"Middle-class" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... They are peasants, and she is a great lady. Ca se comprend. But extremes meet, and Brigit has none of the British middle-class snobbism. It is well that she should see the people from whom we come. She shall ...
— The Halo • Bettina von Hutten
... 22; a tall brunette, of the respectable lower middle-class, with a flow of light badinage, ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 99., August 23, 1890. • Various
... the sights of the world, you know," she said, puffing her cigarette smoke into his face. "It's too middle-class to be shocked, and not to see occasionally what you really cannot get anywhere else. Why, there'll even be a lot of tourists here later on, and these dancers don't do the real Apache until about one. At least leave Helene with me, if you care more ...
— The Avalanche • Gertrude Franklin Horn Atherton
... difficulty in carrying, the attractions of this vein of talk palled on the young agent—who was himself a scion of good family, with his own social ambitions—before long. He decided that Mrs. Grieve was pure middle-class, not at all accustomed to dine in halls of pride, and much agitated by her surroundings. The type did not interest him. She seemed to be asking him to help her out of the mire, and as one does not go into society to be benevolent but to be amused, ...
— The History of David Grieve • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... fault of Antoinette. Why can't she cook in a middle-class, unedifying way? All this comes from having in the house a woman whose soul is ...
— The Morals of Marcus Ordeyne • William J. Locke
... and in a minute more the girl and boy, plainly dressed, middle-class people, were looking in at the confectioner's window at a pink and white frosted castle that reared itself above a cake surrounded with bon-bons to ...
— Jewel's Story Book • Clara Louise Burnham
... king's daughter, made no more effect at Court than if she had been a mere middle-class person. The King, in fact, by his considerateness, splendour, and glory, served to support her dignity. He hoped and even desired that she should be held in honour, partly for her own sake, in a great measure for his. But as soon as she started upon some argument or narration where force ...
— Marguerite de Navarre - Memoirs of Marguerite de Valois Queen of Navarre • Marguerite de Navarre
... embraced only homes of two sorts—the middle-class, conventional sort to which she had been accustomed, and the few poorly furnished frontier dwellings she had entered since coming to the hinterlands of British Columbia. She had a vague impression that any dwelling occupied exclusively by a man must of necessity be dirty, ...
— North of Fifty-Three • Bertrand W. Sinclair
... God. He is a power that can be pictured and endured only by a hardy and courageous race, a race rich enough to sacrifice and to lose in sacrifice. The image of this God degenerates with the people that appropriate it, and gradually He becomes a God of love—"soft and mellow," a lower middle-class deity, who is "pitiful." He can no longer be a God who requires sacrifice, for we ourselves are no longer rich enough for that. The tables are therefore turned upon Him; HE must sacrifice to us. His pity ...
— Thus Spake Zarathustra - A Book for All and None • Friedrich Nietzsche
... they overlooked exaggeration; they pardoned ignorance—in a word, they proved teachable. Yet, though meek in spirit, they have not yet inherited the earth; indeed, there are those who assert that their chances are gone, their sceptre for ever buried. It is all over with the middle-class. Tuck up its muddled head! ...
— In the Name of the Bodleian and Other Essays • Augustine Birrell
... themes taken from the everyday life of middle-class men and women like ourselves, it is true that the lives of the wealthy afford more incident, and that there is a sort of glamour about them which it is difficult to resist. But with a sufficient subtlety the whole poignancy of the lives led by those ...
— On Something • H. Belloc
... in 1613 and died in 1680. He was a genre painter of great merit. He belonged to Leyden, and was a pupil of Rembrandt. He began with portraiture, often painting his own face, and went on to scenes from low and middle-class life, but rarely attempted to represent high society. Compared to Jan Steen, however, he is refined. He had a curious fondness for painting hermits. The lighting of his pictures is frequently by lantern or candle. They are mostly small, and without animated action, but are full of picturesqueness. ...
— The Old Masters and Their Pictures - For the Use of Schools and Learners in Art • Sarah Tytler
... pass her off as a duchess in six months. I started on her some months ago; and she's getting on like a house on fire. I shall win my bet. She has a quick ear; and she's been easier to teach than my middle-class pupils because she's had to learn a complete new language. She talks English ...
— Pygmalion • George Bernard Shaw
... as to say: "What rags these scribblers wear!" and then, casting them over the arm, with a gesture that meant: "Well, they must be brushed, but Heaven knows if they will stand it without coming to pieces!" would next discover in the pockets a great quantity of middle-class ...
— Old and New Masters • Robert Lynd
... was about to sit down to breakfast, word was brought to him that the rural policeman, with two prisoners, was awaiting him at the Hotel de Ville. He went there at once and found old Hochedur standing guard before a middle-class couple whom he was regarding with a ...
— Une Vie, A Piece of String and Other Stories • Guy de Maupassant
... Irishman, Scotchman, nor Englishman, as such, can be made to yield much fun, if sketched alone. It is when ranged alongside of each other, and measured by the English middle-class standard of ...
— Reflections and Comments 1865-1895 • Edwin Lawrence Godkin
... with each other; but as soon as they begin to think for themselves they are sure to differ sooner or later. And that was exactly what happened at Fetter Lane. The members came from various stations in life. Some, like the Wesleys, were university men; some, like Hutton, were middle-class tradesmen, of moderate education; some, like Bray, the brazier, were artizans; and all stood on the same footing, and discussed theology with the zeal of novices and the confidence of experts. John Wesley found himself in a strange country. He had been brought up in the realm of authority; he ...
— History of the Moravian Church • J. E. Hutton
... sick of the hideousness of life, of the excruciating lower middle-class arrangement of this room. I don't know how I've stood it all these years. My soul must have been starved—stifled. I want to live in another atmosphere, to be surrounded by beautiful things. Don't laugh like that,—I know I'm not an artist; ...
— Audrey Craven • May Sinclair
... case let me cite that of the ex-soldier S. He reached the age of twenty-two with a very creditable history. Born of middle-class parents he went through high school and ranked in the upper third of his class for scholarship. His physique was good; he was a joyous, popular young fellow; and wherever he went was pointed out as the clean young American so representative of our country. That means he worked ...
