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Forties   /fˈɔrtiz/   Listen
Forties

noun
1.
The time of life between 40 and 50.  Synonym: mid-forties.
2.
The decade from 1940 to 1949.  Synonym: 1940s.






WordNet 3.0 © 2010 Princeton University








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"Forties" Quotes from Famous Books



... Arcady from Dr. Jessopp, we know something of the old farmers and tranters and woodlanders from Hardy, something of late Georgian London from Dickens, something of the old Lancashire mill-hands from Mrs. Gaskell, and something of provincial town-life in the forties and fifties from George Eliot. It has fallen to Borrow to hold up the mirror to wild Nature on the roadside and ...
— Isopel Berners - The History of certain doings in a Staffordshire Dingle, July, 1825 • George Borrow

... from my car up about Fortieth Street, the region where the theatres and restaurants are, the 'roaring forties.' Broadway here might be the offspring of Shaftesbury Avenue and Leicester Square, with, somehow, some of Fleet Street also in its ancestry. I passed two men on the sidewalk, their hats on the back of their heads, arguing fiercely. One had slightly long hair. The other looked ...
— Letters from America • Rupert Brooke

... a woman, begins to scream and tear off and destroy her clothing. If on the ship, she will walk up and down the deck, screaming and gesticulating, and generally in a state of nudity, though the thermometer may be in the minus forties. As the intensity of the attack increases, she will sometimes leap over the rail upon the ice, running perhaps half a mile. The attack may last a few minutes, an hour, or even more, and some sufferers become so wild that ...
— The North Pole - Its Discovery in 1909 under the auspices of the Peary Arctic Club • Robert E. Peary

... Preston chiefly consists. In poems like "Owd Moxy," "T' Lancashire Famine," and "I niver can call her my wife," he gives us pictures of the struggle that went on in the cottage-homes of the West Riding during the "hungry forties." In "Owd Moxy" his subject is the old waller who has to face the pitiless winter wind and rain as he plies his dreary task on the moors; but in most of his poems it is the life of the handloom-weaver that he interprets. The kindliness of his nature is everywhere apparent and gives ...
— Yorkshire Dialect Poems • F.W. Moorman

... and solemn leave-taking performed. Once on the other side, descriptive letters were conscientiously written, and eagerly read by friends at home,—in spite of these epistles being on the thinnest of paper and with crossing carried to a fine art, for postage was high in the forties. Above all, ...
— Worldly Ways and Byways • Eliot Gregory

... hotel was erected in 1804 at a cost of L40,000, although built entirely by slaves. Its varied and brilliant career came to an end some time in the forties. The tide of fashion turned, and as it was too large for a private residence, it was left to the elements. Earthquakes have riven it, hurricanes unroofed it, and time devoured it, but it is still magnificent ...
— The Gorgeous Isle - A Romance; Scene: Nevis, B.W.I. 1842 • Gertrude Atherton

... little time for the trivial social amenities, but her frequent missives from her relatives, the Lees and Wards of New York City and Boston, and her enjoyable visits to their gay homes, broke the strain of mental grind, and kept her in touch with the fashionable world. Her communications in the forties disclose a relation to men and women of culture, whose letters are colorful of people, places, and events, and through them we reach an intimate inside of her own self. Those faded, musty-smelling epistles, ...
— The Shirley Letters from California Mines in 1851-52 • Louise Amelia Knapp Smith Clappe

... through flying showers, and great north-eastern waves raced past us, their heads torn off in spray, their broad backs laced with ripples, and each, as it passed, gave us a friendly onward lift away into the 'roaring forties,' as the sailors call the stormy seas between 50 and 40 degrees ...
— At Last • Charles Kingsley

... the Maori Hut, and Gordon promptly forgot all thought of the puzzlingly alien figure in the corner. The new arrivals were a vibrantly beautiful blond girl and a plump, sallow-faced man in the early forties. The girl was Leah Keith, Hollywood's latest screen sensation. The man was ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science January 1931 • Various

... of New Zealand; it is likewise the windy port of the Pacific, for it is in the eye of the "roaring forties," the strong west wind of the South Temperate Zone. But Wellington has the harbor, and the harbor has the shipping; and because of this Wellington is a ...
— Wealth of the World's Waste Places and Oceania • Jewett Castello Gilson

... corporations and individuals all over the world to invest surplus funds in bonds, those of the Government being most popular of all. The various issues authorized by act of Congress were known as "seven-thirties," "ten-forties," "five-twenties," etc., these terms denoting either the rate of interest or the period of years, dating from the first issue, wherein it was optional with the Government to redeem them. Everywhere, at home, in the theatres and public ...
— Bidwell's Travels, from Wall Street to London Prison - Fifteen Years in Solitude • Austin Biron Bidwell

... Valley had refused to listen to. He spoke earnestly of the world's terrible need of salvation, the fearful necessity for haste and wholesale repentance and the awful menace of God's wrath. And the fact that he was a man entering his forties instead of his ...
— Green Valley • Katharine Reynolds

... in him that the ways of love change with the years, that the passions of the forties, when they come, are to those of the early years as the deep sea to a shallow lake, less ...
— Dangerous Days • Mary Roberts Rinehart

... Revolution of 1848 and the New Constitutions.*—The turning point came with the great year of revolution, 1848. During the thirties and forties, by public agitation, by the organization of Mazzini's "Young Italy," by the circulation of patriotic literature, and in a variety of other ways, the ground was prepared systematically for the risorgimento upon which the patriots and the prophets had set their hearts. In 1846 a liberal-minded ...
— The Governments of Europe • Frederic Austin Ogg

... JOHN MOORE and officers. MOORE appears on the pale evening light as a handsome man, far on in the forties, the orbits of his dark eyes showing marks of deep anxiety. He is talking to some of his staff with vehement emphasis and gesture. They cross the scene and go on out of sight, and the squashing of their horses' hoofs in the ...
— The Dynasts - An Epic-Drama Of The War With Napoleon, In Three Parts, - Nineteen Acts, And One Hundred And Thirty Scenes • Thomas Hardy

... centralistic efforts of Joseph II., the Czechs again began to recover their national consciousness. This revival marked the beginning of the Czecho-Slovak struggle for the re-establishment of their independence. The movement was at first literary, and only in the forties became political. It was a continuous struggle against reaction and absolutism, and if the Czecho-Slovaks to-day can boast of an advanced civilisation, it is only owing to their perseverance and hard endeavours, and not because of any good-will on the part of the Austrian Government ...
— Independent Bohemia • Vladimir Nosek

