"Victorian" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... 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
... the other calculating, selfish and sure. Ronder sees at once that Brandon is in his way and at once begins his work to overthrow the Archdeacon, not because he dislikes him at all (he likes him), but because he wants his place; too, because Brandon represents the Victorian church, while Ronder is on the ...
— When Winter Comes to Main Street • Grant Martin Overton
... 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 had ...
— Way of the Lawless • Max Brand
... religiously observed by the Pythagoreans. Several great princes and emperors have formerly made good use of it. Octavianus Augustus, second emperor of the Romans, meeting on a day a country fellow named Eutychus —that is, fortunate—driving an ass named Nicon—that is, in Greek, Victorian—moved by the signification of the ass's and ass-driver's names, remained assured ...
— Gargantua and Pantagruel, Complete. • Francois Rabelais
... education was tried for a space of something under two years is in no way a very remarkable school. It has its sixteenth-century founder, "of pious memory," and its "second founder," of memory almost more pious, in early Victorian days. That second founder made the school famous as a centre of stalwart evangelicalism. More recently its fame has been won chiefly in the production of first-class cricketers. Until the early years of the present century the school had ...
— The School and the World • Victor Gollancz and David Somervell
... "Problem" I think it was called in those days. The occasion was an amateur performance given in aid of the local Ragged School. A cousin of mine, lately married, played the wife; and my aunt, I remember, got up and walked out in the middle of the second act. Robina, in spectacles and an early Victorian bonnet, reminded me of her. Young Bute played a comic cabman. It was at the old Haymarket, in Buckstone's time, that I first met the cabman of art and literature. Dear bibulous, becoated creature, with ever-wrathful outstretched ...
— They and I • Jerome K. Jerome
... Irwin was a woman who detested 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
... market and sell again in the same market at an advanced price. To undersell your neighbour was then also an unpardonable crime. You discover, therefore, that trade in Plantagenet London was not like trade in Victorian London. Then, all men of the same trade stood by each other and were brothers: now, too often, men of the same ...
— The History of London • Walter Besant
... a Spinster Lady (CASSELL) is smallish talk about biggish wigs of the Victorian era, but not on that sole account to be condemned. Perhaps rather wholesome as showing how little distant we are from an age of government of the people by superior people for superior people. The notebooks cover the years 1878-1903, but the anecdotes ...
— Punch, Volume 156, 26 March 1919 • Various
... During the early Victorian revival of chivalry the Language of Flowers had some considerable vogue. The Romeo of the mutton-chop whiskers was expected to keep this delicate symbolism in view, and even to display his wit by some dainty conceits in it. An ignorance of the code ...
— Certain Personal Matters • H. G. Wells
... Uncle Tobe, dressed in sober black, like a country undertaker, and with his mid-Victorian whiskers all cleansed and combed, would present himself at his post of duty. He would linger in the background, an unobtrusive bystander, until the condemned sinner had gone through the mockery of eating his last breakfast; and, still making himself inconspicuous ...
— From Place to Place • Irvin S. Cobb
... admitted, "but you must remember that Mr. Ledsam is my only alternative, and I am not at all sure that he likes me. I am not sufficiently Victorian ...
— The Evil Shepherd • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... The only wall decorations were two "samplers" executed by a small daughter of the house, a school certificate in a plain frame, and a couple of gaudy-tinselled religious pictures. A pair of pot dogs on the mantelpiece were as stupidly ugly as some of our own mid-Victorian cottage treasures. And there were the usual glass-covered orange blossoms mounted on red plush and gilt leaves—the wedding custom traditional to the country districts of Northern France. The inner door of this room opened directly into the stable where our horses were ...
— Pushed and the Return Push • George Herbert Fosdike Nichols, (AKA Quex)
... with Van Dycks, nearly as regrettably invisible; Lelys and 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 ...
— When Ghost Meets Ghost • William Frend De Morgan
... poured through gaping holes in the roof, and the coarse brown wrapping paper pasted on the walls was splattered and streaked by rain. The open door of Cordelia's bedroom revealed a wooden bed, a marble-topped bureau, and a washstand of the Victorian period. A rocker, two straight chairs, a small table, and a trunk completed the furnishings of the room and left but little space for ...
— Slave Narratives: A Folk History of Slavery in the United States From Interviews with Former Slaves - Georgia Narratives, Part 4 • Works Projects Administration
... 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 his Rousseaus ...
— The Wild Olive • Basil King
... this school of ideas, the two who will attract most attention in the future were clouded and obscured for the greater period of their working lives. Unobserved, they received, and made their own preparations for utilising, the legacy of the mid-Victorian novel—moral thesis, plot, underplot, set characters, descriptive machinery, landscape colouring, copious phraseology, Herculean proportions, and the rest of the cumbrous and grandiose paraphernalia of Chuzzlewit, Pendennis, and Middlemarch. ...
— The House of Cobwebs and Other Stories • George Gissing
... moustache, but his hair was singularly black for a man of his years. He made no allusion in his conversation to the numerous campaigns in which he had distinguished himself, and the reason usually given for his reticence was that they dated back to such early Victorian days that he had to sacrifice his military glory at the shrine of ...
— A Desert Drama - Being The Tragedy Of The "Korosko" • A. Conan Doyle
... Mrs. Martell and Mrs. Moore, in New South Wales, and Miss Vida Goldstein in Victoria. The candidature of the two former was not unanimously approved by the Women's Association of their own State, and their defeat was a foregone conclusion; but Miss Goldstein was indorsed by the Victorian organization to which she belonged, and, though unsuccessful, the fact that she received 51,497 votes proved that she had many sympathizers. She did not ally herself with either of the great political parties. Her object was avowedly to show that home interests ought to be represented ...
— Political Equality Series, Vol. 1, No. 6. Equal Suffrage in Australia • Various
... Since the 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 ...
— The Book of Business Etiquette • Nella Henney
... had what is called "race". The renown of her family went back far, far beyond its special Victorian vogue, which had transformed an earldom into a marquisate and which, incidentally, was responsible for the new family Christian name that Queenie herself bore. She was young, tall, slim and pale, and dressed with ...