— The Foundations of Personality • Abraham Myerson
... that the low-class converts are somewhat better than they were then), the converts to Christianity must have been originally a very indifferent set of people. Christianity, however, if it did not make these classes much better, at any rate made them no worse. When we turn, however, to the middle-class farmers, it is evident that to have converted them, unless that conversion had been preceded by enlightenment, and a more advanced civilization than they had hitherto enjoyed, would have inflicted on ...
— Gold, Sport, And Coffee Planting In Mysore • Robert H. Elliot
... were a solid middle-class Devonshire family, who for two generations had taken a leading part in the business of the town. They still survive in the county—Achins we used to call them before school pronunciation came in, and so Philip wrote the name when the famous ...
— English Seamen in the Sixteenth Century - Lectures Delivered at Oxford Easter Terms 1893-4 • James Anthony Froude
... confident. They cannot understand the middle-class diffidence of the young men who wear ...
— Twilight in Italy • D.H. Lawrence
... days I secured another place, this time in a middle-class family. I remained there nearly a year and was considered by my mistress a model of willingness, patience, endurance, gentleness, and all the other slavish virtues. I never spoke except when spoken to and then I answered so respectfully! The children might kick and abuse me in any ...
— An Anarchist Woman • Hutchins Hapgood
... of the new influences which have been brought to bear on the middle-class mind, with respect to Art, may be sufficiently seen in the great rise in the price of pictures which has taken place (principally during the last twenty years) owing to the interest occasioned by national exhibitions, coupled with facilities of ...
— On the Old Road Vol. 1 (of 2) - A Collection of Miscellaneous Essays and Articles on Art and Literature • John Ruskin
... moralizes on the muddy feet that pass him, he would probably feel grieved if the strong hand of some clear-headed individual lifted him up out of the gutter's filth and he was informed that much depended upon one's view being from a level, not an incline. We do not Judge our middle-class citizens by our cooks, and it is apt to suggest unwisdom, to express it very mildly, to gauge the men and women workers of the stage by ...
— Volume 10 of Brann The Iconoclast • William Cowper Brann
... shake hands, nurse?" once exclaimed a child cynic. The nurse was nonplussed. The middle-class mother answers the ...
— A History of Nursery Rhymes • Percy B. Green
... Bossuet was of good bourgeois, or middle-class, stock. He passed a well-ordered and virtuous youth, as if in prophetic consistency with what was to be his subsequent career. He was brought forward while a young man in the Hotel de Rambouillet, where, ...
— Classic French Course in English • William Cleaver Wilkinson
... been really in love," he said to himself, "I may as well confess it; and I daresay I never shall be, but marry on an impulse like most men, make the best of it afterwards, and have a sort of middle-class happiness in the end of ...
— Robinetta • Kate Douglas Wiggin
... and Liberal Trade Unions; Federation of Belgian Industries; numerous other associations representing bankers, manufacturers, middle-class artisans, and the legal and medical professions; various organizations represent the cultural interests of Flanders and Wallonia; various peace groups such as Pax Christi and groups ...
— The 2007 CIA World Factbook • United States
... locusts of the great cities have not yet settled on the verdure of the native inhabitants. It is delightful to realize the fact that while the West End of London is flaunting its splendors and the East End in struggling with its miseries, these great middle-class communities are living as comfortable, unpretending lives as if they were in one of our thriving townships in the huckleberry-districts. Human beings are wonderfully alike when they are placed ...
— Over the Teacups • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... the time when the Concordat was in its most flourishing condition, a young man belonging to a wealthy and highly respected middle-class family went to the office of the head of the police at P——, and begged for his help and advice, which was ...
— Library of the World's Best Mystery and Detective Stories • Edited by Julian Hawthorne
... of the mob one way or the other," he said. "I despise them utterly; but the troops and the mobiles are sufficient to man the forts and the walls, and I believe that middle-class corps, like the one I have entered, will fight manfully; and the history of Paris has shown over and over again that the mob of Paris, fickle, vain-headed, noisy braggadocios as they are, and always have been, can at least starve well. They held out against Henry of Navarre ...
— A Girl of the Commune • George Alfred Henty
... was a foreigner, but for the wider fact that no person of English stock has been on the throne since Saxon Harold, the chosen and imposed rulers of England having been French, Welsh, Scotch, and Dutch, many of them being guiltless of the English language, and many of them also of the English middle-class morality. The impartial old Wraxall, the memorialist of the times of George III, having described a noble as a gambler, a drunkard, a smuggler, an appropriator of public money, who always cheated his tradesmen, who was one and ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner
... bad place, and will be destroyed." Troops on their march towards Andenne announced in villages through which they passed that they were going to burn the town and massacre the inhabitants. At Louvain, a German officer, treated generously by a middle-class family, and appreciating their courtesy, rushed to their house on the 25th at 11 o'clock in the morning,[27] and earnestly pressed his hosts to leave without delay, refusing to give them any explanation. ...
— Their Crimes • Various
... later is sure to follow; and if Queen Victoria's morning drum beats round the world, its beat is certain to be echoed before the day is over by the popping of champagne-corks. Now-a-days the exhilarating wine graces not merely princely but middle-class dinner-tables, and is the needful adjunct at every petit souper in all the gayer capitals of the world. It gives a flush to beauty at garden-parties and picnics, sustains the energies of the votaries of Terpsichore until the hour ...
— Facts About Champagne and Other Sparkling Wines • Henry Vizetelly
... higher end of the central benches; and if one had never seen them there no difficulty would be experienced in finding out their seats. You may always ascertain the character of worshippers by what they sit upon. Working-class people rest upon bare boards; middle-class individuals develop the cushion scheme to a moderate pitch; the upper species push it towards consummation-like ease, and therefore are the owners of good cushions. Very few cushions can be seen in St. Walburge's; those noticeable are at the higher end; and the logical inference, ...
