"Victorian" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... forbade him to write a school essay on the subject of the capacity of men to rise on stepping-stones of their dead selves to higher things. Mr. Yeats's upbringing in the home of an artist anti-Victorian to the finger-tips was obviously such as would lead a boy to live self-consciously, and Mr. Yeats tells us that when he was a boy at school he used to feel "as proud of myself as a March cock when it crows to its first sunrise." He remembers how one day he looked at his schoolfellows ...
— Old and New Masters • Robert Lynd
... Areas and Jurisdictions.*—Throughout the earlier and middle portions of the Victorian period legislation respecting local government was abundant, but it was special rather than general. It pertained principally to the care of highways and burial grounds, the laying out and organization of districts for the promotion of sanitation, the ...
— The Governments of Europe • Frederic Austin Ogg
... know that awful painting of a mid-Victorian ancestor of Vera's—a horrible old man with bushy eyebrows and ...
— The Secret City • Hugh Walpole
... middle there was a bowl of tawny red and yellow chrysanthemums, and one of pure white, so fresh that the narrow petals were curved backwards into a firm white ball. From the surrounding walls the heads of three famous Victorian writers surveyed this entertainment, and slips of paper pasted beneath them testified in the great man's own handwriting that he was yours sincerely or affectionately or for ever. The father and daughter would have been quite content, apparently, to eat their dinner in silence, ...
— Night and Day • Virginia Woolf
... appendix, written in Latin by Burton, contained descriptions of sexual customs among certain tribes. It was removed by the publisher of the book, who apparently considered it to be too risque for the Victorian public.] ...
— First footsteps in East Africa • Richard F. Burton
... writing in 1889, connected the Catholic revival with the abandonment of atomism in natural philosophy and of Baconian metaphysics. These were, he thought, the counterpart of individualism in politics and Calvinism in religion. The adherents of mid-Victorian science and philosophy were bewildered by the phenomenon of 'men in the nineteenth century actually expressing a belief in a divine society and a supernatural presence in our midst, a brotherhood in which men become members of an organic ...
— Outspoken Essays • William Ralph Inge
... meet the situation, it would be desirable for the Government to promote special legislation along the lines of the Victorian Police Offences ...
— Report of the Special Committee on Moral Delinquency in Children and Adolescents - The Mazengarb Report (1954) • Oswald Chettle Mazengarb et al.
... change and stated that the alterations had destroyed the symmetry of the building so that it was no longer a monument to his ability. As a result his name was removed from the foundation stone, and today the building, which was said to be the finest example of Victorian Gothic in the country, does not bear the name of ...
— Report of the Chief Librarian - for the Year Ended 31 March 1958: Special Centennial Issue • J. O. Wilson and General Assembly Library (New Zealand)
... humbler passers-by often called, with approval, "good, plain American," but whose point of departure was Georgian. He had the instinct for that which springs out of the soil. For this reason he did not shrink from an Early Victorian note—the first note of the modern, prosperous New York—in decoration; and the same taste impelled him toward the American in art. While Neighbor Smith displayed his Gainsboroughs, and Neighbor Jones his Rousseaus or Daubignys, Conquest quietly picked up a thing here and ...
— The Wild Olive • Basil King
... had arrived that morning from his elder brother George, who was an officer in a line regiment. It had been written in the trenches before Sebastopol, for these events took place in the mid-Victorian period towards the end of the Crimean War. Or rather the letter had been begun in the trenches and finished in the military hospital, whither George had been conveyed, suffering from "fever and severe chill," which seemed to be somewhat ...
— Smith and the Pharaohs, and Other Tales • Henry Rider Haggard
... that he had not graced the Elizabethan era, when he might have become a gallant buccaneer, and so got himself shot through the head; or that he had not flourished under the reign of good Queen Anne, when he would probably have turned pirate and been hanged; or that, being born in the Victorian age, he had not gone to the Far West, where he would, at least, have had the chance of ...
— In Luck at Last • Walter Besant
... been more in place on the main street of a town than here in the mountain desert; but when the first John Merchant had made his stake and could build his home as it pleased him to build, his imagination harked back to a mid-Victorian model, built of wood, with high, pointed roofs, many carved balconies and windows, and several towers. Here the second John Merchant lived with his son Charles, whose taste had ...
