"Victorian" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... cars which might have been duplicates of Henry's first model—with trailers containing the overflow of children—together with the larger cars of the more prosperous or more extravagant, as happened. Top buggies were in evidence, relics of the Victorian period, shipped out from Iowa and Nebraska—serviceable vehicles that had done duty when their owners were "keeping company." Lumber wagons were plentiful, with straw and quilts in the bottom ...
— The Dude Wrangler • Caroline Lockhart
... who think a girl needs to know nothing very practical, and has no need to go in for a profession. Our women's colleges have more students than ever and the war has done great things in breaking down these old conventional ideas. The war, in fact, has shaken the very foundations of the old Victorian beliefs in the limited sphere of women to atoms. Our sphere is now very much more what every human being's sphere is and ought to be—the place and work in which our capacity, ability or genius finds its fullest vent—and there is no need to worry about ...
— Women and War Work • Helen Fraser
... conversation grated upon Gay not a little. There was something splendidly barbaric about the girl, and yet the mixture of her childishness and her cynicism affected him unpleasantly rather than otherwise. His ideal woman—the woman of the early Victorian period—was submissive and clinging. He was perfectly assured that she would have borne her wrongs, and even her mother's wrongs, with humility. Meekness had always seemed to him the becoming mental and facial expression for the sex; and that a woman should resent appeared almost ...
— The Miller Of Old Church • Ellen Glasgow
... welcomed the English stories of a decade ago that began to give the complexities of life instead of the conventions of a plot. But this complete liquidation rather appals us. The novels I have mentioned so far in this article have all together not enough plot to set up one lively Victorian novel. Benet, Dos Passos, Fitzgerald—the flood-gates of each mind have been opened, and all that the years had dammed up bursts forth in a deluge of waters, carrying flotsam and jetsam and good ...
— Definitions • Henry Seidel Canby
... necessarily a "degenerate," and who claim boldly that they can trace a distinctly evil and mischievous strain in that unfortunate miscellany which constitutes "the criminal class." They invoke the name of "science" with just as much confidence and just as much claim as the early Victorian phrenologists. They speak and write with ineffable profundity about the "criminal" ear, the "criminal" thumb, the "criminal" glance. They gain access to gaols and pester unfortunate prisoners with callipers and cameras, and quite unforgivable prying into personal and private matters, and they ...
— Mankind in the Making • H. G. Wells
... he would encounter horse-hair chairs, frayed carpet, and more early Victorian prints; in the back sitting-room more frayed carpet, more prints, and ...
— The Stowmarket Mystery - Or, A Legacy of Hate • Louis Tracy
... an anthologist, and in the choice of extracts I have rarely indulged my personal likings when they conflicted with time-honored preferences; yet this anthology,—the first published in a projected series of four or five volumes comprising the English poets from Elizabethan to Victorian times,—has certain minor features that may be deemed objectionably novel. Much the greater portion of the volume has of course, as usual, been given to those poems (by Pope, Thomson, Collins, Gray, Goldsmith, Crabbe, Cowper, and Burns) which have been loved or admired from ...
— English Poets of the Eighteenth Century • Selected and Edited with an Introduction by Ernest Bernbaum
... were in the same vein. Regarding the one to England which meant war, he asked of Secretary Seward if its language would be comprehended by our minister at the Victorian court, and added dryly: "Will James, the coachman at the door—will he understand it?" Receiving the answer, he nodded grimly and said: "Then it goes!" It went, and there was no war with ...
— The Lincoln Story Book • Henry L. Williams
... till towns were largely rebuilt on a more commodious scale in the next great building era, which began in 1666 in London and in the early years of the eighteenth century elsewhere. No advance was made in sanitation till the Victorian Age, when town sanitation was completely revolutionised and, for the ...
— Life in a Medival City - Illustrated by York in the XVth Century • Edwin Benson
... of the Poems to the Prose, and of the Prose to the Poems—of which above he himself wrote—makes the collection and publication of the Prose a duty to all who regard WILLIAM WORDSWORTH as one of the supreme intellects of the century—as certainly the glory of the Georgian and Victorian age as ever SHAKESPEARE and RALEIGH were of the Elizabethan and Jacobean—will ...
— The Prose Works of William Wordsworth • William Wordsworth
... the door, in the place, the position, in which she had said good-bye to the Davencotts. Her flamboyant tulle skirt, contrasted with the tightly-fitting upper part of her dress, gave her, now, in the sombre crowded furnishings, the rich draped brocades, of the room, an aspect of mid-Victorian unreality. ...
— Cytherea • Joseph Hergesheimer
... Bye-hours, and since that time, Off the Skelligs in 1872, Fated to be Free in 1875, Sarah de Berenger in 1879, Don John in 1881, and Poems of the Old Days and the New, recently issued. Of the latter, the poet Stoddard says: "Beyond all the women of the Victorian era, she is the most of an Elizabethan.... She has tracked the ocean journeyings of Drake, Raleigh, and Frobisher, and others to whom the Spanish main was a second home, the El Dorado of which Columbus and his followers dreamed ...
— Lives of Girls Who Became Famous • Sarah Knowles Bolton
... stay here in your garden," he said musingly. "You think it's better to keep on walking these sunshiny gravel paths between your flower-beds, and growing to look like a pensive garden lady in a Victorian engraving." ...
— The Magnificent Ambersons • Booth Tarkington
... that an event happened which greatly agitated the social life of Adelaide. The wife of a Victorian country resident had arrived in Adelaide and had taken a house in the city. She was good-looking and charming. She appeared to be quite well off. Her house became a pleasant resort. She entertained well. She delighted in giving excellent supper parties. She was quite ...
— The Chronicles of a Gay Gordon • Jose Maria Gordon
... in 1609 by shipwrecked English colonists headed for Virginia. Tourism to the island to escape North American winters first developed in Victorian times. Tourism continues to be important to the island's economy, although international business has overtaken it in recent years. Bermuda has developed into a highly successful offshore financial center. Although a referendum on independence from the UK was soundly defeated ...
— The 2008 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency.
... precentor. The news went across the seas. Diggers from Australia and elsewhere poured in by the thousand. Before many months the province's population had doubled, and the prayerful and painful era of caution, the day of small things, was whisked away in a whirl of Victorian enterprise. For the next few years the history of Otago became a series of rushes. Economically, no doubt, "rush" is the proper word to apply to the old stampedes to colonial goldfields. But in New Zealand, at any ...
— The Long White Cloud • William Pember Reeves
... not without a sneer, "And what would you prefer? Would you go back to the elegant early Victorian female, with ringlets and smelling-bottle, doing a little in water colors, dabbling a little in Italian, playing a little on the harp, writing in vulgar albums and painting on senseless screens? Do you prefer that?" To which I answer, "Emphatically, yes." I solidly prefer it to the ...
— What's Wrong With The World • G.K. Chesterton
... great who had not the profoundest reverence for religion. But, however that may be, it is plain that we are justified in speaking of a poet's religion, and in discussing the religious conceptions which took shape in the soul of one of the two great poets of the Victorian era. ...