— Our Churches and Chapels • Atticus
... of American character and so it goes on." My sly countryman skilfully interviewed his victim, disclosing step by step the ludicrous traits of a Yankee. There were many weak sides. Mr. Jackson, in whom we were mainly interested, proved to be a mediocre person in all respects, with a naively middle-class outlook on life, and we, the two Russian observers, revelled in that delightful malice which is so characteristic of Russians abroad. So that is what they are, the far-famed ...
— The Shield • Various
... The lower middle-class Boers attach great weight to the guesses of native bonethrowers. It is strange sometimes when a Malay charmer is prosecuted for imposing on the public to find Dutch witnesses giving evidence of the healing powers possessed ...
— Native Life in South Africa, Before and Since • Solomon Tshekisho Plaatje
... school-master, every bank-manager, and every clergyman produces one, two, three or more old maids? Do the middle-classes, particularly the lower middle-classes, give birth to more girls than boys? Or do the lower middle-class men assiduously climb up or down, in marriage, thus leaving their true partners stranded? Or are middle-class women very squeamish in ...
— The Lost Girl • D. H. Lawrence
... so-called "dictatorship measures"—upon Lincoln. Wise as Lyons ordinarily was he was bound by the social and educational traditions of his class, and had at first not the slightest conception of the force or effect of emancipation upon the public in middle-class England. He feared an American reaction against England when it was understood that popular meetings would have no ...
— Great Britain and the American Civil War • Ephraim Douglass Adams
... it has been learning. In England we have a method that for obtaining the least possible result at the greatest possible expenditure of time and money is perhaps unequalled. An English boy who has been through a good middle-class school in England can talk to a Frenchman, slowly and with difficulty, about female gardeners and aunts; conversation which, to a man possessed perhaps of neither, is liable to pall. Possibly, if he be a bright exception, ...
— Three Men on the Bummel • Jerome K. Jerome
... with skill and judgment: nor is there any head of a household capable of seeing that the necessary care and trouble are given. It is wonderful, under the circumstances, how clever and willing our domestic cooks are. A considerable section of English middle-class women at the present day are allowed by the men, who should guide them so as to make them honourable and useful members of the community, to grow up in complete ignorance of the essential parts of the art of cookery. This was not the case a ...
— More Science From an Easy Chair • Sir E. Ray (Edwin Ray) Lankester
... present at a family festival of the Forsytes have seen that charming and instructive sight—an upper middle-class family in full plumage. But whosoever of these favoured persons has possessed the gift of psychological analysis (a talent without monetary value and properly ignored by the Forsytes), has witnessed a ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... contributed his share to the growing wave of bourgeois morality, which in the 18th century was reflected in the middle-class appeal of Addison and Steel, Lillo's London Merchant, and Richardson's almost feminine plea for virtue rewarded. A physician, Blackmore had turned to poetry for relaxation and composed his soporific epics, by his own admission, in the ...
— Essay upon Wit • Sir Richard Blackmore
... Mr. Landover. I always make a noise like that when I yawn. It's an awfully middle-class habit I've gotten into. Still, don't you think one obtains a little more—shall we say enjoyment?—a little more enjoyment out of a yawn if he lets go and puts his whole soul into it? Of course, it isn't really necessary ...
— West Wind Drift • George Barr McCutcheon
... he never grew weary, and, while praising her, a halo of glory was to him visible around my head and I was faultless for the time being. There was nothing in our fellow-passengers to break the monotony of the voyage. They were all stolid, middle-class English people, returning from various parts of the world to visit their ...
— Eighty Years And More; Reminiscences 1815-1897 • Elizabeth Cady Stanton
... until radicals had begun to wonder at times whether the power of language wasn't exhausted. The response was discouragingly weak—an occasional government investigation, an impassioned protest from a few individuals, a placid charity, were about all that the middle-class public had to say about factory life. The cynical indifference of legislatures and the hypocrisy of the dominant parties were all that politics had to offer. The Lawrence strike touched the most impervious: story after story ...
— A Preface to Politics • Walter Lippmann
... part I consider him chimerical," Pecuchet ended by declaring. "He believes in the occult sciences, in monarchy, in rank; is dazzled by rascals; turns up millions for you like centimes; and middle-class people are not with him middle-class people at all, but giants. Why inflate what is unimportant, and waste description on silly things? He wrote one novel on chemistry, another on banking, another on printing-machines, just as one Ricard produced The Cabman, The Water-Carrier and The Cocoa-Nut ...
— Bouvard and Pecuchet - A Tragi-comic Novel of Bourgeois Life • Gustave Flaubert
... been published in great numbers by the home-press, but a voice from the tradesman has seldom been heard; or, if heard, has not been attended to. I trust in some measure to supply the deficiency to those middle-class townsfolk who seek to emigrate ...
— Chambers' Edinburgh Journal, No. 421, New Series, Jan. 24, 1852 • Various
... and the fall of the empire found Sulpice a popular man at Grenoble; loved by all, by the populace who knew how generous he was, and by the middle-class who regarded him as a prudent man, hence the February elections saw him sent to Bordeaux, a member of the National Assembly. He had just ...
— His Excellency the Minister • Jules Claretie
... Zora came upon him on the Casino terrace. He sprawled idly on a bench between a fat German and his fat wife, who were talking across him. His straw hat was tilted over his eyes and his legs were crossed. In spite of the conversation (and a middle-class German does not whisper when he talks to his wife), and the going and coming of the crowd—in spite of the sunshine and the blue air, he slumbered peacefully. Zora passed him once or twice. Then by the station ...
— Septimus • William J. Locke
... adored Him theoretically, feared Him very vaguely, for she did not profess to understand His intentions or His will, having a very limited confidence in the priests, whom she regarded merely as the sons of peasants revolting from military service. Her father, a middle-class Parisian, never had imposed upon her any particular principles of devotion, and she had lived on thinking little about religious matters until her marriage. Then, her new station in life indicating more strictly her apparent duties toward the Church, she had conformed punctiliously to this light ...