— The Pretty Lady • Arnold E. Bennett
... this she was inspiring. She was accustomed to give themes for fortnightly exercises, and at the first lecture of this new term she announced as a special subject: "An Essay on any one of the Great Writers of the Victorian Era", promising a volume of Browning's poems as ...
— The Youngest Girl in the Fifth - A School Story • Angela Brazil
... anti-clerical, who cannot even retell the story of Christ without branding himself a vulgarian. In the prim days when young d'Annunzio first flaunted his carnal delights and sorrows before a world not yet released from Victorian stuffiness, the word "vulgar" was a polite English epithet for "fleshly," an adjective much beloved by indignant gentlemen who were permitting their wrath to triumph over their desire to be respectable. It is a word which ...
— The Child of Pleasure • Gabriele D'Annunzio
... knew him, at any rate by repute, precisely as the least among us knows Mr. Carnegie, though perhaps more intimately. The tales of his orgies, of his ladies, of that divorce case and of the yacht scandal which burst like a starball, tales Victorian and now legendary, have, in their mere recital, made many an old reprobate's mouth champagne. But latterly, during the present generation that is, the ineffable Paliser—M. P. for short—who, with claret liveries and a yard of brass behind ...
— The Paliser case • Edgar Saltus
... 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 him ...
— Life of Robert Browning • William Sharp
... house door, but deliberately avoided reaching the house door until it had wandered in curves over the entire garden. That was the Georgian touch! The modern touch was shown in Councillor Cotterill's bay windows, bath-room and garden squirter. There was stabling, in which were kept a Victorian dogcart and a Georgian horse, used by the Councillor in his business. As sure as ever his wife or daughter wanted the dogcart, it was either out or just going out, or the Georgian horse was fatigued and needed repose. The man who groomed the Georgian ...
— The Card, A Story Of Adventure In The Five Towns • Arnold Bennett
... 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 now on ...
— Commentary on the Epistle to the Galatians • Martin Luther
... On Sturminster Foot-bridge Royal Sponsors Old Furniture A Thought in Two Moods The Last Performance "You on the tower" The Interloper Logs on the Hearth The Sunshade The Ageing House The Caged Goldfinch At Madame Tussaud's in Victorian Years The Ballet The Five Students The Wind's Prophecy During Wind and Rain He prefers her Earthly The Dolls Molly gone A Backward Spring Looking Across At a Seaside Town in 1869 The Glimpse The Pedestrian "Who's in the next room?" At a Country Fair The Memorial Brass: 186- Her ...
— Moments of Vision • Thomas Hardy
... very similar. Speaker Lenthall no doubt shouted "Order! Order!" as did his successor Speaker Peel, while Pym, Hampden, Cromwell, and Vane passionately inveighed against Prelacy and the "Man of Blood," as I had just heard the Radicals of the Victorian era overwhelm with diatribe the obstructors of the popular will. Then, during the subsoiling which the land, growing arid and worthless through mediaeval blight, underwent in 1832 and after, when the Reform Bill and its successors, like deeply penetrating plows, threw to the surface much ...
— The Last Leaf - Observations, during Seventy-Five Years, of Men and Events in America - and Europe • James Kendall Hosmer
... Tennyson (and in spite of Lady 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 ...
— On The Art of Reading • Arthur Quiller-Couch
... these plans had all been arranged, and the garrison was fully occupied, the mine was opened, and Exsuperius, a soldier of the Victorian legion, sprung out, followed by a tribune named Magnus, and Jovianus, a secretary, and an intrepid body of common soldiers, who, after slaughtering all the men found in the temple into which the mine opened, went cautiously forward and slew the sentinels, who ...
— The Roman History of Ammianus Marcellinus • Ammianus Marcellinus
... was a member of a College, there would come, in due course, the country living and goodbye to the University. But statutes were not always strictly observed and the idle life-Fellow, who survived to be the scandal of early Victorian days, was not unknown in the ...
— Life in the Medieval University • Robert S. Rait
... both White and Elwes I have consistently capitalized the term Nature, in accordance with Spinoza's Latin text; White and Elwes capitalize it only desultorily. I have made some slight changes in Elwes' mid-Victorian punctuation and White's all-too-faithful paragraphing. The Latin paragraphs of the Ethics are extremely long. These changes are all external and as far as I can see thoroughly legitimate as well as justified. The very slight and very occasional internal changes I have made—other than ...
— The Philosophy of Spinoza • Baruch de Spinoza
... letters were in the same vein. Regarding the one to England which meant war, he asked of Secretary Seward if its language would be comprehended by our minister at the Victorian court, and added dryly: "Will James, the coachman at the door—will he understand it?" Receiving the answer, he nodded grimly and said: "Then it goes!" It went, and there was ...
— The Lincoln Story Book • Henry L. Williams
... dark-green walls hung a series of eight engravings, portraits of early Victorian belles, clad in lace and tarletan ball dresses, clipped from an old Book of Beauty. Mrs. Bunting was very fond of these pictures; she thought they gave the drawing-room a note ...
— The Lodger • Marie Belloc Lowndes
... one Agatha, and it submitted to her orders and caprices in a way incomprehensible to Prudence—and incidentally to me. The Graynors and also the Morgans were of "influential commercial stock," and both families were so essentially Victorian in their outlook and manner of living that I was surprised when 1914 was announced. The trouble with this story is that too many of the characters are drawn from the stock-pot. But I admit that, before we have done with them, they acquire ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 159, December 8, 1920 • Various
... the little room with angry eyes. If only Fate had set her feet in sunnier paths. She looked at the plain furniture and cheap carpet; the wallpaper was hideous; there was a frightful oleograph of two Early Victorian women with crinolines and ringlet curls hanging over the mantlepiece. They both looked smug and self-satisfied. There was an enlarged photograph of a bald-headed man wearing a Masonic apron on another wall. He was fat and had his right hand plastered carefully along a chair-back ...