— Morality as a Religion - An exposition of some first principles • W. R. Washington Sullivan
... Typical of the Victorian age in which he lived, Tennyson is also representative of its highest thought and culture. This is seen not only in the thought of his verse, but in its splendid forms, and especially in the technical ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume XIII • John Lord
... acknowledged that Dickens is not a temporary phenomenon in Victorian letters, but a very solid major fact in the native literature, too large a creative force to be circumscribed by a generation. Looked back upon across the gap of time, he looms up all the more impressively ...
— Masters of the English Novel - A Study Of Principles And Personalities • Richard Burton
... illuminating), being printed without the usual spacing, produces an indigestible-looking page that might well alarm a reader out for enjoyment. The book, in its record of the progress of the three, Jamie and Tom and John, is really more a study of social conditions in mid-Victorian Manchester than a work of imagination. But there is clever character-drawing in it, especially in Jamie, who from a worldly point of view is the failure of the group, making no money, and drifting through journalism to emigration; ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 150, February 16, 1916 • Various
... "A little Victorian, perhaps," she admitted, smiling at this succinct repudiation. "Nevertheless, I'm inclined to think he was right. There is a sort of Pan-inspired terror in your ...
— The Nest Builder • Beatrice Forbes-Robertson Hale
... within which the Irish Parliament is to exert independent authority, the definition of the term "Irish concerns," the constitution of the Irish Parliament, the nature and appointment of the Irish executive (which, though it is no doubt generally assumed to be a Cabinet chosen in effect like the Victorian Ministry, by the local Parliament, might well, and indeed far better, be a President or Council elected, like the Governor of New York, by popular vote), the occasions on which the British Parliament should retain ...
— England's Case Against Home Rule • Albert Venn Dicey
... him! He was another person entirely. He said it was the maddest, wildest, most sickly sentimental, impractical thing he'd ever heard! He raved on and on, always coming back to the point of her clouded parentage. I told him he was perfectly mid-Victorian,—that any one living in the present century knows that there are no illegitimate children—just illegitimate fathers and mothers! But it never budged him. He was, for the first time, a most uncivil engineer. "Besides," I said, ...
— Jane Journeys On • Ruth Comfort Mitchell
... undivided possession of the large indifferent apartment in which the nervous and mental troubles of the outer world eddied for a time on their way to the distinguished specialist. A bowl of daffodils, a handsome bookcase containing bound Victorian magazines and antiquated medical works, some paintings of Scotch scenery, three big armchairs, a buhl clock, and a bronze Dancing Faun, by their want of any collective idea enhanced rather than mitigated the promiscuous disregard of the room. He drifted ...
— The Secret Places of the Heart • H. G. Wells
... Sunlight poured through gaping holes in the roof, and the coarse brown wrapping paper pasted on the walls was splattered and streaked by rain. The open door of Cordelia's bedroom revealed a wooden bed, a marble-topped bureau, and a washstand of the Victorian period. A rocker, two straight chairs, a small table, and a trunk completed the furnishings of the room and left but little space for its occupant to ...
— Slave Narratives: A Folk History of Slavery in the United States From Interviews with Former Slaves - Georgia Narratives, Part 4 • Works Projects Administration
... waver. You must remember his age, the immaculate, ruthless, mid-Victorian 'teens; and you must remember ...
— O Henry Memorial Award Prize Stories of 1919 • Various
... rare, Not oft is earned, in Fleet Street or Mayfair, In these hot days of hurry. Salons, Symposia, both have met their doom, And wit, in the Victorian drawing-room, Finds a fell foe ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 98, February 1, 1890 • Various
... England, however, we should not forget to mention what will appear to some the least desirable of them all. The fact that this particular feature is omitted by the most successful English poets of the Victorian School, as by other sentimentalists, would not excuse us in failing to give it at least a passing reference here; for Victorian, alas! does not by any means signify Alexandrian in regard to the periods of English poetry; and even if it be a sin to mention this aspect of a sunny August, we prefer ...
— Too Old for Dolls - A Novel • Anthony Mario Ludovici
... of John Tosswill's three daughters, was sitting at a big mid-Victorian writing-table, examining the house-books. She had just discovered two "mistakes" in the milkman's account, and she felt perhaps unreasonably sorry and annoyed. Betty had a generous, unsuspicious outlook ...
— What Timmy Did • Marie Adelaide Belloc Lowndes
... nonsense that Garvington was talking; about shooting a burglar," said the other woman vaguely. "Such nonsense, for I'm sure no burglar would enter a house filled with nothing but Early Victorian furniture." ...
— Red Money • Fergus Hume
... passing the long sweep of Chester Terrace. "I like this neighbourhood with its early Victorian atmosphere," she said. "It always makes me feel quiet and good. I don't ...
— All Roads Lead to Calvary • Jerome K. Jerome
... it, you dear old Early Victorian, and aren't ashamed to say so to those who really love and can understand them. And you do love and understand, ...
— The Red Planet • William J. Locke
... some other domestic, who remained (like all true Christian benefactors) anonymous. The harlequin, already clad in silver paper out of cigar boxes, was, with difficulty, prevented from smashing the old Victorian lustre chandeliers, that he might cover himself with resplendent crystals. In fact he would certainly have done so, had not Ruby unearthed some old pantomime paste jewels she had worn at a fancy dress party as the Queen of Diamonds. Indeed, her uncle, ...
— The Innocence of Father Brown • G. K. Chesterton
... thank the Orientalist, though the classical explorer has been by no means idle. It will be sufficient here to point out in general terms the import of the message of archaeological discovery in the Victorian Era in its bearings upon the great ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 6, Slice 3 - "Chitral" to "Cincinnati" • Various
... Diemen's Land. Mr. Lamb proposed resolutions charging Earl Grey with perfidy—Mr. King sought the same object in a milder form, and in November the whole house concurred in condemning transportation. The Victorian legislature, on the motion of Mr. Westgarth, adopted a similar protest, though in stronger terms. Supported by the law officers of the crown, the resolutions passed with perfect unanimity (Dec.), and they were promptly forwarded by Governor Latrobe, who expressed the warmest interest in their ...
— The History of Tasmania, Volume I (of 2) • John West
... with substance rather than with form. But, in estimating the work of a teacher who taught exclusively with the pen, it would be perverse to disregard entirely the qualities of the writing which so penetrated and coloured the intellectual life of the Victorian age. Some cursory estimate of Arnold's powers in prose and verse must therefore be attempted, before we pass on to consider the practical effect which those powers ...
— Matthew Arnold • G. W. E. Russell
... she reflected, far better, that she should go into the dull and dreary exile of an English village, with the unexciting companionship of Aunt Emily, an ascetic spinster of the mid-Victorian era, and make pretence of pique with Walter, than to reveal to him the shameful truth. He would at least in those circumstances retain of her a recollection fond and tender. He would not despise nor hate her, as he most certainly would do if he ...