— Way of the Lawless • Max Brand
... attached to the communications respecting the Victorian Exploring Expedition, as read before the committee of the Royal Society, there can be little doubt but that the judgment pronounced on Mr. Landells remains unaltered. He deserted his leader on the eve of the fight; and such an act, so subversive of all ...
— Successful Exploration Through the Interior of Australia • William John Wills
... dresses has always to be sternly resisted when dealing with any part of the Victorian era, so merely pausing to note that it seems to have been a triumph on the part of Mrs. Grosjean to have cut a short skirt out of 81/2 yards of material, I reluctantly lay aside the letters at the time when Edward Chesterton and Marie were married ...
— Gilbert Keith Chesterton • Maisie Ward
... '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 ...
— Proserpine and Midas • Mary Shelley
... the system of a sky in fragments is to miss what I learn to look for in all achieved works of Nature and art: the organism that is unity and life. It is the unity and life of painting. The Early Victorian picture—(the school is still in full career, but essentially it belongs to that triumphal period)—is but a dull sum of things put together, in concourse, not in relation; but the true picture is one, however multitudinous ...
— The Rhythm of Life • Alice Meynell
... sea fishing is not much favoured, except during the prevalence of westerly winds, when for days at a time the Pacific is as smooth as a lake; but in the rivers, from Mallacoota Inlet, which is a few miles over the Victorian boundary, to the Tweed River on the north, the stranger may fairly revel, not only in the delights of splendid fishing, but in the charms of beautiful scenery. He needs no guide, will be put to but little expense, for the country hotel accommodation ...
— Ridan The Devil And Other Stories - 1899 • Louis Becke
... banquet-room of a thane, faced in thrice-weathered oak and designed by an architect too eminent to endure interference—except when Miss Meyerburg had later and at her own stealthy volition installed a Pompeian colored window above the high Victorian fireplace—the wide light of a brilliant New-Year's day lay against leaded window-panes, but ...
— Every Soul Hath Its Song • Fannie Hurst
... Several great princes and emperors have formerly made good use of it. Octavianus Augustus, second emperor of the Romans, meeting on a day a country fellow named Eutychus —that is, fortunate—driving an ass named Nicon—that is, in Greek, Victorian—moved by the signification of the ass's and ass-driver's names, remained assured of all prosperity ...
— Gargantua and Pantagruel, Complete. • Francois Rabelais
... is nowadays scarcely opposed in serious criticism. If music were a necessary ornament of lyrical verse, the latter would nowadays scarcely exist; but we hear less and less of the poets devotion (save in a purely conventional sense) to the lute and the pipe. What we call the Victorian lyric is absolutely independent of any such aid. It may be that certain songs of Tennyson and Christina Rossetti have been with great popularity "set," as it is called, "to music." So far as the latter is in itself successful, it ...
— Victorian Songs - Lyrics of the Affections and Nature • Various
... exposed at the shop-doors, and finding in them some fleeting recurrence of the hint that travel was what he needed. Then he stopped, to look through the railings and open gateway at an enclosure on the left, and the substantial, heavily-respectable group of early Victorian buildings beyond. Some well-dressed men were standing talking in one of the porches. The stiff yellowish-stucco pilasters of this entrance, and the tall uniformed figure of the porter in the shadow, came into the picture as he observed it; they gave forth a suggestion ...
— The Market-Place • Harold Frederic
... enough to have a XII century palace. The palace itself has been lucky enough to escape being carved up into XV century Gothic, or shaved into XVIII century ashlar, or "restored" by a XIX century builder and a Victorian architect with a deep sense of the umbrella-like gentlemanliness of XIV century vaulting. The present occupant, A. Chelsea, unofficially Alfred Bridgenorth, appreciates Norman work. He has, by adroit complaints of the discomfort of the place, induced the Ecclesiastical Commissioners ...