— The Phantom Lover • Ruby M. Ayres
... lower is recognized as a 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 ...
— Memoirs of My Dead Life • George Moore
... to the eighteenth century, and its hero was James Cook. He sailed up the whole of the east coast in 1770, from Point Hicks, near the Victorian border, to Cape York at the northern tip of the continent, and accomplished a larger harvest of discovery than has ever fallen to the fortune of any other navigator in a single voyage. To this period also belongs Captain George Vancouver, who in 1791, on his way to north-western America from the ...
— The Life of Captain Matthew Flinders • Ernest Scott
... peace the nearest analogues in history would seem to be the Roman peace, say, of the days of the Antonines, and passably the British peace of the Victorian era. Changes in the scheme of law and order supervened in both of these instances, but the changes were, after all, neither unconscionably large nor were they of a subversive nature. The scheme of law and ...
— An Inquiry Into The Nature Of Peace And The Terms Of Its Perpetuation • Thorstein Veblen
... 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 of his social position, ...
— The Mansion • Henry Van Dyke
... both the restraints and the assaults of the centuries. The need to make a living, that grim necessity which is the mother of democracy, had brushed them as lightly as the theory of evolution. Saturated with tradition as with an odour, and fortified by the ponderous moral purpose of the Victorian age, they had never doubted anything that was old and never discovered anything that was new. About them as about the hidden village, there was the charm of mellowness, of unruffled serenity. Some ineradicable belief in things ...
— One Man in His Time • Ellen Glasgow
... and fog, more 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 era, were young. ...
— Queen Victoria, her girlhood and womanhood • Grace Greenwood
... 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 and which they ...
— The American Mind - The E. T. Earl Lectures • Bliss Perry
... Hartley Parrish's palatial offices in Broad Street, he was to be found at one of those immense and gloomy clubs of indiscriminate membership which are dotted about the parish of St. James's, S.W., and to which Mr. Jeekes was in the habit of referring in Early-Victorian accents of respect. ...
— The Yellow Streak • Williams, Valentine
... sand. Now it is an area of trim lawns and blazing gardens, bowling-greens, croquet-lawns, and tennis-courts, with comfortable huts, the gift of the people of Melbourne to their wounded soldiers, costing several hundred thousand dollars. As I had served with Victorian troops I was assigned to this hospital, although my home was over a thousand miles away in the northern state of Queensland. All who were fit to travel were given fourteen days "disembarkation leave" to visit their ...
— "Over There" with the Australians • R. Hugh Knyvett
... The Victorian Parliament has voted an annual grant to our funds, not as a religious endowment, but in recognition of the service which we render in the reclamation of criminals, and what may be called, if I may use a word which has been so depraved by Continental abuse, the moral police ...
— "In Darkest England and The Way Out" • General William Booth
... putting forth ever new branches and new leaves. When this idea had firmly grasped the human mind, the modern age had come indeed, and progress was its distinctive category of understanding and its exhilarating phrasing of human hope. Then came the days of mid-Victorian optimism with songs like this upon ...
— Christianity and Progress • Harry Emerson Fosdick
... 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
... 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 Regent • E. Arnold Bennett
... of the 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 Life and Letters of Thomas Henry Huxley Volume 1 • Leonard Huxley
... snubbed, and then I think various Portuguese and other nondescripts and groups of non-commissioned officers and men, some with their wives. The play, admirably chosen, was that crystallization of liberal Victorian snobbery, Caste, and I remember there was a sub-current of amusement because the young officer who played—what is the name of the hero's friend? I forget—had in the haste of his superficiality adopted a moustache that would not keep on and an eyeglass ...
— The Passionate Friends • Herbert George Wells
... further, indeed, than to say that if a man had found himself making 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 ...
— Bertram Cope's Year • Henry Blake Fuller
... the roof has been improved. The basement has been coddled with electric lights until a coal hole is no longer an abode of mystery. Even the garret, that used to be but a dusty suburb of the house and lumber room for early Victorian furniture, has been plastered and strewn with ...
— Journeys to Bagdad • Charles S. Brooks
... towards a system of national education. Societies, Congresses, and Institutes were springing up like mushrooms; and all enlightened people agreed that extension of knowledge was the one and all-sufficient remedy for the obvious disorders of the body politic. The Victorian Age was, in brief, the age of Education; and the one dogma which no one ventured to question was that the extension of knowledge was necessarily, and in ...
— Prime Ministers and Some Others - A Book of Reminiscences • George W. E. Russell
... girl reading the stock simplified histories of the schools practically never heard of such a thing as a burgher, until he appears in a shirt with a noose round his neck. They certainly do not imagine anything of what he meant in the Middle Ages. And Victorian shopkeepers did not conceive themselves as taking part in any such romance as the adventure of Courtrai, where the mediaeval shopkeepers more than won their spurs—for they won the spurs of ...
— A Short History of England • G. K. Chesterton
... portraits of an early Victorian date. The artist had spent a couple of months at Barracombe fifty years since, and had painted three generations of the Crewys family, who were then gathered together beneath its hospitable roof. His diligence had been more remarkable than his ability. At any other time John Crewys would ...
— Peter's Mother • Mrs. Henry De La Pasture
... since that time, Off the Skelligs in 1872, Fated to be Free in 1875, Sarah de Berenger in 1879, Don John in 1881, and Poems of the Old Days and the New, recently issued. Of the latter, the poet Stoddard says: "Beyond all the women of the Victorian era, she is the most of an Elizabethan.... She has tracked the ocean journeyings of Drake, Raleigh, and Frobisher, and others to whom the Spanish main was a second home, the El Dorado of which Columbus and his followers ...
— Lives of Girls Who Became Famous • Sarah Knowles Bolton
... better, she reflected, far better, that she should go into the dull and dreary exile of an English village, with the unexciting companionship of Aunt Emily, an ascetic spinster of the mid-Victorian era, and make pretence of pique with Walter, than to reveal to him the shameful truth. He would at least in those circumstances retain of her a recollection fond and tender. He would not despise nor hate her, as ...