— Strong as Death • Guy de Maupassant
... illustration will take us towards the second canon. I remember, years ago, a working-man of my own city talking a swift, impulsive Socialism to me. He was young and something of a poet. He got in return the obvious common sense that would be expected of a mid-Victorian, middle-aged and middle-class. And then he began to talk of hunger—the hunger that haunted whole streets in our city, where they had indeed something to eat every day, but never quite enough, and the children grew up so—the hunger that he had experienced himself, for I knew his story. ...
— The Jesus of History • T. R. Glover
... has some relation with Guy de Maupassant as a close analyst of modern types of character, but he has more humour. He has been compared with such Dutch painters of low life as Teniers. His talent reached its height in the novel called Little Folk (1880), a most admirable study of lower middle-class life in Copenhagen. He was for a while, without doubt, the leading living novelist, and he went on producing works of great force, in which, however, a certain monotony is apparent. The three leaders had meanwhile ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 8, Slice 2 - "Demijohn" to "Destructor" • Various
... are so afraid of co-education. To this day schools like Bedales, King Alfred's, Harpenden, and Arundale are reckoned as crank schools. The great middle-class of England believes in segregation. Even Dr. Ernest Jones, the most prominent Freudian psycho-analyst in England, appears ...
— A Dominie in Doubt • A. S. Neill
... merciless school drill frequently enforced, the wonder is, not that it does extreme injury, but that it can be borne at all. Take the instance given by Sir John Forbes, from personal knowledge; and which he asserts, after much inquiry, to be an average sample of the middle-class girls'-school system throughout England. Omitting detailed divisions of time, we quote the summary of ...
— Essays on Education and Kindred Subjects - Everyman's Library • Herbert Spencer
... he bores me with his interminable descriptions and his whole middle-class outlook. Yet for many years he dominated my senses, which gives him a certain hold over me still. I cannot make up my mind to take the brutal step which would free me once and for all from him. I must let him go on believing that our ...
— The Dangerous Age • Karin Michaelis
... the American Sterne. He did not seek a vehicle for his wit in the oddities and mishaps of English middle-class domestic life, but in the contrasts and incongruities of a Boston boarding-house. He informs us at the outset that he much prefers a family with an ancestry— one that has had a judge or a governor in it, with ...
— Cambridge Sketches • Frank Preston Stearns
... appearance. He stands for the new and virile element, for which the reforms of the Sixties had been the preparation. These reforms, one-sided and imperfect as they may have been, had none the less sufficed to create new economic conditions. On the one hand, a well-to-do middle-class, recruited almost entirely from non-aristocratic strata, sprang up; on the other, an industrial proletariat. Maxim Gorki emerged from this environment: and as a phenomenon he is explained by this essentially modern antithesis. ...
— Maxim Gorki • Hans Ostwald
... Seamen's Funds of New York and Liverpool, or somewhere else. It is then necessary to explain what seamen are. They are "these brave, watchful fellows who have our lives in their hands." At this, the chairman looks at the table stewards, who stand about the walls with their napkins and their middle-class grins; brave, watchful fellows trying to look as if they really held our lives and not ...
— Ship-Bored • Julian Street
... water, the caress of the tiny green blades fresh against his cheek and hand, the swell of earth that supported his broad, powerful limbs. This sensuous acceptance of the physical joy of life pleased Laura, born a Selincourt, bred in France, and temperamentally out of touch with middle-class England. ...
— Nightfall • Anthony Pryde
... universally a rather heavy version of the French art, with perhaps a compote with the veal to give local colour. In the small hotels in little provincial towns the meals are served at the times that the middle-class German of the north usually eats them, and are an inferior copy of what he gets in his own home. As a warning I give what any enterprising traveller looking for the food of the country from the kitchen of a ...
— The Gourmet's Guide to Europe • Algernon Bastard
... house was supported by pillars; its walls were ornately stuccoed; the floor was covered with imitation oriental rugs. It was the rented luxury with which the better middle-class loves to ...
— The Indian Lily and Other Stories • Hermann Sudermann
... job of our Government in this new era is to empower the American people to succeed in the global economy. America has always been a land of opportunity, a land where, if you work hard, you can get ahead. We've become a great middle-class country; middle-class values sustain us. We must expand that middle class and shrink the underclass even as we do everything we can to support the millions of Americans who are already successful in the ...
— Complete State of the Union Addresses from 1790 to the Present • Various
... to have inherited the strongest ideas. in the phrase of the place, about keeping themselves to themselves. A strain of this kind is sometimes constant, even so far from the fountainhead, with its pleasing proof that such views were once the most general and the most sacred defence of middle-class firesides, and that Thackeray had, after all, a good deal to excuse him. Crossing the Atlantic they doubtless suffered some dilution; but all that was possible to conserve them under very adverse conditions ...
— The Imperialist • (a.k.a. Mrs. Everard Cotes) Sara Jeannette Duncan
... Villa Joos, and am beginning to enjoy a study of middle-class provincial life. The ladies do all the house-work. We have breakfast (a bite) in the kitchen at 8.30 a.m., then I go to make soup, and when I come back after lunch for a rest, "the family" are dressed ...
— My War Experiences in Two Continents • Sarah Macnaughtan
... different really. Then there's the middle-class like Mr. Thurston and Miss Avies who pretend to believe all that Mr. Warlock says, but of course, they don't believe a word of it, and they hope that this will prove his ruin. They know there won't be any Second Coming on New Year's Eve, and then they think he will be finished and ...
— The Captives • Hugh Walpole
... every middle-class French home, in those days, was to send a son to the army—have him study to become an officer. Mamma Joffre had not forgotten the Caesar in her oldest son's name; and in a family conclave it was decided that he should be sent to Paris, ...
— Boys' Book of Famous Soldiers • J. Walker McSpadden
... the world.' No good, Mr. McCunn. All back numbers. Poetry's not a thing of pretty round phrases or noisy invocations. It's life itself, with the tang of the raw world in it—not a sweetmeat for middle-class women ...
— Huntingtower • John Buchan
... great army of what may be termed 'middle-class books.' They are bound usually in half-bindings, when they are not in the publisher's cloth, and are good, clean, sound, copies of such works as county histories, antiquarian books, sets of the learned societies' publications and of 'standard authors.' They are such stable and solid books as ...