— Getting Married • George Bernard Shaw
... indulge, and something she had to subdue with a determined effort. She would die sooner than confess to them. Passion might be all right for men with whom every initiative of life lay, but unbecoming for women to acknowledge, even to themselves. In fact, Joyce Wynthrop was a product of Early Victorian views on the subject of a girl's training, and an anachronism in modern times. She had been reared in rigid ignorance of life, her reading having been heavily restricted, her associates selected, so that when the time came to hand ...
— Banked Fires • E. W. (Ethel Winifred) Savi
... will manufacture even the hat with blue feathers, so that you 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. ...
— Betty Trevor • Mrs. G. de Horne Vaizey
... distance in a straight line of not more 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 ...
— Australia Twice Traversed, The Romance of Exploration • Ernest Giles
... sooner he got out of it the better. For weeks this affair of Cope's had hung over the blackboard like a dim tapestry. Now it was gone; and when he tabulated in chalk the Elizabethan dramatists or the Victorian novelists there was nothing to prevent his ...
— Bertram Cope's Year • Henry Blake Fuller
... like the evil magician in the fairy tales, but most harmless. "Old Sir Thomas Erpingham," I call him, for I am sure a good soft pillow for that good grey head were better than the churlish turf of India. He is very kind, and calls us Sunshine and Brightness, and pays us the most involved Early Victorian compliments, which we, talking and laughing all the time, seldom ever hear, and it is left to kind Mrs. ...
— Olivia in India • O. Douglas
... the road, had spoken the needed word to lift the clerk out of the rut. At any rate the Colonel had not forgotten the son of Tyringham Lane, and the young man had often been to the generous, ugly Victorian house,—built when the hardware business made its ...
— Together • Robert Herrick (1868-1938)
... J. C. Snaith is already known to fame by his historical novels, his admirable cricketing story, his essay in Meredithan subtlety "Brooke of Covenden," and his most successful Victorian comedy "Araminta." In his new novel he breaks ground which has never before been touched by an English novelist. He follows no less a leader than Cervantes. His hero, Sir Richard Pendragon, is Sir John Falstaff grown athletic and courageous, with his imagination fired by much adventure in ...
— Daisy's Aunt • E. F. (Edward Frederic) Benson
... the same way, the private correspondence, carried on between Earl Grey and the Earl of Elgin from {ix} 1847 to 1852, takes precedence of all other Canadian material of that period; and is, indeed, the most enlightening series of documents in existence on mid-Victorian Colonial policy. ...
— British Supremacy & Canadian Self-Government - 1839-1854 • J. L. Morison
... 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; and in the finely suggested figure of Tibby, ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 150, February 16, 1916 • Various
... the last great prize-fight fought in England. The fight came off on April 17, 1860; the most extraordinary care had been taken to keep the secret of the place of meeting, and the accounts of the proceedings, when one remembers that it all took place in the mid-Victorian quiet which was producing the Idylls of the King and Adam Bede are nearly unbelievable. Two monster trains carried twelve hundred spectators, peers, members of Parliament, magistrates, officers, clergymen, ...
— Highways and Byways in Surrey • Eric Parker
... be admitted, too, that King Arthur, of the "Idylls," is like an Albert in blank verse, an Albert cursed with a Guinevere for a wife, and a Lancelot for friend. The "Idylls," with all their beauties, are full of a Victorian respectability, and love of talking with Vivien about what is not so respectable. One wishes, at times, that the "Morte d'Arthur" had remained a lonely and flawless fragment, as noble as Homer, as polished as Sophocles. But then we must have missed, with many other admirable ...
— Letters on Literature • Andrew Lang
... metaphysics, to the confusion of their friends and of their own feelings later on, when they come to years of discretion and realize the absurdity of these "lively sallies," as they would have been called in early Victorian times—the name alone might serve as a warning to the incautious! They may perhaps go through an argumentative period and trample severely upon the opinions of those who are not ready to have their majors "distinguished" and their ...
— The Education of Catholic Girls • Janet Erskine Stuart
... the big old seventeenth-century posting-house in the long, quiet village of Ripley, once noted in the late Victorian craze of the "push-bike" as being the Mecca of the daring cyclist who ran out of ...