— The House of Whispers • William Le Queux
... village. To Diana she talked of her predecessors—the Vavasours—whose feudal presence seemed to be still brooding over the village. With little chuckles of laughter, she gave instance after instance of the tyranny with which they had lorded it over the country-side in early Victorian days: how the "Madam Vavasour" of those days had pulled the feathers from the village-girls' hats, and turned a family who had offended her, with all their belongings, out into the village street. But when Diana rejoiced that such days were ...
— The Testing of Diana Mallory • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... and some female relative who, after having insisted upon the great novelist lending her Mrs. Behn, found the Novels and Plays too loose for her perusal, albeit in the heyday of the lady's youth they had been popular enough. As one might expect, Miss Julia Kavanagh, in the mid-Victorian era[17] (English Women of Letters 1863), is sad and sorry at having to mention Mrs. Behn— 'Even if her life remained pure,[18] it is amply evident her mind was "tainted to the very core. Grossness was congenial to her.... Mrs. Behn's indelicacy was useless and worse ...
— The Works of Aphra Behn, Vol. I (of 6) • Aphra Behn
... The average conversation of average men throughout the whole of modern civilization in every class or trade is such as Zola would never dream of printing. Nor is the habit of writing thus of these things a new habit. On the contrary, it is the Victorian prudery and silence which is new still, though it is already dying. The tradition of calling a spade a spade starts very early in our literature and comes down very late. But the truth is that the ordinary honest man, whatever vague account he may have given ...
— Heretics • Gilbert K. Chesterton
... So an English book is a book written by an unaffected Englishman. What difference can it make what the subject of the writing is? Mr. Henry James lately brought out a volume of essays on "French Poets and Novelists." Mr. E. C. Stedman recently published a series of monographs on "The Victorian Poets." Are these books French and English, or are they nondescript, or are they American? Not only are they American, but they are more essentially American than if they had been disquisitions upon ...
— Confessions and Criticisms • Julian Hawthorne
... will never have had anything so becoming in your life. Fortunately the General does not confine you to one shade of blue. And the muslins and blue ribbons will be wonderful filmy creations, as different from the Early Victorian stiffnesses as anything you can possibly imagine. How ...
— Betty Trevor • Mrs. G. de Horne Vaizey
... of chickens, may be cut with the fork. A bone is never taken in the fingers, the historic anecdote about Queen Victoria to the contrary notwithstanding. The table manners of the twentieth century are not Early Victorian. Olives and celery are correctly laid on the bread-and-butter plate. The former is never dipped in one's salt cellar; a small portion of salt is put on the edge of the plate; both are ...
— Mother's Remedies - Over One Thousand Tried and Tested Remedies from Mothers - of the United States and Canada • T. J. Ritter
... realized—for which the Moor enters the room. It is a frightful, blackfaced murderer—designed in the seventeenth century, and considered true to nature then, coming into the open daylight of the nineteenth, casting his Elizabethan energies into forms repulsive to the sentiments of our VICTORIAN time; and we should also feel, if the play were presented to us for the first time, that an Othello created by Shakspeare—if he had been left for these latter times—would not have murdered his wife with a pillow—if he had murdered her at all—and would not have brought forward ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 59, No. 367, May 1846 • Various
... of early Victorian fashion and massive folding shutters were provided to close the French windows. He never used them, as a matter of fact, but now he tested the fastenings which kept them in place against the inner wall and even moved them in order to learn ...
— The Golden Scorpion • Sax Rohmer
... nice little Y. M. C. A. boy—I bow to conventions, too. Lordy! the fact that I'm so old-fashioned as even to talk about 'conventions' in this age of Shaw and d'Annunzio shows that I'm still a small-town, district-school radical! I'm really as mid-Victorian as you are, in knowledge. Only I'm modern by instinct, and the combination will always keep me half-baked, I suppose. I don't know what I want from life, and if I did I wouldn't know how to get it. I'm a Middle Western farmer, and yet I regard ...
— The Job - An American Novel • Sinclair Lewis
... of experience, then, it follows that if we wish to have an interest in a given subject, we must consciously and purposefully develop it. There is wide choice open to us. We may develop interest in early Victorian literature, prize-fight promoting, social theory, lignitic rocks, history of Siam, the ...
— How to Use Your Mind • Harry D. Kitson
... She is one of the few ladies left who possess this Victorian, accomplishment. "And you advise my leaving my sister's child in his present precarious state of mind alone ...
— The Window-Gazer • Isabel Ecclestone Mackay
... reaching the house door until it had wandered in curves over the entire garden. That was the Georgian touch! The modern touch was shown in Councillor Cotterill's bay windows, bath-room and garden squirter. There was stabling, in which were kept a Victorian dogcart and a Georgian horse, used by the Councillor in his business. As sure as ever his wife or daughter wanted the dogcart, it was either out or just going out, or the Georgian horse was fatigued and needed repose. The man who groomed the Georgian also ploughed ...
— The Card, A Story Of Adventure In The Five Towns • Arnold Bennett
... pieces, like the pitchers mentioned above, are not as pleasing aesthetically as the earlier ones, and they are much more closely allied with the exuberance of the Victorian era than they are with the classical lines of the ...
— Presentation Pieces in the Museum of History and Technology • Margaret Brown Klapthor
... first time a shadow on his countenance. I wondered if for the moment his mind had wandered to the past, and to his mother's table, with Sunday waffles, omelet, broiled bacon. Yet—there had been no bits of gay brocade to light the mid-Victorian dullness of his mother's dining-room, no daffodils on a radiant morning, no white lilacs on a purple twilight, no slender goddess, ...
— The Gay Cockade • Temple Bailey
... dhota, which they use then after the manner of a sheet. The mosquito-nets cut off a good deal of air, and people are tempted to discard them unwisely when the nights are intensely hot. The framework from which the nets depend is a frail counterpart of the four-poster of the Victorian age. The net is usually tucked in under the mattress, to prevent any possibility of the mosquito entering. In places where mosquitoes abound they are troublesome by day as well as by night, and they are specially fond of attacking ...
— India and the Indians • Edward F. Elwin
... with the wickedest twinkle in them, and a strong cleft in a double chin. She is rather stout but has Paris clothes and perfect jewels. She is not a bit like English old ladies, sticking to their hideous early Victorian settings for their diamonds; hers are the very latest, and although she is seventy-eight, she crosses the ocean twice a year to have her frocks fitted, and ...
— Elizabeth Visits America • Elinor Glyn
... Early-Victorian Sparrow! A fox is more fun than a sheep! I shall show that my mind is not narrow And give him ...
— It Can Be Done - Poems of Inspiration • Joseph Morris
... that kittenish person seldom arouses in me much curiosity. I agree with George Moore that Thackeray, in the interests of mid-Victorian morality, suppressed many of her characteristics, telling us too little of her amatory temperament. Possibly, Mr. Moore may err, Becky may have had no "temperament," notwithstanding her ability to twist men around her expressive digits. That she was disagreeable ...
— Ivory Apes and Peacocks • James Huneker
... the Victorian era probably, and a man of course—"The only mechanical tool ever needed by a woman is a hair-pin"? He might have added that with a hair-pin and a visiting card, she is ready to meet ...