— The House of Whispers • William Le Queux
... of those lines of flat-faced pillared, and porticoed houses which are so prominent a product of the middle Victorian epoch in the West End of London. Next door there appeared to be a children's party, for the merry buzz of young voices and the clatter of a piano resounded through the night. The fog still hung about and screened us with its friendly shade. Holmes had ...
— The Adventure of the Bruce-Partington Plans • Arthur Conan Doyle
... atmosphere he can be as lively as anybody. Questioned about the reopening of Ciro's, he betrayed a minute acquaintance with the details of its programme. I was beginning to wonder if he were related to that famous Early-Victorian family, the Caves of Harmony, when his knowledge broke down. On being asked by his old friend Mr. BUTCHER to define a cabaret-entertainment he was nonplussed, and could only refer him to Colonel LOCKWOOD ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Volume 152, March 21, 1917 • Various
... other's eyes. To do so, I had to look a long way down, and she a long way up. This in itself is a pleasantly Victorian thing for a man to do in these days of Jerrybuilt girls, on the same level or a story or two higher than himself. I'm not a tall man: just the dull average five foot ten or eleven that appears taller, while it keeps lean—so naturally I have a hopeless yearning for nymph-like ...
— It Happened in Egypt • C. N. Williamson & A. M. Williamson
... occasion to enlarge upon this generous tribute of one of the greatest of our Victorian novelists to another. Considering how inevitably the critic is driven to compare these two, if not to set one up against the other, we can experience no feeling but pleasure and pride in humanity, before the evidence of their mutual appreciation. The Cornhill "In Memoriam" article of ...
— Famous Reviews • Editor: R. Brimley Johnson
... is not much favoured, except during the prevalence of westerly winds, when for days at a time the Pacific is as smooth as a lake; but in the rivers, from Mallacoota Inlet, which is a few miles over the Victorian boundary, to the Tweed River on the north, the stranger may fairly revel, not only in the delights of splendid fishing, but in the charms of beautiful scenery. He needs no guide, will be put to but little expense, for the country hotel accommodation is good and cheap; ...
— Ridan The Devil And Other Stories - 1899 • Louis Becke
... be sitting on the throne, though I do not want to, not at all. The throne of Megalia is what you call a hot spot. But my friend is it wise? There must be someone who knows that the Pink Vulture of Megalia is not an antique. It is, as the English say, mid-Victorian. 1865, Gorman. That is the date; and someone will ...
— Lady Bountiful - 1922 • George A. Birmingham
... filth. The negro quarters in Dinwiddie were dirty enough, but not, she thought with a kind of triumph, quite so dirty as New York. When the cab turned into Fifth Avenue, she took her handkerchief from her nostrils; but this imposing street, which had not yet emerged from its evil dream of Victorian brownstone, impressed her chiefly as a place of a thousand prisons. It was impossible to believe that those frowning walls, undecorated by a creeper or the shadow of a tree, could really be homes where people lived and ...
— Virginia • Ellen Glasgow
... 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 ...
— Grain and Chaff from an English Manor • Arthur H. Savory
... great families before the war used to call "the inferior aristocracy"—with an inflection of voice caught no doubt from the great families themselves. Yet their father had been an Earl, the second of his name, and was himself the son of a meteoric personage of mid-Victorian days—parliamentary lawyer, peer, and Governor of an Indian Presidency, who had earned his final step in the peerage by the skilful management of a little war, and had then incontinently died, leaving his family his reputation, which was considerable, and his savings, which were ...
— Helena • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... unsympathetic, domineering. "Sumner is my idea of a bishop," said Lincoln tentatively. There are bishops and bishops, however, and if Henry Ward Beecher, whom Lincoln and hosts of other Americans admired, had only belonged to the Church of England, what an admirable Victorian bishop he might have made! Perhaps his best service to the cause of union was rendered by his speeches in England, where he fairly mobbed the mob and won them by his wit, courage, and by his appeal to the instinct of fair play. Beecher's oratory, in and out of the pulpit, ...
— The American Spirit in Literature, - A Chronicle of Great Interpreters, Volume 34 in The - Chronicles Of America Series • Bliss Perry
... 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 ...
— History of the War in South Africa 1899-1902 v. 1 (of 4) - Compiled by Direction of His Majesty's Government • Frederick Maurice
... white vases picked out in bright green, a clock with a bronze upon it representing a waiter dressed up partly in fifteenth-century plate and partly in twelfth-century mail, and on the wall were two Jewish texts, each translated into Jacobean English and illuminated with a Victorian illumination. One said: "He hath prevented all my ways." The other said: "Wisdom is better than Rubies." But the gothic "u" was ill made and it looked like "Rabies." There was also in the room a good wardrobe of a kind now difficult to get, made out of cedar and very reasonable in arrangement. ...
— On Nothing & Kindred Subjects • Hilaire Belloc
... be obtained from any theatrical supply house. They must be of the style prevalent at the date of the play; Colonial clothes in a Mid-Victorian setting foredoom the play to failure. A curtain may also be hired from a theatrical supply house, but it is very simple to adjust one made at home by means of brass rings such as are used in hanging portieres. There should be a separation in the center so that the ...
— Book of Etiquette • Lillian Eichler
... dove-notes, those melting eyes, those lips! Oh, the horrible fool passion that burns out my soul and brain and reduces me to rave like a lovelorn early Victorian tailor! Which was worse I know not—the spasm of jealousy or the spasm of self-contempt that followed it. At that moment the music ceased suddenly ...
— The Morals of Marcus Ordeyne • William J. Locke
... next place and still more significant is the manifest determination to keep in public hands many things that would once inevitably have become private property. For example, in the middle Victorian period a water supply, a gas supply, a railway or tramway was inevitably a private enterprise, the creation of a new property; now, this is the exception rather than the rule. While gas and water and trains were supplied by speculative owners for profit, electric light and power, ...
— New Worlds For Old - A Plain Account of Modern Socialism • Herbert George Wells
... 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. Queen Victoria was a great and good lady, and her home life was, as the two women so clearly ...