— The Golden Face - A Great 'Crook' Romance • William Le Queux
... of Mohammed that once, rather than disturb a favourite cat, he cut off the sleeve of his robe on which it lay asleep. Whether in like circumstances my father would have done the same—had flowing sleeves been a Victorian fashion—I cannot certainly say, though he once was found similarly dispossessed of his favourite study chair; but he always regarded this anecdote as displaying an agreeable trait in the Prophet. For he himself was ...
— Thomas Henry Huxley - A Character Sketch • Leonard Huxley
... encouraged the girls to read for themselves. All her lessons were interesting, but in 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 ...
— The Youngest Girl in the Fifth - A School Story • Angela Brazil
... perhaps a pre-Victorian, sentimentalist, looking out of an upstairs window, I believe, at a street—perhaps Fleet Street itself—full of people, is reported, by an admiring friend, to have wept for joy at seeing so much life. These arcadian tears, this facile emotion ...
— Notes on Life and Letters • Joseph Conrad
... waiting to tuck us in. There were we two females in neat gray motor dust-cloaks, on which the Dragon insisted; Mrs. Norton in a toque, which she wore as if it were a remote and dreaded contingency; your Audrie in a duck of an early Victorian bonnet, in which she liked herself better than in anything else she ever had on before. There, too, was our luggage, made to fit the car, and looking like the very last word of up-to-dateness—if you know what ...
— Set in Silver • Charles Norris Williamson and Alice Muriel Williamson
... hour of the mid-day dinner—for Polish hours are the hours of the early Victorian meals. Horses and men were alike at rest. The horses nibbled at the thin grass, while the men sat by the water and ate their gray bread, which only tastes of dampness and carraway-seeds. It was late ...
— The Vultures • Henry Seton Merriman
... one or at a quarter to two? I really am very fond of Aunt Charlotte, you know, though I find it awfully difficult to educate her. I sometimes despair of ever being able to bring her up properly at all, she is so hopelessly Early Victorian, poor thing. But, then, so many people are, aren't they? Now animals are never Early Victorian; that's why I respect them so. If you weren't a human being, Lubin—and a very nice one, as you are—what sort of an animal would ...
— Austin and His Friends • Frederic H. Balfour
... heed the warning I give?" The little Clerk pointed to the open page of the Victorian statutes ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... work 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 which ...
— Before and after Waterloo - Letters from Edward Stanley, sometime Bishop of Norwich (1802;1814;1814) • Edward Stanley
... eyes, those lips! Oh, the horrible fool passion that burns out my soul and brain and reduces me to rave like a lovelorn early Victorian tailor! Which was worse I know not—the spasm of jealousy or the spasm of self-contempt that followed it. At that moment the music ceased suddenly on a ...
— The Morals of Marcus Ordeyne • William J. Locke
... would not have been tolerated because of its appearance and because of the fact that the excessively high unit stresses, of which Mr. Mensch is an exponent, did not commend themselves either to the designer, in common with most engineers, or to Victorian taste; while the design used has proven eminently satisfactory to a more than usually ...
— Transactions of the American Society of Civil Engineers, Vol. LXX, Dec. 1910 - A Concrete Water Tower, Paper No. 1173 • A. Kempkey
... varieties, including Newfoundland, New South Wales, St. Vincent, South Australia, Trinidad, and a really grand lot of Victorian. Price ...
— Stamp Collecting as a Pastime • Edward J. Nankivell
... here accorded the first rank among historic painters. His gallery in Bond Street became one of the London sights; in fashionable society, if not in the close ring of the great Victorian artists, he made a leading figure. Royalty patronized and welcomed him. The Queen bought one of his pictures ("Le Psalterion," now at Windsor), and invited him to Balmoral. The heir-apparent, the late King, admired ...
— In the Heart of the Vosges - And Other Sketches by a "Devious Traveller" • Matilda Betham-Edwards
... The effort was indeed well-meant. It was blessed by Churchmen as dissimilar as Bishop Mackarness, Edwin Palmer, Burgon, Scott Holland, Illingworth, Ottley, Lacey, Gore, and Jayne, now Bishop of Chester; but it was not long-lived. Very soon the "Victorian Persecution," as we used to call it, engineered by Archbishop Tait through the P.W.R. Act, made it difficult for ritualists to feel that they had part or lot with those who were imprisoning conscientious clergymen; so the O.U.C.S. fell to pieces and disappeared, to be revived ...