— Etiquette • Emily Post
... try in the first place to realize—for this is the essential matter as regards my present argument—the full extent of Victorian independence. ...
— England's Case Against Home Rule • Albert Venn Dicey
... contributions which graced the 'Keepsakes' of the thirties, and even—alas—in the various prefaces and commentaries which accompanied the publication of so many poems of Shelley, his wife succumbed to an increasing habit of almost Victorian reticence and dignity. And those later novels and tales, though they sold well in their days and were kindly reviewed, can hardly boast of any reputation now. Most of them are pervaded by a brooding spirit of melancholy of the 'moping' rather than the 'musical' sort, and consequently ...
— Proserpine and Midas • Mary Shelley
... a palatial structure, built on the sombre lines of the Early Victorian period. Miss Talbot's brief description of the measures taken to protect its occupants from interference was fully borne out by its aspect. There was no access to the basement; the main entrance was situated at the side; all the ground-floor and first-storey windows ...
— The Albert Gate Mystery - Being Further Adventures of Reginald Brett, Barrister Detective • Louis Tracy
... not justify the sweeping generalizations based upon it. Judging from the pre-Elizabethan literature, who would have expected the brilliancy of the Elizabethan period? Similarly in regard to the Victorian period of English literature. Because the Japanese have failed in the past to produce literature equal to the best of Western lands, we are not justified in asserting that she never will and that she is inherently deficient in literary ...
— Evolution Of The Japanese, Social And Psychic • Sidney L. Gulick
... restored," or "repaired." An intellectual-looking man, with a fine head, has Norman bumps and Gothic ears. A puppy with big feet is an early Perp., with Norman foundations, and so on. It gives a new interest to life and the creatures we meet. Emily is late Georgian, with Victorian elevations. ...
— Set in Silver • Charles Norris Williamson and Alice Muriel Williamson
... this she was inspiring. She was accustomed to give themes for fortnightly exercises, and at the first lecture of this new term she announced as a special subject: "An Essay on any one of the Great Writers of the Victorian Era", promising a volume of Browning's poems as ...
— The Youngest Girl in the Fifth - A School Story • Angela Brazil
... you must remember that Mr. Ledsam is my only alternative, and I am not at all sure that he likes me. I am not sufficiently Victorian ...
— The Evil Shepherd • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... poignant touch comes in—she never had a love affair of her own. I could not understand why. It isn't that she's unattractive, being quite pretty in that feminine clinging way which we generally connect with the Victorian era. ...
— Our Elizabeth - A Humour Novel • Florence A. Kilpatrick
... Yetta noticed for the first time a shawl-clad figure on the adjacent bench, and immediately a pair of keen eyes flashed from a face whose plump contentment was framed in a jet black wig of an early Victorian design. ...
— Elkan Lubliner, American • Montague Glass
... the Goths and Vandals of the nineteenth century. Many old churches, replete with a thousand memories of the past, were pulled down entirely, and modern structures of "Victorian Gothic" style erected in their place, which can have none of the precious associations which the old churches had. Much harm was done to the old features of many churches by so-called "restoration," carried out by men ignorant of architecture and ...
— English Villages • P. H. Ditchfield
... in human origins may refer to an old Victorian writer of English, who in the last and most restrained of his historical essays wrote of Frederick the Great, the founder of this unchanging Prussian policy. After describing how Frederick broke the guarantee he had signed on behalf of Maria Theresa he then describes how ...
— New York Times, Current History, Vol 1, Issue 1 - From the Beginning to March, 1915 With Index • Various
... emotional fact it was Edwin's house, because he alone was capable of possessing it by enjoying it. To Darius, to Bursley in general, it was just a nice house, of red brick with terra-cotta facings and red tiles, in the second-Victorian Style, the style that had broken away from Georgian austerity and first-Victorian stucco and smugness, and wandered off vaguely into nothing in particular. To the plebeian in Darius it was of course grandiose, and vast; to Edwin also, in a less degree. But to Edwin it was not a house, it was a work ...
— Clayhanger • Arnold Bennett
... forward to the termination of their visit. The life they had led for the past fortnight was not their way of life. They met each morning for breakfast at nine o'clock—Miss Heredith was a stickler for the mid-Victorian etiquette of everybody sitting down together at the breakfast table. After breakfast the men wandered off to their own devices for killing time: some to play a round of golf, others to go shooting or fishing, generally not reappearing until dinner-time. After ...
— The Hand in the Dark • Arthur J. Rees
... population during the long peace, interrupted only by the Crimean War and the Indian Mutiny, had multiplied beyond men's wildest dreams. Her manufacturers were amassing fortunes, her industry had no rival. The Victorian age was thought of as the beginning of a wonderful new era, in which, among the nations, England was first and the rest nowhere. The temporary effort of the French to create a modern navy disturbed the sense of security which existed and gave rise to the Volunteer movement, ...
— Britain at Bay • Spenser Wilkinson
... some of Punch's efforts outside the usual routine, and the result has been the continual popularisation of the paper. Volume after volume, too, in various forms, has been republished, culminating in the "Victorian Era," "Pictures from Punch," and "Sir John Tenniel's Cartoons;" and each one has but served to attract the favourable notice of the public to the ordinary issue. So Punch has developed his power and his resources. To him one might almost apply ...
— The History of "Punch" • M. H. Spielmann
... early Victorian revival of chivalry the Language of Flowers had some considerable vogue. The Romeo of the mutton-chop whiskers was expected to keep this delicate symbolism in view, and even to display his wit by some dainty conceits in it. An ...
— Certain Personal Matters • H. G. Wells
... in all that zeal as well as indiscretion, for Mr. Bronte had his good points as fathers go. Think what the fathers of the Victorian era could be, and what its evangelical parsons often were; and remember that Mr. Bronte was an evangelical parson, and the father of Emily and Charlotte, not of a brood of gentle, immaculate Jane Austens, and that he was confronted ...
— The Three Brontes • May Sinclair
... the eldest daughter did at school will be spoken of as "tapestry of the Victorian era," and be almost priceless. The blue-and- white mugs of the present-day roadside inn will be hunted up, all cracked and chipped, and sold for their weight in gold, and rich people will use them ...
— Three Men in a Boa • Jerome K. Jerome
... owner, whoever he might be, was a man of wealth and taste inherited from another age; he had found little of meretricious to-day in the dwelling, much that was solid and sedate and homely, and—Victorian.... He could have wished for more; a box of early Victorian ...
— The Black Bag • Louis Joseph Vance
... she exclaimed. "You think you know such a lot and are so advanced, yet you are as easily scared or fooled as any country maiden in Victorian times." ...
— Bandit Love • Juanita Savage
... curious side-light on the intelligence of men that they almost universally seem to think that women, by a special Providence, are exempt from these natural laws; and almost all women are still too Early Victorian to insist upon some change. Many of the old theatres in London and the provinces suffer from want of proper ventilation; and many of them are appallingly, incredibly dirty. In the provinces dressing-rooms ...
— Women Workers in Seven Professions • Edith J. Morley
... was very arduous and often discouraging. He came in the dawn of the Victorian age to attack a wall of customs and abuses which had arisen far back in the early Georgian era, with no hereditary connection or influence in the diocese to counteract the odium that he incurred as a new-comer by the institution of changes ...