— The Book-Hunter at Home • P. B. M. Allan
... Frederick-Charles, Prince French people self-centred attitude of conventions in dress of girls interest of women in their children lack of regard for, on part of Northern races defence of fine qualities of difficulties of interpreting conversation, cramped lives of middle-class women religious question among Freycinet, M. de appointed Minister of Public Works ability displayed by, as a Republican statesman excellent qualities of succeeds M. Waddington as premier official changes made by Freycinet, Madame de author's ...
— My First Years As A Frenchwoman, 1876-1879 • Mary King Waddington
... made a fad or a problem of. Then it got smothered pretty quick. And a fad or a problem always breeds a host of parasites or hangers-on. Why, as soon as I saw the advanced idealist fools—they're generally the middle-class, shabby-genteel families that catch Spiritualism and Theosophy and those sort of complaints, at the end of the epidemic—that catch on at the tail-end of things and think they've caught something brand, shining, new;—as soon ...
— Over the Sliprails • Henry Lawson
... manner. My zeal in this latter respect soon gave rise to great unpleasantness. I became hard and insulting, harangued them about the French Revolution, and begged them with fatherly admonitions 'for the love of heaven' to be content with well-educated middle-class men, and give up those impertinent suitors who could only harm their reputation. The indignation provoked by my friendly advice I often had to ward off with the harshest retorts. I never apologised, but tried by dint of real or feigned jealousy to get our friendship back on the old footing. In ...
— My Life, Volume I • Richard Wagner
... or poem. But these softer moods were rare; in Wilhelmine's life there was little to call forth a gentle feeling. She lived alone with her mother in the small dark house, her brother Friedrich was away at the wars, her elder sister had married a middle-class personage of the name of Sittmann, a struggling Berlin merchant; and thus Wilhelmine led a dull life enough, for she despised the homely Guestrow citizens, who in return disliked and feared her ...
— A German Pompadour - Being the Extraordinary History of Wilhelmine van Graevenitz, - Landhofmeisterin of Wirtemberg • Marie Hay
... there is a strong element of class antagonism. The Dunces were middle-class and Whiggish, their spirit capitalist. Pope, though middle-class by birth, was aristocratic in his sympathies, Tory in a loose sense, and firmly anti-Walpole. Perhaps verse satire is essentially aristocratic. Perhaps ...
— Two Poems Against Pope - One Epistle to Mr. A. Pope and the Blatant Beast • Leonard Welsted
... continued, "the great Knockespotch, who delivered us from the dreary tyranny of the realistic novel. My life, Knockespotch said, is not so long that I can afford to spend precious hours writing or reading descriptions of middle-class interiors. He said again, 'I am tired of seeing the human mind bogged in a social plenum; I prefer to paint it in a ...
— Crome Yellow • Aldous Huxley
... like many middle-class people, had taken a compliment almost as a personal offence; and regarded the utterer, however gracious or sincere, with suspicion. Neither had the squire himself erred on the side ...
— Peter's Mother • Mrs. Henry De La Pasture
... as the middle-class parents of to-day. They discounted the future, and however hard up they were, they resolved to make sacrifices for his education. And as the schools of Thagaste were inadequate, it was decided to send this very promising boy ...
— Saint Augustin • Louis Bertrand
... great contemporary Oliver Cromwell (born 1599), one year the junior of the immortal Milton (born 1608), and some fifteen years older than George Fox (born 1624). Of his earlier years we know nothing; but, to judge from many passages in his writings, he appears to have received a good middle-class education, and to have been brought up a dutiful follower of the Church as by law established. When arrived at man's estate, he settled as a small trader in London, of which City he probably became a freeman; for in a pamphlet addressed to the City of London,[41:2] he claims ...
— The Digger Movement in the Days of the Commonwealth • Lewis H. Berens
... in a little city of the south of Italy, told Paola Lombroso that young middle-class girls there are not allowed to go out except to Mass, and cannot even show themselves at the window except under their mother's eye; yet they do not think it necessary to have a cabin when sea-bathing, and even dispense with a bathing costume ...
— Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 1 (of 6) • Havelock Ellis
... bare majority sufficed for that purpose (instead of three-fourths), they could not to-day command a working majority for any practical measure of Revision. It is easy to club their votes and vaguely declare some change necessary—but what change? A Bourbon Restoration? An Orleans Middle-Class Royalty? A Napoleonic Empire? For no one of these can a majority even of this Reaectionist Assembly be obtained. What, then, is ...
— Glances at Europe - In a Series of Letters from Great Britain, France, Italy, - Switzerland, &c. During the Summer of 1851. • Horace Greeley
... words, be something of a "substantial middle class," dependent on the wealthy and on their expenditure of wealth, but presumably imbued with the Victorian middle-class illusion that they are of some account in their own right. Under the due legal forms and sanctions this, somewhat voluminous, middle-class population would engage in the traffic which is their perquisite, and would continue to believe, ...
— An Inquiry Into The Nature Of Peace And The Terms Of Its Perpetuation • Thorstein Veblen
... desire to convey the idea that our boy was a wicked boy. He was not. He was just the average type of what we call the "upper middle-class" boy. He was merely tuned to the low moral tone of the city. Vice to him was not a monster of hideous mien. He had seen it from childhood.... I knew that a greater part of his ideas on patriotism, ...
— The Social Emergency - Studies in Sex Hygiene and Morals • Various
... time. They seem, both of them, as if petrified. Everyone else has a subject for conversation—ladies, for instance, people in society, the upper ten—all these sets have some topic or other. It is the thing, but somehow people of the middle-class, like you and I, seem constrained and taciturn. How does that come about, batuchka? Have we no social interests? Or is it, rather, owing to our being too straightforward to mislead one another? I don't know. What is your opinion, pray? ...
— The Most Interesting Stories of All Nations • Julian Hawthorne
... illustration of the way in which the locality that has given birth to a man influences him throughout his life. The fact of Borrow’s having been born in East Anglia was the result of accident. His father, a Cornishman of a good middle-class family, had been obliged, owing to a youthful escapade, to leave his native place and enlist as a common soldier. Afterwards he became a recruiting officer, and moved about from one part of Great Britain and Ireland to another. It so chanced that while staying at East Dereham, ...