— Fifteen Chapters of Autobiography • George William Erskine Russell
... spoke in the name of Queen Victoria and on behalf of her heirs and successors. What has suddenly become of the Briton's word — his bond — that solemn obligations of such Imperialists should cease to count? And if it is decided that the Victorian Englishman and the Twentieth Century Englishman are creatures of different clay (and that with the latter honour is binding only when both parties to the undertaking are white), surely this could hardly be the moment to inaugurate a change the reaction of which ...
— Native Life in South Africa, Before and Since • Solomon Tshekisho Plaatje
... glass of wine. The policeman will attend to the gas-man. We don't often get a chance to talk to a genuine antiquarian. I think, Mr. Blair, that you will be greatly interested in the architectural restoration of our parish church. It exemplifies the worst excesses of the mid-Victorian period. The church itself is one of the finest examples of the cruciform type. The south transept dates from the thirteenth century; the nave, clerestory, and north transept from the fifth. The chancel was restored in 1865, but I must confess that the treatment of the clerestory seems to me barbarous. ...
— Kathleen • Christopher Morley
... 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
... 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) seemed eager ...
— The Trail of the Hawk - A Comedy of the Seriousness of Life • Sinclair Lewis
... Mrs. Nye, the housekeeper, was passing through the hall, and her gasp at this exhibition of unbecoming athletics was the least that could be expected from one who still thought in the terms of the crinoline and had never recovered from the habit of regarding life through the early-Victorian end ...
— Who Cares? • Cosmo Hamilton
... a 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 had often heard men say that Tom Lingard cared ...
— The Rescue • Joseph Conrad
... tower clock, Molly saw that she still had three quarters of an hour before the lecture on early Victorian Poets by the Professor of English Literature from Exmoor, who came over several times a week to substitute for ...
— Molly Brown's Senior Days • Nell Speed
... seven years old. But Cynthia was not a good 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 ...
— Racketty-Packetty House • Frances H. Burnett
... contrast. Hand-tool design, with few exceptions, continued vigorous and functional amidst the confusion of an eclectic architecture, a flurry of rival styles, the horrors of the jigsaw, and the excesses of Victorian taste. In conclusion, it would seem that whether seeking some continuous thread in the evolution of a national style, or whether appraising American contributions to technology, such a search must rest, at least in part, upon the character and quality of the hand tools the society ...
— Woodworking Tools 1600-1900 • Peter C. Welsh
... situated; then a rather superior block, where the rents were much cheaper because they were called "dwellings"; and beyond that, the huddled small houses of a quarter with which no builder had interfered since early Victorian days. ...
— Finn The Wolfhound • A. J. Dawson
... the breast 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 eaten ...
— Mother's Remedies - Over One Thousand Tried and Tested Remedies from Mothers - of the United States and Canada • T. J. Ritter
... statue in Westminster Abbey, Samuel Rogers, the poet, cynically said, "Yes, I will gladly give twenty pounds any day to see dear old Tom Campbell stand steady on his legs." It is a matter of congratulation that the most eminent men of the Victorian era have not fallen into some of the unhappy habits of their predecessors at the beginning of the last century. Mrs. Baillie entertained me with lively descriptions of Sir Walter Scott, and of her old friend, Mr. Wordsworth, who was her guest ...
— Recollections of a Long Life - An Autobiography • Theodore Ledyard Cuyler
... 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 in their stormy slumbers.... The first of ...
— Lives of Girls Who Became Famous • Sarah Knowles Bolton
... clump or pine-ridge. And away beyond the horizon, southward still, the geodesic curve carries that monotony across the zone of salt-bush, myall, and swamp box; across the Lachlan and Murrumbidgee, and on to the Victorian border—say, two ...
— Such is Life • Joseph Furphy
... the essential thing in my reckoning of the war. It is a drama without a hero; without countless incidental heroes no doubt, but no star part. Even the Germans, with a national predisposition for hero-cults and living still in an atmosphere of Victorian humbug, can produce nothing better than ...