— Before and after Waterloo - Letters from Edward Stanley, sometime Bishop of Norwich (1802;1814;1814) • Edward Stanley
... of her benefactions during her long and active life can only be briefly indicated; but the baroness must remain a striking figure in the social history of Victorian England, for the thoughtful and conscientious care with which she "held her wealth in trust" for innumerable good objects. It was her aim to benefit the working-classes in ways involving no loss of independence ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 4, Part 4 - "Bulgaria" to "Calgary" • Various
... history of the later Victorian era was more remarkable than the growth of popular interest in Art. Doubtless this was largely due to the spread of education, which has not only disseminated knowledge, but also improved public taste. Nevertheless much of the credit must be ascribed to the influence ...
— The Evolution of Modern Capitalism - A Study of Machine Production • John Atkinson Hobson
... picture of the social history of the West Riding during the greater part of a century. As we study their pages, we realise what impression events such as the introduction of the railroad, the Chartist Movement, the Repeal of the Corn Laws, mid-Victorian factory legislation, Trade- Unionism, the Co-operative movement and Temperance reform made upon the minds of nineteenth-century Yorkshiremen; in other words, these almanacs furnish us with just such a mirror of nineteenth-century ...
— Yorkshire Dialect Poems • F.W. Moorman
... a quick movement, and a confusion of brilliant fabrics poured out over his knees. "You lived, Sire, in a period essentially cylindrical—the Victorian. With a tendency to the hemisphere in hats. Circular curves always. Now—" He flicked out a little appliance the size and appearance of a keyless watch, whirled the knob, and behold—a little figure ...
— When the Sleeper Wakes • Herbert George Wells
... unprivileged and unsuspected hanger-on, lost their trail, returning to my own affairs. For some reason—I don't know just why—I never "took" that course in Nineteenth Century Poets, in the classroom at any rate. But just as Mr. Chesterton, in his glorious little book, "The Victorian Age in Literature," asserts that the most important event in English history was the event that never happened at all (you yourself may look up his explanation) so perhaps the college course that meant most to me was the one I never attended. What it meant to those sophomores of the class ...
— Plum Pudding - Of Divers Ingredients, Discreetly Blended & Seasoned • Christopher Morley
... Wurzel-Flummery, he hoped to have the grim satisfaction of witnessing, from the grave, an exhibition of human weakness. Of the two legatees—politicians on opposite sides of the House—Crawshaw, whose whiskers gave him the air of a successful grocer of the mid-Victorian period, found reasons sufficiently convincing to himself for accepting the testator's terms; while Richard Meriton, who had little besides his salary as an M.P., took the high line of proper pride and declared his determination to refuse. Mr. ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 152, April 18, 1917 • Various
... of "The Hollows" was opened by the butler, a gentle-faced old man, in appearance rather like a mid-Victorian lawyer. At the sight of the inspector, a troubled look came ...
— Malcolm Sage, Detective • Herbert George Jenkins
... Bartley she pretended to like it, and said it was a good thing to be reminded that there were things going on in the world. She loved life, and Bartley brought a great deal of it in to her when he came to the house. Aunt Eleanor was very worldly in a frank, Early-Victorian manner. She liked men of action, and disliked young men who were careful of themselves and who, as she put it, were always trimming their wick as if they were afraid of their oil's giving out. MacKeller, Bartley's first chief, was an ...
— Alexander's Bridge and The Barrel Organ • Willa Cather and Alfred Noyes
... though interesting to themselves, was not thrilling to an outsider. I saw the American's quick eye dart from one to the other, and hoped he was not classifying the company as typical English wits! The dinner itself was long, heavy, and unenterprising; a Victorian feast, even to the "specimen glass" decorations. One rose and one spray of maidenhair, in a tall thin glass, before each separate diner. Charmion and the Squire talked and laughed together, and seemed quite happy. She is a lovely ...
— The Lady of the Basement Flat • Mrs. George de Horne Vaizey
... other men and other manners. Probably he is the wittier of the two; yet this might be contradicted. Locker's humour has the reflective vein, with a suggestion of pathos, of the great writers who flourished in the early and middle Victorian era. We are perhaps a little out of tune now with the sentiment of the middle of the nineteenth century and perhaps, too, with Praed's "antithetical rhetoric"; but Locker's humour can never be quite out of fashion. ...
— London Lyrics • Frederick Locker
... introduce Blenheim oranges to the Etonian palate. He was an under-sized man, about five feet five inches high, with a pale face and hooked nose and always wore a woollen muffler, which we called "Jobey's comforter." To represent him as belonging to the Victorian age is an anachronism calculated to ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 150, January 26, 1916 • Various
... anti-clerical, who cannot even retell the story of Christ without branding himself a vulgarian. In the prim days when young d'Annunzio first flaunted his carnal delights and sorrows before a world not yet released from Victorian stuffiness, the word "vulgar" was a polite English epithet for "fleshly," an adjective much beloved by indignant gentlemen who were permitting their wrath to triumph over their desire to be respectable. It is a word which we apply ...
— The Child of Pleasure • Gabriele D'Annunzio
... herself, she will be remembered by a state of mind. Already "mid-Victorian" has little or nothing to do with Victoria, and is losing its suggestion, even, of a time-period. It is coming to stand for a mental and moral attitude—in fact, for priggishness and moral timidity. Queen Victoria was a great and good ...
— Penguin Persons & Peppermints • Walter Prichard Eaton
... Govinda was one of the first Sanskrit poems to be rendered into English—Sir William Jones publishing a mellifluous version in Asiatick Researches in 1792. Later in the nineteenth century it was translated into Victorian verse by Sir Edwin Arnold. The present translation from which all the extracts are taken is by George Keyt, the foremost modern artist of Ceylon. It is greatly to be hoped that the entire translation, hitherto available ...
— The Loves of Krishna in Indian Painting and Poetry • W. G. Archer
... bump in the small of his back cut short his flagrantly Victorian musings. Dyan's punt was the offender; and Dyan himself, clutching the pole that had betrayed him, was almost pitched into ...
— Far to Seek - A Romance of England and India • Maud Diver
... full-length portraits of an early Victorian date. The artist had spent a couple of months at Barracombe fifty years since, and had painted three generations of the Crewys family, who were then gathered together beneath its hospitable roof. His diligence had been more remarkable than his ability. At any other time John ...
— Peter's Mother • Mrs. Henry De La Pasture
... of Nicholas Danver's own choosing? He dismissed the idea. It savoured too much of early Victorian melodrama for the prosaic twentieth century. The support of some antediluvian servant or pet? Possibly. But then it would hardly be necessary to require verbal communication of such a condition; a brief written statement to the effect ...
— Antony Gray,—Gardener • Leslie Moore
... merely reflected light, but in his own native nobility. I think there are a few lovers of England and of books who will be glad not to forget his unobtrusive services to literature. If only John Loder had kept a journal it would be one of the minor treasures of the Victorian Age. He had a racy, original turn of speech, full of the Suffolk lingo that so delighted his friend FitzGerald; full, too, of the delicacies of rich thought and feeling. He used to lament in his later years that he had not kept a diary as a young man. ...