— Penguin Persons & Peppermints • Walter Prichard Eaton
... spirit, breathes in every bar of Purcell's music. Mid-Victorian critics and historians deplored the resemblance between the profane style of the stage pieces and the sacred style of the anthems and services. Not resemblance, but identity, is the word to use. There is no distinguishing between the two styles. There are not ...
— Purcell • John F. Runciman
... shanty, but I could wish a little more stress were laid on the sailor's natural delicacy. Jack was always a gentleman in feeling. Granted his drinking, cursing, and amours—but were not these, until Victorian times, the hall-mark of every gentleman ashore? The Rabelaisian jokes of the shantyman were solos, the sound of which would not travel far beyond the little knot of workers who chuckled over them. The choruses—shouted out by the whole working party—would be heard all over the ship and even ...
— The Shanty Book, Part I, Sailor Shanties • Richard Runciman Terry
... that morning from his elder brother George, who was an officer in a line regiment. It had been written in the trenches before Sebastopol, for these events took place in the mid-Victorian period towards the end of the Crimean War. Or rather the letter had been begun in the trenches and finished in the military hospital, whither George had been conveyed, suffering from "fever and severe chill," which seemed to be somewhat contradictory terms, ...
— Smith and the Pharaohs, and Other Tales • Henry Rider Haggard
... added to that, after some words I have forgotten, 'I write, write, write as the Wandering Jew walks, walks, walks.' Besides the devotees, who came to listen and to turn every doctrine into a new sanction for the puritanical convictions of their Victorian childhood, cranks came from half Europe and from all America, and they came that they might talk. One American said to me, 'She has become the most famous woman in the world by sitting in a big chair and permitting us to talk.' They talked ...
— Four Years • William Butler Yeats
... she exclaimed. "You think you know such a lot and are so advanced, yet you are as easily scared or fooled as any country maiden in Victorian times." ...
— Bandit Love • Juanita Savage
... Gosse, one of the South Australian explorers, quitted the telegraph line about forty miles south of Mount Stuart; that the farthest point in a westerly direction reached by him was in longitude 126 degrees 59 minutes East; and that Mr. Giles, a Victorian explorer, had reached longitude 125 degrees, but had been unable to ...
— Explorations in Australia • John Forrest
... resulted in a fine of L100 and three months' imprisonment for a libel on Admiral Knowles. He died on October 21, 1771. Smollett wrote altogether five novels and a number of historical works and records of travel. It is impossible to overestimate his influence on novel-writing. Most of the great Victorian writers, especially Charles Dickens, ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol VIII • Arthur Mee and J.A. Hammerton, Eds.
... them:—The Heirs of Tranby Chase. It weighed four or five pounds. The publishers would never have had to grumble at its brevity, or have been compelled to use large type and wide margins to "bulk up." It was written in the thin, early Victorian handwriting not often met with in this generation of writers. It subscribed faithfully to the great canons of publication—for instance, it was written on "one side only of the paper"; it was pinned together at the "left-hand top corner"; ...
— In the Mist of the Mountains • Ethel Turner
... faraway-above ceiling. Lady Franks sat at a large black Bechstein piano at one end of this vacant yellow state-room. She sat, a little plump elderly lady in black lace, for all the world like Queen Victoria in Max Beerbohm's drawing of Alfred Tennyson reading to her Victorian Majesty, with space before her. Arthur's wife was bending over some music in a remote corner of ...
— Aaron's Rod • D. H. Lawrence
... bump in the small of his back cut short his flagrantly Victorian musings. Dyan's punt was the offender; and Dyan himself, clutching the pole that had betrayed him, was almost ...
— Far to Seek - A Romance of England and India • Maud Diver
... the Prose, and of the Prose to the 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 ...
— The Prose Works of William Wordsworth • William Wordsworth
... further than his house and furniture suggested, but the family had first come to the front in the East India Company's wars, and while maintaining its position afterwards had escaped the modernizing influence of the country's awakening in the early Victorian days. It seemed to Blake, fresh from the new and democratic West, that his uncle, shrewd and well-informed man as he was, was very much of the type of Wellington's officers. For all that he pitied him. Challoner looked old and worn, and there were wrinkles that hinted at anxious thought ...
— Blake's Burden • Harold Bindloss
... largely products of experience, then, it follows that if we wish to have an interest in a given subject, we must consciously and purposefully develop it. There is wide choice open to us. We may develop interest in early Victorian literature, prize-fight promoting, social theory, lignitic rocks, history of Siam, the collection of ...
— How to Use Your Mind • Harry D. Kitson
... day of rain the sun came out suddenly at five o'clock and threw a golden bar into the deep Victorian gloom of the front parlour. On the window-sill, midway between the white curtains, a pot of blue hyacinths stood in a cracked china plate, and as the sunlight shone into the room, the scent of the blossoms floated to the corner where Gabriella was patiently pulling basting threads out of the hem ...
— Life and Gabriella - The Story of a Woman's Courage • Ellen Glasgow
... pine-ridge. And away beyond the horizon, southward still, the geodesic curve carries that monotony across the zone of salt-bush, myall, and swamp box; across the Lachlan and Murrumbidgee, and on to the Victorian border—say, two hundred and ...
— Such is Life • Joseph Furphy
... Fatherland. We owed much to Mr. George Stevenson, who was an enthusiastic gardener and fruitgrower, and lectured on these subjects, but the contrast between the environs of Adelaide and those of Sydney and Melbourne were striking, and Mr. Wilson never lost an opportunity of calling on the Victorian Legislature and the Victorian public to develop their own wonderful resources. When you take gold out of the ground there is less gold to win. When you grow golden grain or ruddy grapes this year you may expect as ...
— An Autobiography • Catherine Helen Spence
... part of a five volume set entitled Victorian Novels of Oxbridge Life, Christopher Stray editor, Thoemmes, ...