... newcomers were nice, fresh-cheeked, clear-eyed lads to whom everything was new and strange and wonderful, their enthusiasm was contagious, and their cheerful command of vernacular exceedingly heart-warming. California John, then a man in his forties, tried to head ...
— The Killer • Stewart Edward White

... in Putnam's Monthly for November (1906), points out that the most significant contrast between our time and Early Victorian days is a decrease in idealism. "The most characteristic note," he tells us, "in the mental attitude of the forties and fifties in England, and that in which they contrast most sharply with our own times, was confidence.... In party politics this confidence was almost without limit. There was a section of Conservatism ...
— Socialism: Positive and Negative • Robert Rives La Monte

... forty-seven days," continued Nanna. "You can make the account. Chickens and milk and fresh meat for forty-seven days! Even the bread comes to something in that time, at least two soldi a day—two forties eighty, two sevens fourteen, ninety-four—nearly five francs. Who will give us the five francs? Are ...
— Whosoever Shall Offend • F. Marion Crawford

... the house," he continued inconsequentially, "back in the forties for himself and his young bride, and, though it looks bleak enough now, it was for the Crosby of those days a mansion of the first class. The captain, the tradition is, was a wild, obstinate fellow with black hair and brilliant eyes (I fancy Emily has much of her father in ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1919 - and the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various

... towards the close of the 'forties of the nineteenth century, and the place the city of Ranjitgarh, capital of the great native state of Granthistan, which was not yet a British possession, but well on the way to becoming one. This ultimate destiny ...
— The Path to Honour • Sydney C. Grier

... difficulty in getting him to consent to the baptism of his elder children. He was still in many respects the Philip of the "Bothie," influenced by Goethe, and the French romantics, by Emerson, Kingsley, and Carlyle, and in touch still with all that Liberalism of the later 'forties in Oxford, of which his most intimate friend, Arthur Clough, and his elder brother, Matthew Arnold, were to become the foremost representatives. But all the while, under the surface, an extraordinary ...
— A Writer's Recollections (In Two Volumes), Volume I • Mrs. Humphry Ward

... therefore, that early the following morning the men of Cloudy Mountain Camp assembled in the low, narrow room with its walls of boards nailed across inside upright beams—a typical miners' dance-hall of the late Forties—which they had transformed into a veritable bower, so eager were they to please their lovely teacher. Everyone was in high spirits, Rance alone refraining from taking any part whatsoever in the morning's activities; dejectedly, sullenly, ...
— The Girl of the Golden West • David Belasco

... in mid-century, or rather in the "forties and fifties," during the early dark days of struggle and ten years thereafter, differed greatly from College life in our day. It is difficult perhaps fully to realise the changes since that time in other ways than growth. The McGill of our day is not the McGill of seventy years ...
— McGill and its Story, 1821-1921 • Cyrus Macmillan

... had not advanced beyond the stage of ballads; they had no history, or other prose literature of their own, except, perhaps, a few traditional genealogical lists, mostly mythical, and adapted to an artificial grouping by eights and forties. The Roman missionaries brought over the Roman works, with their developed historical and philosophical style; and the change induced in England by copying these originals was as great as the change would now be from the rude Polynesian ...
— Early Britain - Anglo-Saxon Britain • Grant Allen

... from the most cultured scholars to the lowest degree of illiteracy. We had men who had formerly been gentlemen of leisure, lawyers, physicians, students of divinity, teachers, merchants, farmers and mechanics, ranging in age from boys of seventeen to matured men in the forties and from all parts of the South and several from Northern States, as well as Irish and Germans. At one camp-fire could be heard discussions on literature, philosophy, science, etc., and at another horse-talk. The tone of the company was decidedly moral, and there was comparatively little ...
— The Story of a Cannoneer Under Stonewall Jackson • Edward A. Moore

... is the interesting old house where, in the forties and fifties lived Baron Bodisco, Minister from Russia to the United States. He had a very romantic marriage of which I shall tell later. Just before the marriage he purchased this house from Sally Van Devanter, who had inherited it ...
— A Portrait of Old George Town • Grace Dunlop Ecker

... question afterwards killed the king, Crimthann, son of Enna Ceinnselach, to avenge his exile. In thirties and forties are the churches which he gave to Patrick in the east of Leinster, and in Ui-Cennselaigh, including Domnach-mor of Magh-Criathar and Inis-Fail, where Mochonoc and Mochatoc are, and Erdit and Augustin in the smaller island ...
— The Most Ancient Lives of Saint Patrick - Including the Life by Jocelin, Hitherto Unpublished in America, and His Extant Writings • Various

... I'm sold on it already!" To you the hacienda of a Rancho Palomar will always bring delightful recollections of the gracious hospitality of Senor Cave Coutts, sitting at the head of that table hewed in the forties. Little did Senor Coutts realize that he, the last of the dons in San Diego County, was to furnish copy for my novel; that his pride of ancestry, both American and Castilian, his love for his ancestral hacienda at the Rancho Guajome, and his old-fashioned garden with ...
— The Pride of Palomar • Peter B. Kyne

... one season of the year, lye at another, and where lard was rendered at butchering-time. He took him into the wagon-shed and showed him the rickety high-wheeled, top-heavy carriage used by the first of the Dowds back in the forties, now ready to fall to pieces at the slightest ungentle shake; the once gaudy sleigh with its great curved "runners"; and over in a dark corner two long barrelled rifles with rusty locks and rotten stocks, that once upon a time cracked the doom of deer and wolf and ...
— Quill's Window • George Barr McCutcheon

... stage? That was another matter altogether. It is a better stimulant than the society of old friends. It is a finer anodyne than tobacco. It is a quicker and more constant pick-me-up than champagne. Sternest duty and purest pleasure wear one smiling face. And to think that I was well into the forties before ...
— The Making Of A Novelist - An Experiment In Autobiography • David Christie Murray

... of the Sovereign is obvious and was illustrated by Queen Victoria in such historic incidents as the personal relations with King Louis Philippe which probably averted a war with France in the early forties; in the later friendship with Louis Napoleon which helped to make the Crimean War alliance possible; in the refusal by the Queen to assent to a certain casus belli despatch during the American War which saved Great Britain from being drawn ...
— The Life of King Edward VII - with a sketch of the career of King George V • J. Castell Hopkins

... turnpike road, but there's no pier for it to stop at, and how grey and turbulent the sea is in the seventeenth century! Let's to the museum. Cannon-balls; arrow- heads; Roman glass and a forceps green with verdigris. The Rev. Jaspar Floyd dug them up at his own expense early in the forties in the Roman camp on Dods Hill—see the little ticket with the faded writing ...
— Jacob's Room • Virginia Woolf