— Shandygaff • Christopher Morley
... to go upstairs. In the hall we stopped dead. Upon the floor was the wretched paper which my Victorian conscience and my twentieth-century caution had prevented me ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 158, April 21, 1920 • Various
... fashionable hats with heavy plumes. Wodger, of the "Purple Fawn," and Mr. Jaggers, the cobbler, who also sold old second-hand ordinary bicycles, were stretching a string of union-jacks and royal ensigns (which had originally celebrated the first Victorian ...
— The Invisible Man • H. G. Wells
... that pact they have not yet been able to include Germany or Russia or the United States, three Powers which are, potentially at any rate, among the greatest in the world. So, some fifty years ago, Bismarck, who won three wars in the mid-Victorian age, set himself to build up a pact of peace. But his Triple Alliance was not only used to restrain, but abused to repress, the excluded Powers; and that abuse of a pact of peace drove the excluded Powers, France and Russia, into each other's arms. There resulted the Balance of Power ...
— Essays in Liberalism - Being the Lectures and Papers Which Were Delivered at the - Liberal Summer School at Oxford, 1922 • Various
... awoke with a sensation of extreme lassitude, and on going out, instead of the delicious atmosphere of yesterday, I found intolerable suffocating heat, a BLAZING (not BRILLIANT) sun, and a sirocco like a Victorian hot wind. Neuralgia, inflamed eyes, and a sense of extreme prostration followed, and my acclimatized hosts were somewhat similarly affected. The sparkle, the crystalline atmosphere, and the glory of color of yesterday, had all vanished. We had borrowed a wagon, but Dr. H.'s strong but lazy horse ...
— A Lady's Life in the Rocky Mountains • Isabella L. Bird
... with those of Coleridge, Wordsworth, Shelley, Byron and Keats. And who will maintain, that in force of imagination, in truth of vision, in grasp of the ideal side of things, in beautiful expression of elusive thoughts, in lyric rapture, the Elizabethans are equal to the Georgian and Victorian poets? ...
— Platform Monologues • T. G. Tucker
... sympathetic friend, adoring midinette, and so on. But Mr. JULES DELACRE, who played his own part, Pierrot, with a fine sincerity and a sense of the great tradition in this genre, got his effect across to us with an admirable directness. Miss PHYLLIS PINSON looking charming in a mid-Victorian Latin-Quarterly sort of way (which is a very nice way), danced seriously, fantastically, delightfully, and with quite astonishing command of her technique—the sort of thing that nine infallible managers out of ten who know what the public wants would condemn out of hand as impossible. The ...
— Punch, 1917.07.04, Vol. 153, Issue No. 1 • Various
... sanity, moderation, and breadth of outlook, they would have diminished the difficulties that beset the task of convincing the community generally. Mary Wollstonecraft was, however, the inspired pioneer of a great movement which slowly gained force and volume.[55] During the long Victorian period the practical aims of this movement went chiefly into the direction of improving the education of girls so as to make it, so far as possible, like that of boys. In this matter an immense revolution was slowly accomplished, involving the entrance of women into various professions and employments ...
— The Task of Social Hygiene • Havelock Ellis
... authority. The evil of two co-equal Houses of distinct natures is obvious. Each House can stop all legislation, and yet some legislation may be necessary. At this moment we have the best instance of this which could be conceived. The Upper House of our Victorian Constitution, representing the rich wool-growers, has disagreed with the Lower Assembly, and most business is suspended. But for a most curious stratagem, the machine of Government would stand still. Most Constitutions have committed this blunder. The two most remarkable Republican institutions ...
— The English Constitution • Walter Bagehot
... than six hundred miles; and as everything that Victoria undertakes must always be on the grandest scale, so was this. One colonist gave 1000 pounds; 4000 pounds more was subscribed, and then the Government took the matter in hand to fit out the Victorian Exploring Expedition. Camels were specially imported from India, and everything was done to ensure success; when I say everything, I mean all but the principal thing—the leader was the wrong man. He knew nothing ...
— Australia Twice Traversed, The Romance of Exploration • Ernest Giles
... can't build too much on that. In mid-Victorian days they labelled all sorts of things as unspeakable that we should speak about quite tolerantly. I dare say this particular aunt had only married a Unitarian, or rode to hounds on both sides of her horse, or ...
— Reginald in Russia and Other Sketches • Saki (H.H. Munro)
... number three; and, following upon these, could Sheridan, and Hook, and Carlyle, and Sidney Smith (I pick up names almost at random) have had a really assured position and full plenary indulgence as commentators on the Court and aristocracy of the Regency, and of the early Victorian period which culminated in that middleman's millennium, the Great Exhibition, with its Crystal Palace so shoddily furnished to celebrate the expurgation of art from industry. If only that could have been allowed, think how England might have ...
— King John of Jingalo - The Story of a Monarch in Difficulties • Laurence Housman
... arrogant, unsympathetic, domineering. "Sumner is my idea of a bishop," said Lincoln tentatively. There are bishops and bishops, however, and if Henry Ward Beecher, whom Lincoln and hosts of other Americans admired, had only belonged to the Church of England, what an admirable Victorian bishop he might have made! Perhaps his best service to the cause of union was rendered by his speeches in England, where he fairly mobbed the mob and won them by his wit, courage, and by his appeal to the instinct of fair play. Beecher's oratory, in and out of the pulpit, was temperamental, ...
— The American Spirit in Literature, - A Chronicle of Great Interpreters, Volume 34 in The - Chronicles Of America Series • Bliss Perry
... the quaint ideas of our Victorian forbears, however, it is well to ask, 88 years later, whether some rather elaborate work reported recently on the synthesis of straight-line mechanisms is more to the point, when the principal objective appears to be the ...
— Kinematics of Mechanisms from the Time of Watt • Eugene S. Ferguson
... into something too delicious and absurd. She enjoyed, too, telling Mrs. Hilary the latest scandals; she was so shocked and disgusted; and it was fun dropping little accidental hints about Nan, and even about Gilbert. Anyhow, what a treasure of a relic of the Victorian age! And how comic in her jealousy, her ingenuous, futile boasting, her so readily exposed deceits! And how she hated Rosalind herself, the painted, corrupt woman ...
— Dangerous Ages • Rose Macaulay
... better place for the enjoying of a novel by Anthony Trollope than under a tree in Kensington Gardens of a summer day. Under a tree in the avenue that reaches down from the Round Pond to the Long Water. There, perhaps more than anywhere else, lingers the early Victorian atmosphere. As we sit beneath our tree, we see in the distance the dun, red-brick walls of Kensington Palace, where one night Princess Victoria was awakened to hear that she was Queen; there in quaint, hideously ugly Victorian rooms are to be seen Victorian dolls and other playthings; the whole ...
— The Three Clerks • Anthony Trollope
... value of his social teachings was concealed from most of us at that time by reaction against his religious mediaevalism, and indifference to his gospel of art. Books so eminently adapted for young ladies at mid-Victorian schools did not appeal to modernists educated ...