— War and the Future • H. G. Wells
... Emmeline "twice as plump." Like the baby in the "Pig and Pepper," Hannah sneezes at the first sight of Dicky. The novel is artfully littered with references to wonder, curiosity, and strangeness—all evidence of Stacpoole's conscious effort to invoke and honor his Victorian predecessor. ...
— The Blue Lagoon - A Romance • H. de Vere Stacpoole
... nation's prettiness is another's grotesque. My companion was wearing one of those comely straw hats trimmed with roses which we call Early Victorian, and which the hot summer of 1904 brought into fashion again on account of their peculiar suitability to keep off the sun. In England we think them becoming; upon certain heads they are charming. But no head must wear such a ...
— A Wanderer in Holland • E. V. Lucas
... and chastised. In one epoch lubricity, in another fanaticism, in a third dulness and a dead-alive copying of the past, are the faults which criticism finds to attack. None of these affected the Victorian era. It was pure—though tainted with a profound hypocrisy; it was singularly free from violence in its judgments; it was certainly alive and new: but it had this grievous defect (a defect under which we still labour heavily) that thought was restrained upon every side. Never in the ...
— Froude's Essays in Literature and History - With Introduction by Hilaire Belloc • James Froude
... 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. ...
— The Evolution of Modern Capitalism - A Study of Machine Production • John Atkinson Hobson
... unworldly clerk, if he was a member of a College, there would come, in due course, the country living and goodbye to the University. But statutes were not always strictly observed and the idle life-Fellow, who survived to be the scandal of early Victorian days, was not unknown in the end of ...
— Life in the Medieval University • Robert S. Rait
... to-day through the intermediary of a converted 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 nowadays to the writings of a vulgarian like Papini, whose ...
— The Child of Pleasure • Gabriele D'Annunzio
... portrayal of the reaction of experience upon personality. Their realism has rescued her from the sentimentality surrounding an impossible Camille quite as their fellow-craftsmen in realism have replaced the weeping Amelias of the Victorian period by reasonable women ...
— A New Conscience And An Ancient Evil • Jane Addams
... thing, really the dark thing, was that, even while he thought of the quick column he might add up, he felt it less easy to laugh at the heavy horrors than to quail before them. He couldn't describe and dismiss them collectively, call them either Mid-Victorian or Early; not being at all sure they were rangeable under one rubric. It was only manifest they were splendid and were furthermore conclusively British. They constituted an order and they abounded in rare ...
— The Wings of the Dove, Volume 1 of 2 • Henry James
... elaborate detail. Both men were at heart moralists, seeking the 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 ...
— Cynthia's Revels • Ben Jonson
... made to please and be pleased, a regular mid-Victorian heroine, universally courted. Though always courted she was never spoilt, and was a most affectionate sister and daughter. But the old particular bond which had attached her and Henrietta no longer existed. She was equally affectionate to ...
— The Third Miss Symons • Flora Macdonald Mayor
... he learnt the rest of Captain S———'s story. A year after his lady-love had jilted him he received a letter from her in England. She was in sad trouble, she said. Her husband, a Victorian official, was serving five years for embezzlement. Her letter was suggestive of a desire to hasten to the "protection" of her sailor lover. She wished, she said, that her husband were dead. But dead or alive she would ...
— The Ebbing Of The Tide - South Sea Stories - 1896 • Louis Becke
... smoking in early Victorian days, and for some time later, was curious. The development of cigar-smoking among those classes from which tobacco had long been practically banished, and the natural consequent spread downwards of the use of cigars—in accordance ...
— The Social History of Smoking • G. L. Apperson
... a cup of tea with Pancrazio and hearing these stories of English painters. It was strange to look at the battered figure of Pancrazio, and think how much he had been crucified through the long years in London, for the sake of late Victorian art. It was strangest of all to see through his yellow, often dull, red-rimmed eyes these blithe and well-conditioned painters. Pancrazio looked on them admiringly and contemptuously, as an old, rakish tom-cat might look on such frivolous ...