... experience had taught Mr Pickering that, superior as he was to Chingachgook and his friends in many ways, as a creeper he was not in their class. He weighed thirty or forty pounds more than a first-class creeper should. Besides, creeping is like golf. You can't take it up in the middle forties and expect to compete with those who have been at it ...
— Uneasy Money • P.G. Wodehouse

... temporary exhilaration, and he went to the dining-place he had frequented in his wicked days in a devil-may-care frame of mind, and dined altogether too amply and cheerfully with two other golden youths in their early forties. He threw up the game; no woman was worth being good for, and he astonished even himself by the strain of witty cynicism he developed. One of the other desperate blades, warmed with wine, made a facetious allusion to his disappointment, ...
— Tales of Space and Time • Herbert George Wells

... them to participate in the proceedings of the Rabbinical Commission convened at St. Petersburg. The replies from these prominent Jews were full of complimentary references to Uvarov's endeavors. The Allgemeine Zeitung des Judentums,[1] in the beginning of the forties, voiced the general belief that the era of persecutions in Russia ...
— History of the Jews in Russia and Poland. Volume II • S.M. Dubnow

... from the German by Oswald Mueller, San Antonio, 1935. OP. Roemer, a geologist, rode through Texas in the forties and made acute observations on the land, its plants and ...
— Guide to Life and Literature of the Southwest • J. Frank Dobie

... mother's account. The eastern forty acres I intend to keep for mother while she lives; if you will not cultivate it, it will rent for enough to support her; at least, it will rent for something. Her dower in the other two forties she can let you have, and no thanks to me. Now do not misunderstand this letter. I do not write it in any unkindness. I write it in order, if possible, to get you to face the truth, which truth is, you are destitute because you have idled away all your time. Your thousand pretenses ...
— Abraham Lincoln: A History V1 • John G. Nicolay and John Hay

... years old when "Pamela" was published; Scott was forty-three when "Waverley" appeared; Hawthorne was forty-six when he wrote "The Scarlet Letter"; Thackeray and George Eliot were well on their way to the forties when they completed "Vanity Fair" and "Adam Bede"; and these are the ...
— A Manual of the Art of Fiction • Clayton Hamilton

... them back before the "forties," taking their stand beneath the broad gateway or pebbled court-yard of our old inns—the Red Lion, the Bull, or the Crown—would require a very slight effort of memory to recall the exhilarating spectacle of the arrival and departure of the stage coach of ...
— Fragments of Two Centuries - Glimpses of Country Life when George III. was King • Alfred Kingston

... Mat. "A young giraffe like him, dropped this spring in the Sarah desert under a cocoanut shy. Four hundred and forties I thought you was goin' to say. 'Ark to him!" He appealed to the delighted crowd. "Offers me forties against my pantomime colt, and ain't ashamed of himself. I'd ha' left him at home in the ...
— Boy Woodburn - A Story of the Sussex Downs • Alfred Ollivant

... sweet old idyl of mediaeval France—"un echo du temps passe"—seems to have been a somewhat Rabelaisian ditty; by no means proper singing for a Sunday morning in a boys' school. But boys will be boys, even in France; and the famous "esprit Gaulois" was somewhat precocious in the forties, I suppose. Perhaps it is now, if it still exists (which I doubt—the dirt remains, but all the fun seems to ...
— The Martian • George Du Maurier

... breakfast, it seemed to go along of itself, and erelong the convives were eating ambrosia and sipping nectar. Van Dam told a shark story. Mavick demonstrated its innate improbability. The Major sang a song—a song of the forties, with a touch of sentiment. Jack, whose cheerful voice was a little of the cider-cellar order, and who never sang when he was sad, struck up the latest vaudeville ditty, and Carmen and Miss Tavish joined ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner

... see the editor of the 'Riversford Gazette,' an illiterate tuft-hunting little man,—and nearly frightened him into fits. He had asserted himself in this kind of autocratic fashion ever since he had purchased Badsworth, when he was still in his forties,—and it may be well imagined that at the age of sixty he was not prepared to be thwarted, even in a matter wherein he had no real concern. The former rector of St. Rest, an ailing, nervous and ...
— God's Good Man • Marie Corelli

... woman, still in the early forties, and the word "stylish" inevitably leaped to one's mind at the sight of her full, well-corseted figure, fashionable raiment, and carefully coiffured hair. There was nothing whatever of the boarding-house keeper about her; in fact, at first ...
— The Splendid Folly • Margaret Pedler

... any editor imagine these pages are my professional obituary,—my autobiography. If by mistake he does, then let him place me immediately in their births column. I am in my forties, and there is quite time for me to prepare and publish two more volumes of my "Confessions" from my first to my second birth, and many other things, before I ...
— The Confessions of a Caricaturist, Vol. 1 (of 2) • Harry Furniss

... Somewhere in the forties a professor of the Universidad Central, Sanz del Rio, was sent to Germany to study philosophy on a government scholarship. Spain was still in the intellectual coma that had followed the failure of the ...
— Rosinante to the Road Again • John Dos Passos

... ends very far downtown! The fifties, forties, thirties, even the twenties, are to them the veritable wilderness, the variously repugnant sections ...
— Greenwich Village • Anna Alice Chapin

... by at least twelve years, her husband's junior, and apparently not very far advanced in the forties. Her blonde hair, which was freshly crimped, fell lightly over her smooth, narrow forehead; her nose, mouth and chin had a neat distinctness of outline; her complexion was either naturally or artificially perfect, and her eyes, which ...
— Tales From Two Hemispheres • Hjalmar Hjorth Boyesen

... else in this world; and hardly had the last of our visitors quitted the ship than the hands were turned up to weigh anchor, the old Candahar sailing soon after daybreak and shaping a course southwards to pick up the westerly trade winds of the "Roaring Forties." ...
— Crown and Anchor - Under the Pen'ant • John Conroy Hutcheson

... still uncertain. Was it before his first escape from London, as he says in "Lavengro"? Was it during his second long stay in London or after his second escape? Or was it really not long before the actual narrative was written in the 'forties? There is some reason for thinking so. The most vivid description of "the horrors," and the account of the touching gentleman and of Peter Williams, together with a second reference to "the horrors" or the "evil one," ...
— George Borrow - The Man and His Books • Edward Thomas

... excited, and there was something almost youthful in her excitement. Yet she was on the eve of a horrible passing. For that day was her last day in the forties. On the following morning she would wake up a ...
— December Love • Robert Hichens