— The History of the Fabian Society • Edward R. Pease
... But in your Aunt perhaps, and Warlock. The only thing I'm sure of is that there's something there, but what it is of course I can't tell you, and I don't suppose I shall ever know. The story of Sir Galahad, Miss Cardinal—it seems mid-Victorian to us now—but it's a ...
— The Captives • Hugh Walpole
... over the changes for good or for evil which have taken place in this country of ours; to try to understand clearly why the reign of a great Queen should have left its mark upon our history in such a way that men speak of the Victorian Age as one of the greatest ages that ...
— Queen Victoria • E. Gordon Browne
... full of high chimneys, and the sky much blurred with smoke, but the grounds and gardens were large, and suited to a spacious sort of retirement. From the same pictures I gather that the house was very bare within and decidedly unpleasing, with no atmosphere except that of a denuded Victorian domesticity. ...
— Hugh - Memoirs of a Brother • Arthur Christopher Benson
... since Peter had developed measles. She was an unhappy little exile, and could only relieve her anguish of soul by daily letters to Cecily, which the faithful and obliging Judy Pineau brought up for her. These epistles were as gushingly underlined as if Sara had been a correspondent of early Victorian days. ...
— The Story Girl • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... run of luck on the Victorian goldfields; his sagacious moderation; long days of planning, of loving care in building; the great joy of his youth, the incomparable freedom of the seas; a perfect because a wandering home; his independence, his love—and his anxiety. He ...
— The Rescue • Joseph Conrad
... a certain fig-tree has crept across the face of the grey rock forming a ridge or barricade against which decayed vegetation accumulates, there the BAEA flourishes, displaying an indeterminate line of mauve flowers above oval, crimpled leaves. Mauve, green and grey—the mauve of the Victorian age, the green of the cowslip, the grey of ...
— The Confessions of a Beachcomber • E J Banfield
... public intent upon classifying everything by means of labels and of making everything so classified stick to its label like grim death. Yet the unclassified may flourish, and does, when its merit is beyond dispute. Mrs. Craddock appeared fully a decade before its time, when Victorian influences were still alive, and the modern idea for well to do women to have something to justify their existence was still in the nature of a novelty. Even in the fuller light of experience, Maugham could hardly have bettered his study of an impulsive and exigent ...
— When Winter Comes to Main Street • Grant Martin Overton
... box, but growing like a tree, putting forth ever new branches and new leaves. When this idea had firmly grasped the human mind, the modern age had come indeed, and progress was its distinctive category of understanding and its exhilarating phrasing of human hope. Then came the days of mid-Victorian optimism with songs like ...
— Christianity and Progress • Harry Emerson Fosdick
... the middle of the Victorian era as a reaction against romanticism. It was born of the scientific spirit, which rendered the public dissatisfied with fanciful pictures of past ages and with the impossibilities of wild romance. Realism, as the word indicates, ...
— Elementary Guide to Literary Criticism • F. V. N. Painter
... snobs any more than democracy'; but this 'Thackeray was too restrained and early Victorian to see.' There are at the present day a great number of people who will not see that Bolshevism is as snobbish as Suburbia, that the poor man in the Park Lodge is as much a snob as his master, who only knows the county folks. Snobbery is not the monopoly of any one set; even also ...
— Gilbert Keith Chesterton • Patrick Braybrooke
... rich unmarried woman, with a peculiarly matronly appearance, a good-natured love of giving advice, and with views that obviously dated—one did not know exactly from when. If she had some of the Victorian severities of the sixties, she had also many of the sentimental vagaries of the eighties. The serious business of her life was gossip. In her lighter moments she collected autographs. But her gossip differed from that of the nervous, impatient Mrs. Wyburn in that it was far more ...
— The Limit • Ada Leverson
... of studies, I shall make no attempt to estimate the later literature of the Victorian Age, nor will I at all refer to any living writer. Nor shall I deal with social and moral philosophy, poetry, art, or religion. I propose to look back, from our present point of view, on the literature, in the narrower sense of the term, produced ...
— Studies in Early Victorian Literature • Frederic Harrison
... dressed in black, with a widow's cap, and she greeted us very kindly and showed us all her treasured possessions. I was disappointed in the contents of the rooms, which were certainly mixed, some very beautiful things rubbing shoulders with modern specimens of clumsy early Victorian furniture. A room at the back was given up to the Delft china, but even this was spoilt by ordinary yellow arabesque wall-paper, on which were hung the rare plates and dishes, and by some gaudy window curtains, evidently ...
— South African Memories - Social, Warlike & Sporting From Diaries Written At The Time • Lady Sarah Wilson
... evenly, without freckles. Her chin was soft, but without a dimple, and her jaws had a clean, boyish leanness. Her smooth neck and delicious shoulders were curved, not fatly, but with youth and happiness. They were square, capable shoulders, with no mid-Victorian droop about them. Her waist was slender naturally, not from stays. Her short but not fat fingers were the ideal instruments for the piano. Slim were her crossed feet, and her unwrinkled pumps (foolish footgear for a snowy evening) ...
— The Trail of the Hawk - A Comedy of the Seriousness of Life • Sinclair Lewis
... critics of the mid-Victorian prophets of progress, Dr. John Grote, did very well in disentangling the ideal element which is inherent in every sound doctrine of progress as a guide to conduct. He took the theory of a continuous inevitable progress ...
— Progress and History • Various
... to be it. But what I cannot understand is how these brawny young persons can be the granddaughters and the great granddaughters of those fragile creatures, with wasp waists and tiny feet, who lived back in the Early Victorian period and suffered from megrims and vapors. I'll venture that none of this generation ever had a vapor in her life; and as for megrims, she wouldn't know one if she met it in the big road. She may be muscle-bound and throw a splint sometimes, or get the Charley horse; ...
— Cobb's Bill-of-Fare • Irvin Shrewsbury Cobb
... similar. Speaker Lenthall no doubt shouted "Order! Order!" as did his successor Speaker Peel, while Pym, Hampden, Cromwell, and Vane passionately inveighed against Prelacy and the "Man of Blood," as I had just heard the Radicals of the Victorian era overwhelm with diatribe the obstructors of the popular will. Then, during the subsoiling which the land, growing arid and worthless through mediaeval blight, underwent in 1832 and after, when the Reform ...
— The Last Leaf - Observations, during Seventy-Five Years, of Men and Events in America - and Europe • James Kendall Hosmer
... greater part was built of northern stone, with mullioned windows, twisted chimneys, peaked gables surmounted with stone balls, and a roof of flat slabs of the same yellow-brown stone that formed the walls. A section of black and white timbered Elizabethan work, a Queen Anne wing, and some early Victorian alterations made a strange conglomeration of styles of architecture; but the roses and ivy had climbed up and clothed ancient and modern alike, and Time had softened the jarring nineteenth-century additions, so that the whole now blended into a mellow, brownish mass, with large, bright windows ...