— Old Familiar Faces • Theodore Watts-Dunton
... fenced about, and our visitors had to pay for admission at a little kiosk by the gate. At the side of the road stood a travel-stained middle-class automobile, with a miscellany of dusty luggage, rugs and luncheon things therein—a family automobile with father no doubt at the wheel. Sir Richmond left his own trim ...
— The Secret Places of the Heart • H. G. Wells
... not the honour to be a prince, have no reason to despise the mercanti di campagna. Quite the contrary. I have solid ones for esteeming them highly. I have found them full of intelligence, kindness, and cordiality: middle-class men in the best sense of the term. My sole regret is that their numbers are so few, and that their scope of action is ...
— The Roman Question • Edmond About
... also another Home in this neighbourhood, run on similar lines, for the treatment of middle-class and poor people. ...
— Regeneration • H. Rider Haggard
... levelling up and a levelling down in the matter of education, for it is doubtful whether tradesmen and others called middle-class people are so well educated—I mean so thoroughly educated, for they know more things but fewer things well—as men were a generation ago, if we consider education on the abstract and ...
— Fragments of Two Centuries - Glimpses of Country Life when George III. was King • Alfred Kingston
... are directing their attention. On that river many battles must be fought and heavy risks incurred before any impression can be made on the enemy, all of which could be avoided by using the Tennessee river. This river is navigable for middle-class boats to the foot of the Muscle Shoals, in Alabama, and is open to navigation all the year, while the distance is but two hundred and fifty miles, by the river, from Paducah, on the Ohio. The Tennessee offers many advantages over the Mississippi. We should ...
— A Military Genius - Life of Anna Ella Carroll of Maryland • Sarah Ellen Blackwell
... Marshall, 'he is too flowery for me, and he does not belong to the people. He is middle-class to ...
— Clara Hopgood • Mark Rutherford
... the frontier the douaniers returned to their fishing opposite the little cabaret where we had some needed refreshment. It is curious what satisfaction middle-class officialdom in Continental Europe gets out of fishing. It is their one passion, apparently, if their work lies near a well-stocked stream. The chef de bureau goes fishing, the commissionnaire goes fishing, and ...
— The Automobilist Abroad • M. F. (Milburg Francisco) Mansfield
... of the shortage of officers for the army. As the army itself is steadily increasing every day, it should have been easy in each regiment for him, gradually and quite quietly, to increase the number of officers drawn from the middle-class; indeed, the change would have practically effected itself, for the Minister of War had a hundred-and-one means of bringing it about. But this rescript has put a check on what might otherwise have been a natural process of change, ...
— The Schemes of the Kaiser • Juliette Adam
... 'Christmas Carol,' and the political aim that of sentimental socialism. Thus, though all three candidates promised to support Mr. Gladstone's Government, one of Fitzjames's rivals represented the stolid middle-class prejudices, and a second the unctuous philanthropic enthusiasm, which he had denounced with his whole force in 'Liberty, Equality, Fraternity.' No combination could have been contrived which would have set before him more clearly ...
— The Life of Sir James Fitzjames Stephen, Bart., K.C.S.I. - A Judge of the High Court of Justice • Sir Leslie Stephen
... pet for a little girl. The rosy hearthstone and sheltered rug were too circumspect for him. Surrounded by the comforts of middle-class respectability, and profoundly oppressed, even in his youth, by the Puritan ideals of the household, he sometimes experienced a sense of suffocation. He wanted free air and he wanted free life; he wanted ...
— Penrod and Sam • Booth Tarkington
... he grew up, was one of those cheerless, middle-class homes, across which never passes a breath of the great gladness, the ideal beauty of life; where thought never swings itself above the material interests of the day gone, the day to come, and existence grows as timid and trivial as the petty griefs and pleasures that intersperse ...
— Maurice Guest • Henry Handel Richardson
... the fact that the Priory had stood on that site. This spot is still pointed out not far from Kilburn Station, close by the place where Priory Road goes over the railway. It is a most uninteresting spot at present, with dull respectable middle-class shops ...
— Hampstead and Marylebone - The Fascination of London • Geraldine Edith Mitton
... everywhere, the German sailor is a frank and hearty type of his race, and welcome wherever he goes. The German naval officer is usually of middle-class extraction, while a slightly larger proportion of the officers of the army is taken from the noblesse. He is a fine, frank, and manly fellow as a rule, and, like the Emperor, perfectly willing to admit that his navy is closely modelled on that of Great Britain. Moreover, in addition to a thorough ...
— William of Germany • Stanley Shaw
... grand Mahogany Bedstead, 9-1/2' x 8', with posts and testers complete, meant for Rajas and Zemindars. Can also accommodate 4 middle-class people comfortably. Going for Rs. 500."—Advt. in ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 156, June 18, 1919 • Various
... pioneer squatter, the Oxford scholar disguised as a 'rouseabout,' and the digger and bushranger of a past generation; who will sacrifice something of dramatic effect in the endeavour to produce a faithful and finished picture of colonial middle-class society. As qualifications for such work, Clarke had exceptional courage, straightness of eye, and a decided taste for exposing shams, superadded to a forcible ...
— Australian Writers • Desmond Byrne
... painters grouped in the background of the Holy Family. The glance of her blue eyes seemed to bring a beam from the sky on those she favored with a look. Her dress, quite simple, with no exaggeration of fashion, had a delightful middle-class modesty. Picture to yourself an old Satan as the father of an angel, and purified in her divine presence, and you will have an idea of Peyrade and his daughter. If anybody had soiled this jewel, her father would have invented, ...
— Scenes from a Courtesan's Life • Honore de Balzac
... money for their necessities or desires. If they had four servants, they needed six; if they had one motor, they must have two; and the new idea of country houses had simply doubled or trebled domestic budgets. It wasn't merely in the homes of ambitious middle-class folk that the cry went up,—"We must have more!" Isabelle herself had begun to feel that the Colonel might very well have given her a package of stocks and bonds at her wedding. Even with her skilful management, and John's excellent salary, there was so much they could not do ...