... would need him and send for him, cry that it had been a mistake, that her heart ached only for the pain she had caused him. Never again could he find even the sombre luxury of wanting her—not this Rosalind, harder, older—nor any beaten, broken woman that his imagination brought to the door of his forties—Amory had wanted her youth, the fresh radiance of her mind and body, the stuff that she was selling now once and for all. So far as he was ...
— This Side of Paradise • F. Scott Fitzgerald

... industries. The iron and steel industry was scarcely in existence at Confederation. The Marmora plant at Long Point, Ontario, and a smaller plant at Three Rivers, Quebec, had been in existence since the forties; but the iron and steel industry, as it exists to-day in Canada, is largely the creation of the national policy of protective tariffs and bounties. The bounty system was instituted in 1883, chiefly for the benefit of ...
— Canada • J. G. Bourinot

... Facundus and Primitivus; where likewise their bodies rest, an abbey was founded, and a city built. When the King's army advanced, Argolander wished to decide the contest by set combat between twenties, forties, hundreds, thousands, or even by two champions only. Charles willingly consented, and marched a hundred of his soldiers against a hundred Saracens, when all of them were slain. Argolander then sent ...
— Mediaeval Tales • Various

... original forms and colors, crowned with golden crosses of elaborate and beautiful designs. Ask a resident, whether prince or peasant, "How many churches are there in 'Holy Moscow town'?" The answer invariably is, "Who knows? A forty of forties," which is the old equivalent, in the Epic Songs, of incalculable numbers. After a while one really begins to feel that sixteen hundred is not ...
— Russian Rambles • Isabel F. Hapgood

... led Bagley and Larcher over to the medico-legal criminologist—a tall, thin man in the forties, with prematurely gray hair and a smooth-shaven face, cold and inscrutable in expression—and, having introduced and helped them to find chairs, rejoined Turl. Bagley was not ten seconds in getting the medico-legal ...
— The Mystery of Murray Davenport - A Story of New York at the Present Day • Robert Neilson Stephens

... saloon-keepers and bootblacks. He drifted through a department store, and whispered to a pretty girl who sold "art pictures." She shook her head. He spoke a word to the negro sentinel of a house in the West Forties, and was admitted to quiet, padded rooms, containing everything which is necessary to separate hopeful persons from their money. In one room a number of book-makers were whiling away the hot afternoon with poker ...
— The Penalty • Gouverneur Morris

... be most welcome. Paris, Rue de la Chaussee d'Antin, No. 5. At present I am occupying Franck's lodging [Dr. Hermann Franck, author, friend of Chopin and of many other celebrities; editor also for a short time, in the forties, of Brockhaus's "Deutsche Allgemeine Zeitung"]—he is gone to London and Berlin. I am most happy in the rooms which were so often our meeting-place. ...
— Letters of Franz Liszt, Volume 1, "From Paris to Rome: - Years of Travel as a Virtuoso" • Franz Liszt; Letters assembled by La Mara and translated

... I don't pretend to say, but I won for my client three forties of the quarter section in dispute. We returned home the way we went down,—on foot,—with the exception that at Stockton we constructed a small sleigh, sufficient to carry our baggage, which much relieved the animals. My client offered me one of ...
— The History of Minnesota and Tales of the Frontier • Charles E. Flandrau

... arched and fretted screen of red lacquer, and within this open cage stood Mrs. John, surveying winsomely the expanse of little tables, little chairs, big chairs, huge chairs, sofas, rugs, flower-vases, and knick-knacks. She had an advantage over most blondes nearing the forties in that she had not stoutened. She was in fact thin as well as short; but her face was too thin. Still, it dimpled, and she held her head knowingly on one side, and her bright hair was wonderfully done up. Dressed richly as she was, and assisted by ...
— The Roll-Call • Arnold Bennett

... sixteen or so, carrying a paper parcel, stops hesitatingly, looks in a moment and then walks to the porch. As he stands there a man comes out of the house. The man is in his early forties, he stoops a little, but not from weakness; his expression is ...
— Read-Aloud Plays • Horace Holley

... provide that majority, to insure responsible and steady action, and at the same time responsible criticism from Her Majesty's loyal Opposition. Baldwin saw this clearly in 1841, but it took hard fighting throughout the forties to bring all his fellow countrymen to see likewise and to induce the English Government to resign ...
— The Canadian Dominion - A Chronicle of our Northern Neighbor • Oscar D. Skelton

... mother. She had been beguiled on this occasion by the family history which was concerned, and which, fin de siecle as Dolly was, excited her curiosity almost as much as if she had been born in the "forties." Dolly was never unkind, sometimes indeed was quite the reverse, to her mother. When Mr. Tatham, with a man's brutal unconsciousness of what is desirable, placed a chair for Lady Mariamne in front of the fire, Dolly twisted it round with a dexterous movement ...
— The Marriage of Elinor • Margaret Oliphant

... sent for Belvy," Jim wrote. "We've heard it read and reread, and the more it's worn with reading the fresher it gets in our minds. As I size up the effect on the population, we folks in the forties and fifties got more fun out of it than anybody except the folks in the seventies and the five-to-twelve-year-olds. Some of the thirteen and fourteen-year-olds were inclined to think at first that it wasn't quite grown up enough for them, until they saw what fashionable ...
— Over the Pass • Frederick Palmer

... selection of his subjects, and kept him from wandering so frequently into the low and disgusting purlieus of vice. But this moral and tasteful discrimination seems to have been wholly wanting," &c. The 'forties were the days when critics still talked learnedly of the "noble style," &c., "the vulgar," of "sinking" or "rising" with "the subject," the days when Books of Beauty were in fashion, and Rembrandt's choice of beggars, ...
— The Life, Adventures & Piracies of the Famous Captain Singleton • Daniel Defoe

... Mostyn is much annoyed that the Squire has begun to notice them. He says one of the grandsons of the Tyrrel-Rawdons, disinherited for love's sake, came to America some time in the forties. I asked your grandmother if this story was true. She said it is quite true; that my father was his friend in the matter, and that it was his reports about America which made them decide to try their ...
— The Man Between • Amelia E. Barr

... While we are on the subject of the middle-aged woman, it may be well to mention a phenomenon sometimes noticed in the early forties. Often an "old maid" who has considered herself settled for life in her bachelor estate, suddenly takes to herself a husband. (I use the verb advisedly!) Mothers who have thought their child-bearing days long past sometimes ...
— Outwitting Our Nerves - A Primer of Psychotherapy • Josephine A. Jackson and Helen M. Salisbury