— A harum-scarum schoolgirl • Angela Brazil
... person, but given the right atmosphere he can be as lively as anybody. Questioned about the reopening of Ciro's, he betrayed a minute acquaintance with the details of its programme. I was beginning to wonder if he were related to that famous Early-Victorian family, the Caves of Harmony, when his knowledge broke down. On being asked by his old friend Mr. BUTCHER to define a cabaret-entertainment he was nonplussed, and could only refer him to Colonel ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Volume 152, March 21, 1917 • Various
... present purpose to speak of the poets of an earlier and ruder time. For the subject before us it is enough to set our age in comparison with the era that preceded it. We have but to contrast ourselves with our early Victorian grandfathers to realize the profound revolution that has taken place in public feeling. It is only with an effort that the practical common sense of the twentieth century can realize the excessive ...
— Literary Lapses • Stephen Leacock
... secession of the Southern Confederates, which ended in making "all America" the counterpoise to our older world—neither dare you neglect the Indian meeting whence England issued, clad in moral as in political glory, and gave the noblest sign of the Christian significancy of the Victorian Era; all holds together, men and facts succeed each other in quick alternation; the light that fades on one hand shines with dazzling glare on the other. Cavour dies. Greatest of all, and genuine creator, with his disappearance the equilibrium is endangered. ...
— The Arena - Volume 4, No. 21, August, 1891 • Various
... admitted, too, that King Arthur, of the "Idylls," is like an Albert in blank verse, an Albert cursed with a Guinevere for a wife, and a Lancelot for friend. The "Idylls," with all their beauties, are full of a Victorian respectability, and love of talking with Vivien about what is not so respectable. One wishes, at times, that the "Morte d'Arthur" had remained a lonely and flawless fragment, as noble as Homer, as polished as Sophocles. But then we must have missed, with ...
— Letters on Literature • Andrew Lang
... ignoring her and him, our humanitarianism and passion for liberty, quite safely, quite politely. Now that Abdul is deposed from 'his infernal throne,' it is taken as a matter of course that the King will visit his successor. Well, let His Majesty betake himself and his tact and a full cargo of Victorian Orders to Constantinople, by all means. But, on the way, nestling in the very heart of Europe, perfectly civilised and strifeless, jewelled all over with freedom, is another country which he has not visited since his accession—a ...
— Yet Again • Max Beerbohm
... goitres. It had one window, which looked riverwards, across whose panes, dust and cobweb smirched, a muslin curtain had been hung by a previous agent, who was reputed to have drunk himself to death. This was its only attempt at decoration, save for a faded photo of a girl attired in early Victorian dress, across the right-hand corner of which was scrawled, "Yours, with love, from Gertrude." She looked a good girl, and Granger felt sorry for her because, by the ordinary laws of nature, she had probably been dead for many years; and he also felt sorry for her because he ...
— Murder Point - A Tale of Keewatin • Coningsby Dawson
... morning from his elder brother George, who was an officer in a line regiment. It had been written in the trenches before Sebastopol, for these events took place in the mid-Victorian period towards the end of the Crimean War. Or rather the letter had been begun in the trenches and finished in the military hospital, whither George had been conveyed, suffering from "fever and severe chill," ...
— Smith and the Pharaohs, and Other Tales • Henry Rider Haggard
... "I wish you'd put your twentieth century mind on your mid-Victorian clothes," he said, "and live ...
— Contrary Mary • Temple Bailey
... housekeeper and she did not re-cover the furniture when it got dingy, or re-paper the walls, or mend the carpets and bedclothes, and she never thought of such a thing as making new clothes for the doll family, so that of course their early Victorian frocks and capes and bonnets grew in time to be too shabby for words. You see, when Queen Victoria was a little girl, dolls wore queer frocks and long pantalets and boy dolls wore funny frilled trousers and coats which it would almost make ...
— Racketty-Packetty House • Frances H. Burnett
... aisles were without ornament or architecture; there was no tower, but beside it stood a peculiar and unexplained erection, shaped like a pagoda, in three tiers of black and battered tar-boarding. It had a slight cant towards the church, and suggested nothing so much as a disreputable Victorian widow, in tippet, mantle and crinoline, seeking the support of a ...
— Joanna Godden • Sheila Kaye-Smith
... contrasted the jubilee then being celebrated all over the English-speaking world, with that of George the Third, which was "a jubilee of the great folks, a jubilee of corporations and of authorities, a jubilee of the upper classes." On the other hand, he continued, the Victorian Jubilee was one when "the population are better fed, better clothed, and better housed—and by a great deal—than they were fifty years ago, and the great mass of these happy and blessed changes is associated with the name and action ...
— The Grand Old Man • Richard B. Cook
... To compare the achievements of a statesman hard pressed by the problems of the Revolutionary Era with those of a peaceful age when the standard of legislative effort had been greatly raised is unfair; and the criticism of Pitt by a distinguished historian evinces partiality towards the Victorian statesman rather than an adequate appreciation of the difficulties besetting a Minister of George III in those times of turmoil.[790] It is true that Pitt did not inaugurate Factory legislation; that was the work of the Addington Cabinet in 1802; he did not ...
— William Pitt and the Great War • John Holland Rose
... butler, discreet, precise, incapable of error. Tomlinson had recovered his breath and his dignity. He was in his own domain. The very sight of the Mid-Victorian furniture gave him confidence. His skilled glance traveled to the decanter and the empty glass. He knew to a minim how much brandy had evaporated since his last ...
— The Strange Case of Mortimer Fenley • Louis Tracy
... truth by the exaggerated methods of humour and caricature; perverse, even wrong-headed at times, but possessed of a true pathos and largeness of heart, and when all has been said—though the Elizabethan ran to satire, the Victorian to sentimentality—leaving the world better for the art that they ...
— Cynthia's Revels • Ben Jonson
... nearly every adjoining parish in that part of Wiltshire. Passing over several praiseworthy establishments of allotments by private persons, we come to 1819, when parliament passed an act akin in spirit to several that came into existence during the later portion of the Victorian era. It empowered the churchwardens and overseers of any parish, with the consent of the vestry, to purchase or hire land not exceeding 25 acres, and to let it in portions to "any poor and industrious inhabitant of the parish.'' This was amended in 1831 by an act extending the quantity ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... by his Christian belief. We are told a great deal about the progress of missionaries among the Pacific Islands. Rather definitely a Victorian book, ...
— Ben Hadden - or, Do Right Whatever Comes Of It • W.H.G. Kingston
... of people. No good can come of such methods, for there are no short cuts to excellence. But help of a very practical kind it is the aim of the following pages to give; although it may be necessary to make a greater call upon the intelligence of the student than these Victorian methods attempted. ...
— The Practice and Science Of Drawing • Harold Speed
... weighed four or five pounds. The publishers would never have had to grumble at its brevity, or have been compelled to use large type and wide margins to "bulk up." It was written in the thin, early Victorian handwriting not often met with in this generation of writers. It subscribed faithfully to the great canons of publication—for instance, it was written on "one side only of the paper"; it was pinned together at the "left-hand top corner"; ...
— In the Mist of the Mountains • Ethel Turner |