— Tom Brown at Oxford • Thomas Hughes
... so-called "fallen" woman through a skilful portrayal of the reaction of experience upon personality. Their realism has rescued her from the sentimentality surrounding an impossible Camille quite as their fellow-craftsmen in realism have replaced the weeping Amelias of the Victorian period by reasonable ...
— A New Conscience And An Ancient Evil • Jane Addams
... politeness; each man forced himself to be considerate, and strove at whatever expense to himself to lighten the other's burdens; all of their relations were characterized by an elaborate, an almost mid-Victorian courtesy. A friendly rivalry in self-sacrifice existed between them; they quarreled good-naturedly over the dish-washing, that disgusting rite which tries the patience of every grown man; when there was wood to be cut they battled with ...
— The Winds of Chance • Rex Beach
... English civilization would be similarly incomplete without the semi-historic figure of King Arthur, glorified through the accumulated legends of the Middle Ages and made to live again in the melodic idylls of the great Victorian laureate. And so one might go on. In many ways the mythology and folklore of a country are a truer index to the life of its people than any of the pages of actual history; for through these channels the imagination and the heart speak. All the chronicles of rulers ...
— Famous Tales of Fact and Fancy - Myths and Legends of the Nations of the World Retold for Boys and Girls • Various
... the white man's own poison-gift, an excuse is found for sweeping the poor creatures off the face of the earth. Marsden's writings show how our Australian blacks are destroyed. But I have myself been on the track of such butcheries again and again. A Victorian lady told me the following incident. She heard a child's pitiful cry in the bush. On tracing it, she found a little girl weeping over her younger brother. She said, "The white men poisoned our father and mother. They threaten ...
— The Story of John G. Paton - Or Thirty Years Among South Sea Cannibals • James Paton
... shreds 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 think it was the greatest luck in the ...
— Of Human Bondage • W. Somerset Maugham
... how they will manage some points in the histories for the coming generation. In most of these books you see illustrations and descriptions of the dress of the period, the costume of the reign. How, oh historians! can you show forth those of Victorian times? Fifty years have passed already! There were four seasons in each of those fifty years! Two hundred illustrations must be shown in order to give a correct idea of the dress of the time! Perhaps it might be more satisfactory to devote a volume ...
— Lazy Thoughts of a Lazy Girl - Sister of that "Idle Fellow." • Jenny Wren
... it has lain for years, for though the authoress was nine when she wrote it she is now a grown woman. It has lain, in lavender as it were, in the dumpy note book, waiting for a publisher to ride that way and rescue it; and here he is at last, not a bit afraid that to this age it may appear "Victorian." Indeed if its pictures of High Life are accurate (as we cannot doubt, the authoress seems always so sure of her facts) they had a way of going on in those times which is really surprising. Even the grand historical figures were free and easy, such as King ...
— The Young Visiters or, Mr. Salteena's Plan • Daisy Ashford
... was reduced to the minister and precentor. The news went across the seas. Diggers from Australia and elsewhere poured in by the thousand. Before many months the province's population had doubled, and the prayerful and painful era of caution, the day of small things, was whisked away in a whirl of Victorian enterprise. For the next few years the history of Otago became a series of rushes. Economically, no doubt, "rush" is the proper word to apply to the old stampedes to colonial goldfields. But in New Zealand, at any rate, the physical methods of progression thither were laborious in the extreme. ...
— The Long White Cloud • William Pember Reeves
... rather re-write it,' I said to myself, and I have already submitted to this eminent man of letters my rough scenario of the lines on which FIELDING'S novel should be brought home to the Georgian mind. In reply he has made a counter-suggestion that the characters should be rearranged on a Victorian basis, CHARLOTTE BRONTE replacing Sophia, THACKERAY Mr. Allworthy, while the title-role should be assigned to an enterprising publisher. But I am not without hope that he ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 158, May 19, 1920 • Various
... know that awful painting of a mid-Victorian ancestor of Vera's—a horrible old man with bushy eyebrows and a ...
— The Secret City • Hugh Walpole
... Hetty with cabriole legs. Don't bother with her much. They're lower case people—tin pergola and pebble garden sort. And early Victorian bathrooms. You won't like her—freeze ...
— Ptomaine Street • Carolyn Wells
... side sheltered by fine timber. At the foot of the cliff are the flower beds of an old-world garden. The nucleus of the house is ancient, but has now been incrusted by great modern additions, the Victorian regime expressing itself in windows of plate glass. But through the plate glass on one side is visible a prehistoric habitation of the Picts and a cavern in which gypsy mothers are even now brought secretly to give birth to their offspring. On the other side are visible the slopes of a barren hill, ...
— Memoirs of Life and Literature • W. H. Mallock
... his pepper-and-salt trousers for white flannel, but nothing on earth would induce him to forsake his top hat. He entirely agreed with the heroes of England's proudest epoch—of course I mean the middle Victorian—that the top hat was the sign-manual, the mark, the distinction of the true Englishman, the completest expression of England's greatness. Mr Clinton despised all foreigners, and although he would never have ...
— Orientations • William Somerset Maugham
... of the dim reflection of himself in the mirror of the immense Victorian mahogany ...
— The Price of Love • Arnold Bennett
... Pole is not a very good joke to start with. An icicle hanging on one's nose is a simple sort of humour in any case. If a set of spontaneous mummers got the effect cleverly with cut crystals from the early Victorian chandelier there might really be something suddenly funny in it. But what should we say of hanging diamonds on a hundred human noses merely to make that precious ...
— Alarms and Discursions • G. K. Chesterton
... built of northern stone, with mullioned windows, twisted chimneys, peaked gables surmounted with stone balls, and a roof of flat slabs of the same yellow-brown stone that formed the walls. A section of black and white timbered Elizabethan work, a Queen Anne wing, and some early Victorian alterations made a strange conglomeration of styles of architecture; but the roses and ivy had climbed up and clothed ancient and modern alike, and Time had softened the jarring nineteenth-century additions, so that the whole now blended into a mellow, brownish mass, with large, ...