— Together • Robert Herrick (1868-1938)
... metropolitan areas, is probably going to cut down on the power of rural areas and rural viewpoints—though just how much and in what way no one is yet sure. Some prophets claim that these influences are going to erode rural influence utterly; others that they will merely shape an alliance between middle-class suburbs and rural areas against the beleaguered central cities with their slums and other huge ...
— The Nation's River - The Department of the Interior Official Report on the Potomac • United States Department of the Interior
... dislike. To give but one instance more, Matthew Arnold, trying to carry into England constructive educational schemes which he could see spread like a clear railway map all over the Continent, was much badgered about what he really thought was wrong with English middle-class education. Despairing of explaining to the English middle class the idea of high and central public instruction, as distinct from coarse and hole-and-corner private instruction, he invoked the aid of Dickens. He said the English middle-class school was the sort of school where ...
— The Victorian Age in Literature • G. K. Chesterton
... saying in a joke to a young, well-educated girl of a wealthy, middle-class family, who had the figure and bearing of a queen, shortly before her marriage, not to forget an ermine cloak ...
— The Works of Guy de Maupassant, Volume III (of 8) • Guy de Maupassant
... middle of the last century the clouds began to lift. For a while the good Lord Shaftesbury seemed to be crying in the wilderness of middle-class plutocracy, but it was not long before the crying of the children in their factories stirred the national conscience. The health of nations was allowed to be considered as well as their wealth. Social and political science rose up in protest against both the economists ...
— The Rural Life Problem of the United States - Notes of an Irish Observer • Horace Curzon Plunkett
... when they attempt educational institutions in connection with their factories, are prone to follow conventional lines, and to exhibit the weakness of imitation. We find, indeed, that the middle-class educator constantly makes the mistakes of the middle-class moralist when he attempts to aid working people. The latter has constantly and traditionally urged upon the workingman the specialized virtues ...
— Democracy and Social Ethics • Jane Addams
... lying at the foot of the "House of the Flutes," had little of this survival of former custom about it; it was rapidly developing into that temple of British middle-class mediocrity, a modern watering-place. It had, in the months of June, July, and August, nigger minstrels, a cafe chantant, and a promenade, with six bathing-machines and two donkeys; two new hotels had sprung up within ...
— The Wooden Horse • Hugh Walpole
... income could not but remember that a large proportion of present-day duchesses hail from across the water, but it was a very different matter when the young woman suddenly assumed the personality of the niece of a middle-class spinster resident at the Manor gates. To Mrs Greville, Miss Briskett stood as a type of all that was narrow, conventional, and depressing. As much as she could trouble herself to dislike any woman outside her own world, she disliked the rigid, strait-laced spinster, and was ...
— Flaming June • Mrs. George de Horne Vaizey
... element usually invoked as an explanation exerted in reality but a very slight influence. It prepared the way for the Revolution, but maintained it only at the outset, while it was still exclusively middle-class. Its action was manifested by many measures of the time, such as the proposals to reform the taxes, the suppression of the privileges of a useless ...
— The Psychology of Revolution • Gustave le Bon
... blazed cheerfully, the people quaffed their ale and sang, "Yule! Yule! a pack of new cards and a Christmas stool!"[664] At Clee, in Lincolnshire, "when Christmas Eve has come the Yule cake is duly cut and the Yule log lit, and I know of some even middle-class houses where the new log must always rest upon and be lighted by the old one, a small portion of which has been carefully stored away to preserve a continuity of light and heat."[665] At the village of Wootton Wawen ...
— Balder The Beautiful, Vol. I. • Sir James George Frazer
... were entirely unable to do justice to its possibilities. The romantic movement touched it into new life, and a school arose which contrived by dint of graceful melody and ingenious orchestral device to invest with real musical interest the simple stories in which the German middle-class delights. The most successful of these composers ...
— The Opera - A Sketch of the Development of Opera. With full Descriptions - of all Works in the Modern Repertory • R.A. Streatfeild
... those tea-party revolutionists who pandered to the respectability of a church-ridden community. "Wild Bill" had watched the discussions over "Section Six", the provision in the constitution of the party against sabotage and violence; the very same persons who had been enthusiastic for that bit of middle-class fakery were now trying to line up the local for the defence of the British sea-power! What the hell difference did it make to any working man whether or not the Kaiser got a railroad to Bagdad? Of course, if a man had been to school in Britain, and had a British ...
— Jimmie Higgins • Upton Sinclair
... unsteadied sensibilities and the too-ready acrimony could have foreshadowed the large blatant woman she was to become, a woman who alternated between a generous flow of emotion on the one hand and an unimaginative hardness on the other. Only Lin Darton could have given promise then of the middle-class, semi-prosperous business man who was to justify the Darton tradition. But from all that I could gather of those younger days, before Con's marriage to Selma Perkins, he was the cock of the walk, holding the reins over ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1921 and the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various
... against social and religious change was the more easily made because many of the bishops were now members of noble families, instead of springing, as had usually been the case in the better days of the mediaeval Church, from poor or middle-class parentage. In the reign of Richard II. a Courtenay, a kinsman of the Earl of Devonshire, had become first Bishop of London (see p. 263), and then Archbishop of Canterbury. He was succeeded in his archbishopric ...
— A Student's History of England, v. 1 (of 3) - From the earliest times to the Death of King Edward VII • Samuel Rawson Gardiner
... opinion as to the capability of the Filipinos to attain a high degree of learning and maintain it seems much divided, for many return to America and publicly express pessimistic views on this point. In daily conversation with young middle-class Filipinos one can readily see that the ambition of the majority is limited to the acquisition of sufficient English to qualify them for Government employment or commercial occupations. The industries of the Islands are relatively ...