... to read Thackeray's Paris Sketches with a kind of awe. The Thirties and the Forties, reincarnated and inspired by his glowing spirit, seemed clad in translucent garments, like the figures in the Nibelungenlied, weird, remote, glorified. I once lived in the street "for which no rhyme our language yields," ...
— Marse Henry, Complete - An Autobiography • Henry Watterson

... families held their place, and they of the aristocratic houses divided the spoil. But a new leaven was at work. The prosperity which had culminated in 1872 was passing away. Industrial progress slowed down; and, though the advance from the "Hungry 'Forties" had been immense, men began to see the limit of what they could reasonably expect from retrenchment and Free Trade. The work of Mr. Henry George awakened new interest in problems of poverty, and the idealism of William Morris gave new inspiration to Socialist propaganda. Meanwhile, the teaching ...
— Liberalism • L. T. Hobhouse

... which she is talking about how they first moved into the house at Cheyne Row. They spent their early years in Scotland, you know, and he was a man going on to the forties when he came to London. The success of Sartor Resartus encouraged them to the step. Her letter describes all the incoming. Here is his comment, written after her death: "In about a week all was swept and ...
— A Duet • A. Conan Doyle

... He was older, in his late forties, I thought. His hair was thin and gray but his face was hard. He had a heater strapped to his side, and he wore a good uniform. "Government men don't come out one at a time, do they, Huey?" ...
— The Man Who Played to Lose • Laurence Mark Janifer

... be glad to have you come up and look at my collection. There is every kind of bird that has been shot in Virginia fields or Virginia waters. I've got a Trumpeter Swan. The last one was seen in the Chesapeake in sixty-nine. Mine was killed and stuffed in the forties. He is in a perfect state of preservation, and in the original ...
— The Trumpeter Swan • Temple Bailey

... of virtue is filled with furniture from the vintage of the early forties and I sit in it alone and am so pathetically good, that I am beginning ...
— Letters of a Dakota Divorcee • Jane Burr

... have raced the dogtrains down MacKenzie River an' the canoes down the Saskatchewan! 'Twas your grandfather set the bagpipes skirling when Governor Simpson used to come galloping down the Columbia in the forties with his paddlers splitting the wind, a dark fearsome man, child, but a brave one, tho' his heart was hard as his hand, and his hand was iron—Bras de Fer, Arm of Iron, the Indians called him; for his left hand, he lost in a duel; and his false ...
— The Freebooters of the Wilderness • Agnes C. Laut

... In the forties there was a sleepy clerk at Hampstead, a very portly man, who did ample justice to his bright red waistcoat and brass buttons. The church had a model old-time three-decker. The lower deck was occupied by the clerk, ...
— The Parish Clerk (1907) • Peter Hampson Ditchfield

... eighteenth century, the tremors of which were felt in the life of every country in Europe. Then, although, as Freeman says, no part of Europe ever returned entirely to its former condition, there was a profound and almost universal reaction. In the 'thirties and 'forties, differing in different countries, a second revolutionary disturbance shook Europe. The reaction after this upheaval was far less severe, and the conditions were permanently changed to a great extent, but a third revolutionary movement followed in the next generation, ...
— The Story of Evolution • Joseph McCabe

... months to eighty-five years, among whom were half a dozen entire families, came in one squad. Another lot of a dozen good field-hands arrived the same day; and then they continued to come by twenties, thirties, and forties. They were assigned buildings outside of the fort or tents within. They were set to work as servants to officers, or to store provisions landed from vessels,—thus relieving us of the fatigue duty which we had previously done, except that of dragging and mounting ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 8, Issue 49, November, 1861 • Various

... when the news came, that as fast as you found the news operate, the telegraphic communication from Shorter's Court to the Stock Exchange took place, Mr. Fearn was set to work—he was ordered to sell, and he did sell by twenties, thirties, forties, and fifties of Thousands, and in the hurry and confusion they were in, one sold Ten Thousand Consols less than he had, and the other Twenty-four Thousand omnium more than he had; I think therefore this selling ...
— The Trial of Charles Random de Berenger, Sir Thomas Cochrane, • William Brodie Gurney

... far too rich in such a temper as this and it was never more so than in the forties and the fifties of the last century. Mesmerism crossed the ocean and while Braid and later Bernheim and Charcot were following it through on sound, psychological lines and bringing to bear upon it great insight and scientific ...
— Modern Religious Cults and Movements • Gaius Glenn Atkins

... teams next them, their masters were shouting unheeded words of command, the crowd were cheering their favourites, and altogether you would never have guessed from the racket and confusion that you were north of the Roaring Forties. ...
— Le Petit Nord - or, Annals of a Labrador Harbour • Anne Elizabeth Caldwell (MacClanahan) Grenfell and Katie Spalding

... are worthy of her. I can't imagine where Rooke picked up such a splendid lot of men. They are nearly all man-of-warsmen; of various nationalities, but mostly British. All young men—the oldest of them hasn't got into the forties—and, so far as I can learn, all experts of one kind or another in some special subject of warfare. It will go hard with me, but I shall keep ...
— The Lady of the Shroud • Bram Stoker

... which was not completed till 1853. In this year he contributed as an appendix to the Diary of Haydon—in itself an exciting document, showing how wretched the life of an official painter then might be—a note telling of the state of historical and monumental painting in the 'forties, and of his own attitude towards it; a few of his own words, written before the days of the "poster," may be ...
— Watts (1817-1904) • William Loftus Hare

... little apartment of her own in that hinterland of what is now down-town New York, between the Rialto and its more conventional prototype, Society,—that is, she lived east of Broadway on a cross-street in the forties. The maid who took care of her had been in her aunt's employ for years, and had seen Nancy grow from her rather spoiled babyhood to a hoydenish childhood, and so on to soft-eyed, vibrant maturity. She was the only person who tyrannized over Nancy. ...
— Outside Inn • Ethel M. Kelley

... opera most typical of Verdi's earliest period. With all its blemishes, it is easy to see how its masculine vigour and energy must have captivated the audiences of the day. But there were political as well as musical reasons for the instantaneous success of Verdi's early operas. Italy in the forties was a seething mass of sedition. Verdi's strenuous melodies, often allied to words in which the passionate patriotism of his countrymen contrived to read a political sentiment, struck like a trumpet-call upon the ears ...
— The Opera - A Sketch of the Development of Opera. With full Descriptions - of all Works in the Modern Repertory • R.A. Streatfeild

