... been more in place on the main street of a town than here in the mountain desert; but when the first John Merchant had made his stake and could build his home as it pleased him to build, his imagination harked back to a mid-Victorian model, built of wood, with high, pointed roofs, many carved balconies and windows, and several towers. Here the second John Merchant lived with his son Charles, whose taste ...
— Way of the Lawless • Max Brand
... those who were responsible to advise her—to have had someone perfectly sincere to deal with in the great things of state—that is something which must be left for the historian who chronicles the Victorian era thoroughly to paint. No, my friends, our task now is far simpler: it is to ask what is the secret of this marvellous truthfulness, can we obtain it ourselves, ...
— The After-glow of a Great Reign - Four Addresses Delivered in St. Paul's Cathedral • A. F. Winnington Ingram
... the house, and were met by an anxious Bridget with Baby in her arms. Bridget scolded, and Baby laughed, and they were all so busy "getting ready" that it was not till three white muslin frocks were spread primly over three green damask Victorian chairs that Prudence found ...
— The Happy Adventurers • Lydia Miller Middleton
... The Free Classic of the Georgian reigns followed,—more refined in sentiment, delicate but severe in outline, aristocratic, but lacking strength and boldness in composition. With the advent of the Victorian Gothicists the worn-out and debased Free Classic passed into obscurity, there to remain until the passage by Parliament of the Elementary Education Act in 1870 brought it ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, November 1885 • Various
... Knellers, much more regrettably visible. Across the landing the great staircase, where the Reynolds hangs, which your cicerone of this twentieth century will tell you was the famous beauty of her time, and the grandmother of another famous Victorian beauty, dead not a decade since. And on this staircase Gwen, half pausing to glance at her departed prototype, started suddenly, and ...
— When Ghost Meets Ghost • William Frend De Morgan
... by the throat, as it were, and force it to take in the enormous wealth at the English poet’s command. Fine as is the ‘Prince’s Progress,’ for instance (and it would be hard to find its superior in regard to poetic material in the whole compass of Victorian poetry), the number of rugged lines the reader has to encounter weighs upon and distresses him until, indeed, the conclusion is reached: then the passion and the pathos of the subject cause the poem to rise upon ...
— Old Familiar Faces • Theodore Watts-Dunton
... his host, "my wife will not come with us. You might not suspect it from her conversation, but my wife has no feeling for art—Italian art, that is; for no one is fonder of our early Victorian school." ...
— The Early Short Fiction of Edith Wharton, Part 1 (of 10) • Edith Wharton
... a man," I said, "an early Victorian Whig, whose chief ambitions were to reform the criminal law and abolish slavery. Well, this dull, estimable man in his leisure moments was Emperor of Byzantium. He fought great wars and built palaces, and then, when the time for fancy ...
— The Moon Endureth—Tales and Fancies • John Buchan
... a letter from Vassie—a letter written in superlatives, a letter that made Ishmael and John-James both feel relief in their different ways and that made the Parson very glad. Vassie had achieved her end, the great end of mid-Victorian womanhood, and more vital to her even than most—she was engaged to be married, and to a man whose social position seemed, as far as her judgment could be trusted, satisfactory. Mr. Daniel O'Connell Flynn was, according ...
— Secret Bread • F. Tennyson Jesse
... precision of truth and with a perfection of harmony worthy of Shakespeare himself, and minutely studied from the natural scenes in which the poet was born. If these verses alone survived out of the wreck of Victorian literature, they would demonstrate the greatness of the author as clearly as do the fragments of Sappho. Isabel (a study of the poet's mother) is almost as remarkable in its stately dignity; while Recollections of the Arabian ...
— Alfred Tennyson • Andrew Lang
... development on a style which the humbler passers-by often called, with approval, "good, plain American," but whose point of departure was Georgian. He had the instinct for that which springs out of the soil. For this reason he did not shrink from an Early Victorian note—the first note of the modern, prosperous New York—in decoration; and the same taste impelled him toward the American in art. While Neighbor Smith displayed his Gainsboroughs, and Neighbor Jones ...
— The Wild Olive • Basil King
... when the infant poet was taught at school to sing "Little drops of water," and who indignantly forbade him to write a school essay on the subject of the capacity of men to rise on stepping-stones of their dead selves to higher things. Mr. Yeats's upbringing in the home of an artist anti-Victorian to the finger-tips was obviously such as would lead a boy to live self-consciously, and Mr. Yeats tells us that when he was a boy at school he used to feel "as proud of myself as a March cock when it crows to its first sunrise." He remembers how one day he looked ...
— Old and New Masters • Robert Lynd
... the Victorian era witnessed three great agitations, two of which ended in fiasco and the third in a triumph which wrought tremendous changes in the kingdom. "Chartism," "Repeal," and "Free Trade" were the three topics on which the ...
— Ten Englishmen of the Nineteenth Century • James Richard Joy
... counterpoise to our older world—neither dare you neglect the Indian meeting whence England issued, clad in moral as in political glory, and gave the noblest sign of the Christian significancy of the Victorian Era; all holds together, men and facts succeed each other in quick alternation; the light that fades on one hand shines with dazzling glare on the other. Cavour dies. Greatest of all, and genuine creator, with his disappearance the equilibrium ...
— The Arena - Volume 4, No. 21, August, 1891 • Various
... whose sincerity she eventually convinces herself. Katharine Hilbery, the granddaughter of a great poet, brought up by a father whose only interest is in literature, and a charming mother who wanders in fields of Victorian romance, breaks off her engagement with a civil servant who has more taste than talent for letters, and chooses instead a man slightly below her in social position, but with firmness and decision of character and genuine ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 158, March 3rd, 1920 • Various
... hotel which SIR JAMES and LADY FARRINGDON patronize in Dover Street on their occasional visits to London. Their private sitting-room is furnished in heavy early Victorian style. A couple of gloomy palms help to decorate the room, on whose walls are engravings of ...
— First Plays • A. A. Milne
... in early Victorian days, and for some time later, was curious. The development of cigar-smoking among those classes from which tobacco had long been practically banished, and the natural consequent spread downwards of the use of cigars—in ...
— The Social History of Smoking • G. L. Apperson
... this is not merely fortuitous. For, however abhorrent such a notion may be to those yet wedded to Victorian ideals, we were, even before the war, undoubtedly passing through great changes in our philosophy of life. Just as a plant keeps on conforming to its environment, so our beliefs and ideals are conforming ...
— Another Sheaf • John Galsworthy
... a mistake, the sooner he got out of it the better. For weeks this affair of Cope's had hung over the blackboard like a dim tapestry. Now it was gone; and when he tabulated in chalk the Elizabethan dramatists or the Victorian novelists there was nothing to prevent his students from ...
— Bertram Cope's Year • Henry Blake Fuller |