— The Lost Girl • D. H. Lawrence
... century, when its relative cost was somewhat reduced, bringing it within the means of a greater proportion of the people. Nevertheless it has long been used, chiefly by the wealthy; the departing guest of the early Victorian inn would be likely to find an item on his bill such as this: "For a gentleman who called himself a gentleman, wax-lights, 5/." Poor men used tallow dips or went to bed in the dark. It is interesting to note the importance of the candle in the household budget ...
— Artificial Light - Its Influence upon Civilization • M. Luckiesh
... it by any undue stretch of the royal prerogative that the name of the monarch has attached itself to the literature of her reign and of the reigns succeeding hers. The expression "Victorian poetry" has a rather absurd sound when one considers how little Victoria counts for in the literature of her time. But in Elisabethan poetry the maiden queen is really the central figure. She is Cynthia, she is Thetis, great queen of shepherds and of the sea; ...
— Brief History of English and American Literature • Henry A. Beers
... one meets in a long journey. Coming into Bordeaux we were convoyed for three hours by a ratty little French destroyer and a big dirigible French balloon. Leaving Liverpool, we lay two nights and a day sealed in the harbour, and then sailed out with the Arabic, the Mongolian, the Victorian, and two freighters, amid a whole flock of cruisers and destroyers. The protecting fleet stayed with us two nights and three days. On the French boat the barber practically had no news of sudden deaths and hairbreadth escapes which had happened while we slept. We sailed into the Gironde ...
— The Martial Adventures of Henry and Me • William Allen White
... constitution and the temperament of a big Lincolnshire yeoman, with that simple rusticity that is said to have characterised Vergil. But his spirit dwelt apart, revolving dim and profound thoughts, brooding over mysteries; if he is lightly said to be Early Victorian, it is not because he was typical of his age, but because he contributed so much to make it what it was. While Browning lived an eager personal life, full of observation, zest, and passion, Tennyson abode in more impersonal ...
— Where No Fear Was - A Book About Fear • Arthur Christopher Benson
... much in these parts.' Edward Fitzgerald seems to have had a great regard for his host; the more he knows him the more he cares for him; he describes him 'firing away about the odes of Pindar.' They fired noble broadsides those men of the early Victorian times, and when we listen we still seem to hear their echoes rolling into the far distance. Mr. Fitzgerald ends his letter with a foreboding too soon to be realised: 'Old Miss Edgeworth is wearing away. She has a capital bright soul, which even now shines quite youthfully through her faded ...
— Castle Rackrent • Maria Edgeworth
... of mountains of emeralds and tons of gold—surely that is humiliating! The North Pole is not a very good joke to start with. An icicle hanging on one's nose is a simple sort of humour in any case. If a set of spontaneous mummers got the effect cleverly with cut crystals from the early Victorian chandelier there might really be something suddenly funny in it. But what should we say of hanging diamonds on a hundred human noses merely to make that ...
— Alarms and Discursions • G. K. Chesterton
... badly, the 'Hound of Heaven' faring best. It is a common mark of genius to be ahead of its time. Even Thompson's coreligionists were cold. Indeed, it may be said they were the coldest. If the general reading-public of the nineties suspected Thompson of being a Victorian reactionary of ultra-montane mould, the Catholic public feared him for his art. It was a wild unfettered thing which took strange liberties with Catholic pieties and could not be trusted to run in divine grooves. One can afford to extenuate the attitude ...
— The Hound of Heaven • Francis Thompson
... centuries, its cathedral through six, its chief churches through five. It had the most perfect Norman keep within two hundred miles. It had ancient halls, mansions, towers, markets, and jail. And to these the Victorian-Edwardian age had added museums, law courts, theatres; such astonishing modernities as swimming-baths, power-houses, joint-stock banks, lending libraries, and art schools; and whole monumental streets and squares from the designs of a native architect without whose respectable name ...
— The Roll-Call • Arnold Bennett
... the ineffective husband—for whom I was sincerely sorry, because he asked so very little of life and didn't even get that—badly left, and the case against Cupid looks black. Mrs. MOORE does what she can for him by blaming our Victorian ancestors and their habits of mind; but I think it is only fair to add that, delightful as Jane is, she was not made for happiness any more than the people who enjoy poor health have it in them to be robust, and that, true as much of the author's criticism is, she has not been able to give The ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 159, September 8th, 1920 • Various
... no occasion to enlarge upon this generous tribute of one of the greatest of our Victorian novelists to another. Considering how inevitably the critic is driven to compare these two, if not to set one up against the other, we can experience no feeling but pleasure and pride in humanity, before the evidence of their mutual appreciation. The Cornhill "In Memoriam" article ...