— The Philippine Islands • John Foreman
... that? And those are the kind of people Switzerland was full of. Some were alone, and some were impersonally conducted in a very loose sort of way. Wherever you wanted to go they were sure to be ahead, and kicking up a middle-class dust that choked you. The loud sound of their incessant talk echoed from snow peak to snow peak. And their terrible clothes, chosen evidently "not to show the dirt" (but they did), came between your eyes and any beauty of scenery there might be, even if you cared to see ...
— The Smart Set - Correspondence & Conversations • Clyde Fitch
... couldn't overcome that argument, but in the long run, our cause will not be won permanently and definitely by the bread and butter and taxes argument, except as that sort of argument proves the justice of our cause and arouses love in the hearts of you middle-class people." ...
— In the Heart of a Fool • William Allen White
... saved any foreign observer a great deal of trouble in studying America. He was an almost perfect type of the petty small-town middle-class lawyer. He lived in Panama, Pennsylvania. He had never been "captain" of anything except the Crescent Volunteer Fire Company, but he owned the title because he collected rents, wrote insurance, and ...
— The Job - An American Novel • Sinclair Lewis
... in any human society the parents are the most important people. The division is not between education and the lack of it, or wealth and the lack of it, or breeding and the lack of it. It is not the aristocracy that matters supremely; nor the "great middle-class"; nor the masses; nor the teachers; nor the doctors; nor the servants of modern industrialism. The classification is a biological one—into parents and non-parents. The non-parents may be invaluable in their way, if only they beget ...
— Woman and Womanhood - A Search for Principles • C. W. Saleeby
... and a pedigreed gentleman. We habitually spoke of the Montgomerys as of the wealthy lower orders, people of yesterday, and so forth; and because we took especial care to let nobody hear us, the jealousy of our inferiors manifested itself in that badinage so dear to the middle-class mind. 'Inferiors,' I say advisedly, for there was an indescribable something about us two when we got together, a something too subtle for expression in the vulgar tongue, which made us feel the station aristocracy ...
— Such is Life • Joseph Furphy
... minutes to five he left Mrs. Truslove and walked back to the Castle. He was truly in love with Helena. She was intelligent and appreciative. She was of his own class, with his own practical outlook on life, born of having belonged to a middle-class family of moderate means like himself. She was the daughter of a country architect. He could nowhere have found a more suitable wife. He was relieved about the matter of the reason why she received an allowance from Lord Loudwater; but he was not relieved about the matter of its being ...
— The Loudwater Mystery • Edgar Jepson
... The group of middle-class girls still sat on by the fire, but Hester Thornton now, not Annie, was the center of attraction. It was the first time in all her young life that Hester had found herself in the enviable position of a favorite; and without at all knowing what mischief she ...
— A World of Girls - The Story of a School • L. T. Meade
... women who have character and intelligence, and unselfish desire to work for others, have an average "expectation of life" less by twenty years than that of the class who know the comfortable ease of middle-class life. ...
— Prisoners of Poverty Abroad • Helen Campbell
... father-in-law, the Emperor of Austria. Neither this monarch nor the King of Prussia had his household with him; nor did Alexander at Tilsit or Erfurt. There, as at Dresden, they ate at Napoleon's table. These courts, the Emperor used to say, were mean and middle-class; it was he who arranged the etiquette and set the tone. He invited Francis to visit him and dazzled him with his splendor. Napoleon's luxury and magnificence must have made him seem like an Asiatic satrap. There, as at Tilsit, he covered with diamonds every one who came ...
— The Happy Days of the Empress Marie Louise • Imbert De Saint-Amand
... physical perturbations into a girl's life; and if she marries under the ordinary conditions of lower middle-class life, she must moreover begin to study totally new interests and initiate herself in the intricacies of business. With marriage, therefore, she enters upon a phase of her existence when she is necessarily on the watch before she can act. ...
— Eve and David • Honore de Balzac
... Nipe's hideaway. He wondered if it were furnished in the fashion that a Nipe's living quarters would be furnished on whatever planet the multilegged horror had come from. Probably it had the same similarity as Robinson Crusoe's island home had to a middle-class nineteenth-century English home. ...
— Anything You Can Do ... • Gordon Randall Garrett
... very eventful lives, and they had, for the most part, dropped into their present mode of existence quite naturally. With little romance to look back upon, save such as finds a place in even the homeliest life, with an imperfect middle-class education that had failed to elevate the mind, or give it wide conceptions of life, and religion, and duty, a certain satisfaction at having done with secular life and its cares, and at having their future here and hereafter comfortably provided for, was perhaps the ...
— My Little Lady • Eleanor Frances Poynter
... one of the many middle-class individuals whom he knew, who had money, would get into trouble, he would shake his head. It didn't do to talk about those things. If it came up for discussion among such friends as with him passed for close, he would deprecate the ...
— Sister Carrie • Theodore Dreiser
... strains of the Danish national anthem, and the japes of the jester with his cap and bells? What happy times for butchers and bakers and candlestick-makers when, instead of working, they could go in processions, bearing aloft the insignia of their guilds, and when middle-class girls, ignorant of the New Womanhood, could loll on triumphal cars with roses in their hair! Do you remember how the topmost divinity smiled to me from her perilous perch, too high to rouse your jealousy, ...
— Without Prejudice • Israel Zangwill
... Mr. H. C. Bailey, who is best known by his spirited historical romances, has deserted the past for the present. He tells a story of modern London. The scenes are laid in poor middle-class life, in the worlds of journalism and theoretical revolutionaries and business. His hero is one of the most ordinary of men, fighting his way up from the borders of poverty to respectable suburban comfort. With him is contrasted a much more brilliant ...
— Werwolves • Elliott O'Donnell
... impulse passed away. He thought of her severity, her religion, her middle-class canons and judgments, which perhaps were all the stricter because of Daddy's laxities. What common ground between her and his passion, between her and Elise? No! if he must speak—if, in the end, he proved too weak to forbear wholly from speech—let it be to ears more practised, ...
— The History of David Grieve • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... For what does the middle-class school put in the place of all these things which are left out? It substitutes what is usually comprised under the compendious title of the "classics"—that is to say, the languages, the literature, and ...
— Science & Education • Thomas H. Huxley |