... silken robe, rose, went over to her dressing-table, seated herself and picked up a round cut-glass jar with a silver top. The jar contained cold cream, or something of that sort. Mattie, having filed down her nail, was now faithfully brushing again, in the forties. Her eyes followed Cally; rested upon her as she sat. These eyes, large, dark, and grave, with the sweetest, curlingest lashes, had been the turning-point in Mattie's life. She had early recognized their unique ...
— V. V.'s Eyes • Henry Sydnor Harrison

... always has heavy sorrows and not a few bitter disappointments. And it is in view of these things that married love is found to have redeeming power. It is one of the lies of the cynic that love must needs burn itself out somewhere about the forties. Thousands of people have found at forty that the best was yet to be. For the fact is that all through the afternoon of life and even when the shadows lengthen towards the end love will still send beams of beauty ...
— Men, Women, and God • A. Herbert Gray

... up the dark stairs, and presented Dr. Burnham's card with a word of explanation along the lines which he had suggested. Prescott, surrounded by his retorts, crucibles, burettes, and condensers, received us much more graciously than I had had any reason to anticipate. He was a man in the late forties, his face covered with a thick beard, and his eyes, which seemed a little weak, were helped out with glasses ...
— Master Tales of Mystery, Volume 3 • Collected and Arranged by Francis J. Reynolds

... Soane, whose Through Mesopotamia and Kurdistan in Disguise is a classic. Soane was born in southern France, his mother French and his father English. The latter walked across the United States from ocean to ocean in the early forties, so Soane came by his roving, adventurous spirit naturally. When still but little more than a boy he went out to work in the Anglo-Persian Bank, and immediately interested himself in the language and literature of the country. Some of his holidays he spent in the British Museum ...
— War in the Garden of Eden • Kermit Roosevelt

... it; but of the second convulsion from which emerged the Ireland of to-day he saw only the beginning, for he died in 1873, when the organised peasant uprising was at most a menace. But his wife knew both periods—the bad times of the late 'forties and the bad times of the early eighties. The true link with the past for the writers of Irish Memories is through the female line. This is a book of mothers and daughters rather than ...
— Irish Books and Irish People • Stephen Gwynn

... that hour before dawn cracks, even the West Forties, where night is too often cacophonous with the sound of revelry, drop into long narrow aisles of gloom. Thin, high-stooped houses with drawn shades recede into the mouse-colored mist of morning, and, as through quagmire, this mist hovering ...
— Gaslight Sonatas • Fannie Hurst

... ridicule the Southern "ideal." But in a well-known and excellent passage in Life on the Mississippi, he properly pokes fun at the "wordy, windy, flowery 'eloquence,' romanticism, sentimentality—all imitated from Sir Walter Scott," of the Southern literary journal of the thirties and forties. In later years Mark Twain, in his 'Joan of Arc', voiced a spirit of noble chivalry which bespoke the "Southern ideal" of his Virginia forbears; and that delicacy of instinct in matters of right and wrong which is so conspicuous a trait of Mark Twain's is a symptom of that "moral elegance" which ...
— Mark Twain • Archibald Henderson

... are wide regions of London, miles of streets of houses, that appear to have been originally designed for prosperous-middle-class homes of the early Victorian type. There must have been a perfect fury of such building in the thirties, forties, and fifties. Street after street must have been rushed into being, Campden Town way, Pentonville way, Brompton way, West Kensington way in the Victoria region and all over the minor suburbs of ...
— Tono Bungay • H. G. Wells

... a day in early autumn, shortly after the girls had reassembled after their summer vacation, when they streamed out of the building in groups of twenties and thirties and forties. They stood about and ...
— The Rebel of the School • Mrs. L. T. Meade

... pineal. So closely are they all related that insufficient action of the thyroid, pituitary or adrenals may cause atrophy of the ovaries and uterus, with abolition of genital function. If the sex glands themselves fail, as occurs usually in most women sometime in the forties, the thyroid-pituitary-adrenal association must readjust itself to the new development. The adaptation evokes the phenomena of the transition to ...
— The Glands Regulating Personality • Louis Berman, M.D.

... of pies at this period assumed vast proportions that verged upon the sublime. Pies were made by forties and fifties and hundreds, and made of everything on the earth and ...
— Good Cheer Stories Every Child Should Know • Various

... much of the history of the United States in the Forties and Fifties of the last century has vanished from the general memory. When a skilled historian reopens the study of Webster's "Seventh of March speech" it is more than likely that nine out of ten Americans will have to cudgel their wits endeavoring ...
— Webster's Seventh of March Speech, and the Secession Movement • Herbert Darling Foster

... GILBERT, Glorious JOHN!— Sir JOHN to-day, good knight, fine painter! Our eyes dwelt lingeringly upon His work, by which all else showed fainter. His dashing pencil "go" could give To simplest scene; a wondrous gift 'tis! How his bold line could make things live In those far Forties and old Fifties! ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 102, May 21, 1892 • Various

... acquaintance with likely looking and lonely boobs. Then the first thing the lonely boob knows he's had a good dinner with a new acquaintance and is strolling into a quiet but elegant looking house in the West Forties or Fifties." And the maid laughed, continuing her deft offices in the dressing-room, and the girl looked into the glass at her own crimson cheeks and ...
— The Gay Rebellion • Robert W. Chambers

... thirty. A Commission of Inquiry into the state of the poor in Dorsetshire gave him an opportunity of proving his true talents; and he was appointed a Poor Law Inspector, first at Worcester, next at Manchester, where he had to deal with the potato famine and the Irish immigration of the 'forties, and finally in London, where he again distinguished himself during an epidemic of cholera. He was then advanced to the Permanent Secretaryship of Her Majesty's Office of Works and Public Buildings; a position which he ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson, Volume 9 • Robert Louis Stevenson

... holding up nature, pure and holy, as an ideal, Adalbert Stifter (1805-1868), an Austrian, must be assigned a place of honor in this group. A more incisive contrast to the general turbulence of the forties could hardly be imagined than is found in the nature descriptions and idyls of this quietist, who "from the madding crowd's ignoble strife" sought refuge in the stillness of the country and among people to ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. VIII • Various

... is in the matter of duels. The duels in Pickwick come about quite as a matter of course, and as a common social incident. In the "forties" I recall a military uncle of my own—a gentleman, like uncle Toby—handing his card to some one in a billiard room, with a view to "a meeting." Dickens' friend Forster was at one time "going out" with another gentleman. Mr. Lang thinks that duelling was prohibited about 1844, and "Courts of Honour" ...
— Pickwickian Manners and Customs • Percy Fitzgerald