— A harum-scarum schoolgirl • Angela Brazil
... literature: for at Number 67 lived Arthur Henry Hallam, and diagonally opposite, at Number 50, lived Elizabeth Barrett. This street—utterly commonplace in appearance—is forever associated with the names of our two great Victorian poets: and the association with Tennyson is Death: with ...
— Robert Browning: How To Know Him • William Lyon Phelps
... monotonous and colourless, and were looking forward to the termination of their visit. The life they had led for the past fortnight was not their way of life. They met each morning for breakfast at nine o'clock—Miss Heredith was a stickler for the mid-Victorian etiquette of everybody sitting down together at the breakfast table. After breakfast the men wandered off to their own devices for killing time: some to play a round of golf, others to go shooting or fishing, generally not reappearing until dinner-time. ...
— The Hand in the Dark • Arthur J. Rees
... shawls which 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. With the exception of occasional ...
— A Holiday in the Happy Valley with Pen and Pencil • T. R. Swinburne
... man to think of it was Solly Quhayne, the rising young agent. Solly was the son of Abraham Cohen, an eminent agent of the Victorian era. His brothers, Abe Kern, Benjamin Colquhoun, Jack Coyne, and Barney Cowan had gravitated to the City; but Solly had carried on the old business, and was making a big name for himself. It was Solly who had met Blinky Bill Mullins, the prominent sand-bagger, as he emerged from his twenty ...
— The Swoop! or How Clarence Saved England - A Tale of the Great Invasion • P. G. Wodehouse
... she did not do so without some aid from "boxes," but he liked her none the less for that, and possibly admired her more. He sat down and asked her how she was, and, as he looked at her, he wondered to think that she had ever fainted. Clearly, she was the last woman on earth who could be accused of Victorian ways, and to see her in her white lace dress, dark, distinguished, and perfectly mistress of her emotions, was to be bewildered at the memory. She treated the question with scant ceremony, and remarked upon the fact that the night had been ...
— The Pointing Man - A Burmese Mystery • Marjorie Douie
... Street door. Now that she was his wife, surely John would begin to make love to her, real love, kisses, claspings, and what not. For Elsie Goldmore had presumed upon their schoolgirl friendship and been quite explicate in these last days, and in any case Amaryllis was not a miss of the Victorian era. The feminine world has grown too unrefined in the expression of its private affairs and too indiscreet for any maiden ...
— The Price of Things • Elinor Glyn
... agree,' he said slowly, 'but I don't believe a Greek would have understood a word of it. You remember that in the dim Victorian ages, when one great Latin scholar gave, as he thought, the neatest possible translation of "The path of glory leads but to the grave," another great Latin scholar declared that all a Roman could have understood by it would have been "The path of a public ...
— Elizabeth's Campaign • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... in the 18th or early 19th century farm 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 ...
— If You're Going to Live in the Country • Thomas H. Ormsbee and Richmond Huntley
... moment a 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, and the eye chiefly settles on some ...
— Pickwickian Manners and Customs • Percy Fitzgerald
... midinette, and so on. But Mr. JULES DELACRE, who played his own part, Pierrot, with a fine sincerity and a sense of the great tradition in this genre, got his effect across to us with an admirable directness. Miss PHYLLIS PINSON looking charming in a mid-Victorian Latin-Quarterly sort of way (which is a very nice way), danced seriously, fantastically, delightfully, and with quite astonishing command of her technique—the sort of thing that nine infallible managers out of ten who know what the public wants would ...
— Punch, 1917.07.04, Vol. 153, Issue No. 1 • Various
... was of early Victorian fashion and massive folding shutters were provided to close the French windows. He never used them, as a matter of fact, but now he tested the fastenings which kept them in place against the inner wall and even moved them in order to learn ...
— The Golden Scorpion • Sax Rohmer
... more reflective moments whether she really wanted to stretch out her hand and take it. It was all very like some situation in an Arabian Nights tale or a story of Pagan Hellas, and consequently the more puzzling and disconcerting to a girl brought up on the methodical lines of Victorian Christianity. Her appeal court was in permanent session these last few days, but it gave no decisions, at least none that she would listen to. And the ride on her fast light-stepping little mare, alone and unattended, ...
— The Unbearable Bassington • Saki
... has always to be sternly resisted when dealing with any part of the Victorian era, so merely pausing to note that it seems to have been a triumph on the part of Mrs. Grosjean to have cut a short skirt out of 81/2 yards of material, I reluctantly lay aside the letters at the time when Edward Chesterton and Marie were ...
— Gilbert Keith Chesterton • Maisie Ward
... preserving English valor in immortal verse. Thackeray and Dickens, in prose as immortal, were picturing the social lights and shadows of the Victorian Age. ...
— The Evolution of an Empire • Mary Parmele
... old or elderly author. It has been only within a year or two that we have formed the taste for an English writer, no longer living, save in his charming books. James Payn was a favorite with many in the middle Victorian period, but it is proof of the flexibility of our tastes that we have only just come to him. After shunning Anthony Trollope for fifty years, we came to him, almost as with a rush, long after our half-century was past. Now, ...
— Imaginary Interviews • W. D. Howells
... troubadours or cavaliers and to talk blank verse, I don't see how they can expect to be happy living in these fifteenth-century houses. The modern family—the old man in baggy trousers and a frock-coat he could not button if he tried to; the mother of figure distinctly Victorian; the boys in flannel suits and collars up to their ears; the girls in motor caps—are as incongruous in these mediaeval dwellings as a party of Cook's tourists drinking bottled beer ...
— They and I • Jerome K. Jerome
... dream-country has, by degrees, solidified into a utilitarian region which people can go to, take a house in, and write to the papers from. But I ask all good and gentle readers to be so kind as to forget this, and to refuse steadfastly to believe that there are any inhabitants of a Victorian Wessex outside the pages of this and the companion volumes in ...
— Far from the Madding Crowd • Thomas Hardy
... The Victorian era in England, a period comparable for brilliancy only to that of Queen Elizabeth, began indeed under auspicious circumstances. In the field of letters there was the galaxy of diverse spirits: Southey, Wordsworth, Tennyson, and Browning. A new start was given to English prose by such powerful ...