... nature, if only it could be freed from the unnatural chains with which society had bound it. Nor could anyone who participated in the commercial life of those times, who had lived, for example, through the depression of the forties, have preserved untarnished the precepts of Ricardo—published only a few years before 1819, and accepted as gospel in ...
— Statistical, Historical and Political Description of the Colony of New South Wales and its Dependent Settlements in Van Diemen's Land • William Charles Wentworth

... and a little unionism—the Lachlan speaking in a quiet voice and with a lot of sound, common sense, it seemed to me. He was tall and gaunt, and might have been thirty, or even well on in the forties. His eyes were dark brown and deep set, and had something of the dead-earnest sad expression you saw in the eyes of union leaders and secretaries—the straight men of the strikes of '90 and '91. I fancied once or twice I saw ...
— Over the Sliprails • Henry Lawson

... going of the Negro in California did not especially interest any one until the beginning of the immigration of the forties. The subject of slavery in California was officially called to the attention of the inhabitants through the issuance of a proclamation by the Commander in Chief of the District in regard to the unlawful enslaving of the Indians. ...
— The Journal of Negro History, Volume 3, 1918 • Various

... sought new inspiration in America. On his return he wrote a number of poems on America, which were published under the title of "Atlantica." In later years Lenau's verses, like those of Leopardi in Italy, became ever more melancholy, owing partly to inherited tendencies. In the early forties the poet's pessimism turned ...
— A History of the Nineteenth Century, Year by Year - Volume Two (of Three) • Edwin Emerson

... so she told me, of the Grand Duke Nicholas, the former commander-in-chief of the Russian armies. I have seen many queens, but I have never seen one who so completely meets the popular conception of what a queen should look like as Marie of Rumania. Though in the middle forties, her complexion is so faultless, her physique so superb, her presence so commanding that, were she utterly unknown, she would still be a center of attraction in any assemblage. Had she not been born to a crown she ...
— The New Frontiers of Freedom from the Alps to the AEgean • Edward Alexander Powell

... whole country, and actually moved the whole civilized world. About this time (May and June, 1848), far more importance was attached to quicksilver. One mine, the New Almaden, twelve miles south of San Jose, was well known, and was in possession of the agent of a Scotch gentleman named Forties, who at the time was British consul at Tepic, Mexico. Mr. Forties came up from San Blas in a small brig, which proved to be a Mexican vessel; the vessel was seized, condemned, and actually sold, but Forties ...
— Memoirs of Three Civil War Generals, Complete • U. S. Grant, W. T. Sherman, P. H. Sheridan

... neighbors and his harsh strictures upon the national character, due mainly to his lofty conception of the ideal America. He continued to spin yarns of sea and shore, and to write naval history. The tide of fashion set against him in the eighteen-forties when Bulwer and Dickens rode into favor, but the stouthearted old pioneer could afford to bide his time. He died in 1851, just as Mrs. Stowe ...
— The American Spirit in Literature, - A Chronicle of Great Interpreters, Volume 34 in The - Chronicles Of America Series • Bliss Perry

... probably reaches over the greater part of the Antarctic continent. It was the beginning of November: that is, the beginning of summer; but the conditions of work were much the same as those found during the spring journeys on the Barrier. The temperature dropped into the minus forties; but the worst feature of all was a continuous head-wind blowing from west to east which combined with the low temperature and rarefied air to make the conditions of sledging extremely laborious. The supporting party returned, and the three men continued ...
— The Worst Journey in the World, Volumes 1 and 2 - Antarctic 1910-1913 • Apsley Cherry-Garrard

... periods of this happiness. It is necessary to show that the theory of marriage in the thirteenth arrondissement affects in like manner all who come within its rule.[*] Marquis in the forties, sexagenary retired shopkeeper, quadruple millionnaire or moderate-income man, great seigneur or bourgeois, the strategy of passion (except for the differences inherent in social zones) never varies. The heart and the money-box are always ...
— Beatrix • Honore de Balzac

... proportion to the slight merit of the work. Gogol was denounced on all sides as a renegade; the relentless accuser of autocracy in "The Revisor" could not be forgiven for the spirit of Christian humility and resignation to the will of God which breathed from these letters. It was in the forties. Those were the days when a Hegelian wave went over Russian minds. God had been philosophized away to make place for the Absolute, and even school-boys came home to announce the astounding news that there was no longer any ...
— Lectures on Russian Literature - Pushkin, Gogol, Turgenef, Tolstoy • Ivan Panin

... greatest of horrors irony is seldom absent. Sometimes it enters directly into the composition of the events, while sometimes it relates only to their fortuitous position among persons and places. The latter sort is splendidly exemplified by a case in the ancient city of Providence, where in the late forties Edgar Allan Poe used to sojourn often during his unsuccessful wooing of the gifted poetess, Mrs. Whitman. Poe generally stopped at the Mansion House in Benefit Street—the renamed Golden Ball Inn whose roof has sheltered Washington, Jefferson, and Lafayette—and his favorite walk led northward ...
— The Shunned House • Howard Phillips Lovecraft

... on, Jimmy was possessed of an idea that he had met Hargate before. But, once more, he searched his memory, and drew blank. He did not give the thing much thought, being intent on his diagnosis of Lord Dreever, who by a fluky series of cannons had wobbled into the forties, and was now a few points ahead ...
— The Intrusion of Jimmy • P. G. Wodehouse

... how the world wagged when your grandfather was a ruddy egg-purloining rogue of five. When I read farther back than a century, I feel imagination flagging—the Merry Monarch is not much more to me than John the Baptist. But the men of the forties stand out clear and distinct. If I have never seen an out-and-out fiery Chartist, I have at least seen some smouldering specimens—men with much of the eloquence and a little of the enterprise of the original five-pointers. It may be that as I grow older, my most interesting historical period ...
— Literary Tours in The Highlands and Islands of Scotland • Daniel Turner Holmes

... Poole published his "Index to Periodical Literature," which it is much to be hoped is soon to appear in a new edition, grown as it must be to formidable dimensions by the additions of so long a period. The "British and Foreign Medical Review," edited by the late Sir John Forties, contributed to by Huxley, Carpenter, Laycock, and others of the most distinguished scientific men of Great Britain, has an index to its twenty-four volumes, and by its aid I find this valuable series as manageable as a lexicon. The last edition of ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)

... Algeria, accompanying St. Arnaud in his campaign against the Arabs. The mingled interest and horror inspired in him by this extra-ordinary man finds expression in his "Invasion of the Crimea" (ii. 157). A few, a very few survivors, still remember his appearance and manners in the forties. The eminent husband of a lady, now passed away, who in her lifetime gave Sunday dinners at which Kinglake was always present, speaks of him as SENSITIVE, quiet in the presence of noisy people, of Brookfield and the overpowering Bernal Osborne; liking their company, but never saying anything ...
— Biographical Study of A. W. Kinglake • Rev. W. Tuckwell