— A History of the Nineteenth Century, Year by Year - Volume Two (of Three) • Edwin Emerson
... on which the most class-proud will consult with the lowest and the wickedest; it is a mighty leveller downwards. But the poor lady had a lonely life. It was not Mrs. Caldwell's fault, but the fault of her day, that she was not a noble woman. She belonged to early Victorian times, when every effort was made to mould the characters of women as the homes of the period were built, on lines of ghastly uniformity. The education of a girl in those days was eminently calculated to cloud her intelligence and strengthen every failing developed in her sex by ages ...
— The Beth Book - Being a Study of the Life of Elizabeth Caldwell Maclure, a Woman of Genius • Sarah Grand
... author of many scientific papers, but will, perhaps, be best remembered as the author of a Presidential Address to the British Association in Belfast (1874), which was the highwater mark of the mid-Victorian materialism ...
— The Glories of Ireland • Edited by Joseph Dunn and P.J. Lennox
... not another drop can be added without overflow. Cast in the early 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 to Erato ...
— The Love Sonnets of a Hoodlum • Wallace Irwin
... politics, if she hadn't been so much more important than he. And then, naturally, she's made enemies—powerful enemies. Her friends come here of course—her old cronies—the people who can put up with her. They're devoted to her. And the young people—the very modern ones—who think nice manners 'early Victorian,' and like her rudeness for the sake of her cleverness. But the rest!—What do you think she did at one of these ...
— A Great Success • Mrs Humphry Ward
... contributions which graced the 'Keepsakes' of the thirties, and even—alas—in the various prefaces and commentaries which accompanied the publication of so many poems of Shelley, his wife succumbed to an increasing habit of almost Victorian reticence and dignity. And those later novels and tales, though they sold well in their days and were kindly reviewed, can hardly boast of any reputation now. Most of them are pervaded by a brooding spirit of melancholy of the 'moping' ...
— Proserpine and Midas • Mary Shelley
... the outraged feelings of her Victorian family. In all the seven generations of their sojourn in America they have never had anything like this to record in the family Bible. It all comes from sending her to college and letting her read such dreadful modern people as Ellen Key ...
— Dear Enemy • Jean Webster
... diminished the difficulties that beset the task of convincing the community generally. Mary Wollstonecraft was, however, the inspired pioneer of a great movement which slowly gained force and volume.[55] During the long Victorian period the practical aims of this movement went chiefly into the direction of improving the education of girls so as to make it, so far as possible, like that of boys. In this matter an immense revolution ...
— The Task of Social Hygiene • Havelock Ellis
... as a professional literary man my time, especially in the morning, has a certain commercial value, but I will endeavour to do as you ask. You would of course justly repudiate any comparison between your own artistic setting and those Victorian houses wherein the 'drawing-room book' reposed always in the same sacred corner. Yet in the matter of derelict articles we are millionaires, we ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 159, August 11, 1920 • Various
... has happened elsewhere, to a certain degree. In Victorian England there lived a woman whose love-affair was wrecked and whose mind automatically closed itself against everything associated with her tragedy, or subsequent to it. In her madness she, too, protected herself against pain by living in expectation of the lover's return. ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1920 - and the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various
... Committee, 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 were received by ...
— A Ball Player's Career - Being the Personal Experiences and Reminiscensces of Adrian C. Anson • Adrian C. Anson
... after the Victorian era, though many of the episodes have a strongly Victorian flavour. Makes a brilliant audiobook, ...
— With Airship and Submarine - A Tale of Adventure • Harry Collingwood
... the other hand, American manners contain much that is called young in the contrary sense; in the sense of an earlier stage of history. There are whole patches and particular aspects that seem to me quite Early Victorian. I cannot help having this sensation, for instance, about the arrangement for smoking in the railway carriages. There are no smoking carriages, as a rule; but a corner of each of the great cars is curtained off mysteriously, that a man may go behind the curtain and smoke. ...
— What I Saw in America • G. K. Chesterton
... MILLS [LXIX]. When we remember early and mid-Victorian conditions in English mills and the conditions of the sweat shops in New York and other American cities (vide "Susan Lenox"), we shall be less inclined to take a harsh view of industrial Japan during a period of transition. ...
— The Foundations of Japan • J.W. Robertson Scott
... don't believe in these 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 so ...
— Outside Inn • Ethel M. Kelley
... because he alone was capable of possessing it by enjoying it. To Darius, to Bursley in general, it was just a nice house, of red brick with terra-cotta facings and red tiles, in the second-Victorian Style, the style that had broken away from Georgian austerity and first-Victorian stucco and smugness, and wandered off vaguely into nothing in particular. To the plebeian in Darius it was of course grandiose, and ...
— Clayhanger • Arnold Bennett
... criticism. If music were a necessary ornament of lyrical verse, the latter would nowadays scarcely exist; but we hear less and less of the poets devotion (save in a purely conventional sense) to the lute and the pipe. What we call the Victorian lyric is absolutely independent of any such aid. It may be that certain songs of Tennyson and Christina Rossetti have been with great popularity "set," as it is called, "to music." So far as the latter ...
— Victorian Songs - Lyrics of the Affections and Nature • Various
... made a millionaire's highway of Park Lane. Dominey, who was first scrutinised by an individual in buff waistcoat and silk hat at the porter's lodge, was interviewed by a major-domo in the great stone hall, conducted through an extraordinarily Victorian drawing-room by another myrmidon in a buff waistcoat, and finally ushered into a tiny little boudoir leading out of a larger apartment and terminating in a conservatory filled with sweet-smelling exotics. The Duchess, who was reclining ...
— The Great Impersonation • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... traditions of English literature. Dickens, with little education and less interest in literary culture, looked with joy upon the struggle for democracy, and with an observation that was almost microscopic saw all its picturesque details of speech and character and incident. He was the eye of the mighty Victorian age, as Tennyson was its ear, and Browning its psychologist, and ...
— Outlines of English and American Literature • William J. Long |