... then as now. There were demands for a minimum living wage. The influx of gold and silver from America had sent all prices soaring. Meat became almost prohibitive for the 'submerged tenth'—there was a rapidly submerging tenth. Beef rose from one cent a pound in the forties to four in 1588, the year of the Armada. How would the lowest paid of craftsmen fare on twelve cents a day, with butter at ten cents a pound? Efforts were made, again and again, to readjust the ratio between prices and wages. But, as a rule, prices ...
— Elizabethan Sea Dogs • William Wood

... to September. Miss Ballin, together with Mrs. Wightman, organised junior tournaments for girls under 18, along the lines used for the boys' events. The response was immediate. Entry lists, which in the old days were in "the teens," jumped to the thirties or forties, in the regular events. Young girls who, up to now, had not played tournaments, fearing they lacked the necessary class, rushed to play in the Junior girls' events. From this latter class came such a promising young star of today as ...
— The Art of Lawn Tennis • William T. Tilden, 2D

... standard at all; and what was true of school was true of society. Boston offered none that could help outside. Every one now smiles at the bad taste of Queen Victoria and Louis Philippe — the society of the forties — but the taste was only a reflection of the social slack-water between a tide passed, and a tide to come. Boston belonged to neither, and hardly even to America. Neither aristocratic nor industrial nor social, Boston girls and boys were not nearly as unformed ...
— The Education of Henry Adams • Henry Adams

... Away back in the forties, or perhaps even earlier, when there was some excitement in all parts of the country in regard to railroad building, one of Georgia's most famous orators had alluded in the legislature to Azalia as "the ...
— Free Joe and Other Georgian Sketches • Joel Chandler Harris

... most applicable to our case; and the only one we could think of was when Madame Bargeton, a provincial blue-stocking, left Angouleme for Paris with Lucien de Rubempre. There were no railways in the forties; they must have travelled in a post-chaise. Yes, I remember their journey, faintly it is true, but I remember it. Madame Bargeton was a woman of five-and-thirty at least, and Doris was much younger. Lucien was only one-and-twenty, and even at that time I was ...
— Memoirs of My Dead Life • George Moore

... hall, she reconsidered and Mr. Daniels obtained his desire. It was hard to refuse a personage like Mr. Daniels anything. He was not an elderly man; neither was he, strictly speaking, a young one. His age was, perhaps, somewhere in the late thirties or early forties and he was East Wellmouth's leading lawyer, in fact ...
— Thankful's Inheritance • Joseph C. Lincoln

... Bleeders, Blossoms, Bouncers, Buena Vistas, Buffaloes, Bull Dogs, Bullets, Bunker Hills, Canaries, Clippers, Corkies, Cow Towners, Cruisers, Darts, Didos, Dirty Dozen, Dumplingtown Hivers, Dung Hills, Muters, Forest Eose, Forties, Garroters, Gas House Tarriers, Glassgous, Golden Hours, Gut Gang, Haymakers, Hawk-Towners, Hivers, Killers, Lancers, Lions, Mountaineers, Murderers, Niggers, Pigs, Pluckers, Pots, Prairie Hens, Railroad ...
— The Child and Childhood in Folk-Thought • Alexander F. Chamberlain

... Number 12 or 12A Vinegar Yard. At this place a Mr. Pearkes had opened an oyster shop nearly twenty years before, and his little rooms were frequented by the most talented of the denizens of Bohemia—literary, theatrical, and artistic. One day, in the early 'Forties, the proprietor, to his amazement, heard one of his oysters whistling—a continuous shrill little whistle, doubtless through a hole in its shell. The fact was at once noised abroad, and crowds visited his shop to listen to the ...
— The History of "Punch" • M. H. Spielmann

... things were like throughout Europe in 1843-49. Perhaps the nearest approach to a true idea may be formed by those who heard our own precious Philharmonic Society under the late Cusins. As in London in the 'eighties, so in Dresden in the 'forties. Callous indifference to the beauty of fine music and complete slovenliness in every detail of the rendering of it went hand in hand. If Europe to-day is stocked with competent conductors, that is a debt we owe to Wagner. Himself one of the greatest conductors who ...
— Richard Wagner - Composer of Operas • John F. Runciman

... who can say?— We cannot tell where in its manvantara the Indian Age may have come: whether near the beginning, or at the middle. But in China we are on firm ground, and the firmest of all. A manvantara, a fifteen-century cycle, began in the two-forties B. C.; this Age of Han was its first blossom and splendid epoch; and we need feel no surprise that it was not followed by a night immediately, but only by a twilight and slight dimming of the glories for about thirteen decades again, and ...
— The Crest-Wave of Evolution • Kenneth Morris

... there is a woman's college, founded as a Preparatory School in the forties and soon advanced to be a Seminary, which, with Anna P. Sill for its first head, Jane Addams for its best-known graduate, and Julia Gulliver for its present president, has come to be a college of standing and of leading. Only Troy Female ...
— Stories from Everybody's Magazine • 1910 issues of Everybody's Magazine

... bouncing girls, then; now there are only fine ladies, and respectable God-fearing men of letters." Really! Surely there are plenty of bouncing girls and inky fellows still, just as there were respectable God-fearing men of letters and fine ladies even in the roaring forties. I doubt if Bohemia was ever so amusing as Mr. Buchanan imagines now, and I suspect the bouncing girls were "gey ill to live with." What is true in the immortal Bohemian myth, what appeals to the universal ...
— Without Prejudice • Israel Zangwill

... land question, dating from the seventeenth century, was not seriously tackled until 1881, not drastically and on the right lines till 1903. Education languishes at the present day. Canada started an excellent system of municipal and local government in the forties. In Ireland, while the minority, in Greville's words, were "bellowing spoliation and revolution," an Act was passed in 1840 with the utmost difficulty, removing an infinitesimal part of the gross abuses of municipal ...
— The Framework of Home Rule • Erskine Childers

... for England, until the most favorable season arrived, for his fragile wife and infant children to cross the "rolling forties." At length, on July 6, two days after his forty-ninth birthday, he sailed from Boston in the "Niagara," and with placida onda prospero il vento, in about twelve days they all arrived safely at ...
— The Life and Genius of Nathaniel Hawthorne • Frank Preston Stearns



Words linked to "Forties" :   decade, decennium, decennary, mid-forties, 1940s, adulthood, maturity, time of life



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