— Famous Reviews • Editor: R. Brimley Johnson
... 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 country which, oddly ...
— Yet Again • Max Beerbohm
... looking forward to the termination of their visit. The life they had led for the past fortnight was not their way of life. They met each morning for breakfast at nine o'clock—Miss Heredith was a stickler for the mid-Victorian etiquette of everybody sitting down together at the breakfast table. After breakfast the men wandered off to their own devices for killing time: some to play a round of golf, others to go shooting or fishing, generally not reappearing ...
— The Hand in the Dark • Arthur J. Rees
... 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 ...
— The Confessions of a Beachcomber • E J Banfield
... of Tennyson is eminently representative of the Victorian age. He has written little; but that little marks a distinct era in versification—great harmony untrammelled by artificial correctness; and in language, a search for novelty to supply the wants and correct the faults of the poetic vocabulary. He is national in the Idyls; ...
— English Literature, Considered as an Interpreter of English History - Designed as a Manual of Instruction • Henry Coppee
... perceptible scorn undimmed. There were, too, framed in oak, a large photograph of Tamagno, as Othello, with a scrawled, cordial message; another of a graceful woman in the Page's costume of Les Huguenots, signed "Sempre ... Scalchi"; a water colour drawing by Jan Beers; and a Victorian lithograph in powdery foliage and brick of The Penny Rolling Mills. Jaffa. A black-blue rug, from Myrtle Forge, partly covered the broad, oak boards of the floor; and there was a comfortable variety of chairs—sturdy, painted Dutch, winged Windsors ...
— The Three Black Pennys - A Novel • Joseph Hergesheimer
... the maddest Progressive will hardly contend that our growth in wisdom and liberality has been greater in the last half century than in the sixteen half centuries preceding: indeed it would be easier to sustain the thesis that the last fifty years have witnessed a distinct reaction from Victorian Liberalism to Collectivism which has perceptibly strengthened the State Churches. Yet the fact remains that whereas Byron's Cain, published a century ago, is a leading case on the point that there is no copyright in a blasphemous book, the Salvation ...
— Preface to Androcles and the Lion - On the Prospects of Christianity • George Bernard Shaw
... the Victorian Era art was at its lowest ebb. The young lady students of the period were copying those impossible lithographed heads which formed the stock-in-trade of the drawing-master, or those fashion-plate Venuses whose ...
— The Confessions of a Caricaturist, Vol 2 (of 2) • Harry Furniss
... which she sat reflected perfectly her personality. In spite of the early Victorian date of the furniture, there was in its arrangement and selection a taste so exquisite as to deprive it of even a suspicion of Philistinism. Somehow the rosewood table on which the September morning sun fell with serene beauty did not conflict as ...
— The Necromancers • Robert Hugh Benson
... presence of a specific audience, accustomed to certain Anglo-Saxon and Puritanic restraint of topic and of speech, has from the beginning of our imaginative literature cooperated with the instinct of our writers. That Victorian reticence which is so plainly seen even in such full-bodied writers as Dickens or Thackeray—a reticence which men like Mr. Bernard Shaw and Mr. Galsworthy and Mr. Wells think so hypocritical and dangerous to society and which they have certainly ...
— The American Mind - The E. T. Earl Lectures • Bliss Perry
... sunny August in 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
... was the great prose writer of the age preceding the Victorian. The first of his series of Waverley novels was published in 1814, and he continued until his death in 1832 to delight the world with his genius as a writer of romances. His influence may be traced in Cooper's work, although the American author occupies an original ...
— History of American Literature • Reuben Post Halleck
... a faraway-above ceiling. Lady Franks sat at a large black Bechstein piano at one end of this vacant yellow state-room. She sat, a little plump elderly lady in black lace, for all the world like Queen Victoria in Max Beerbohm's drawing of Alfred Tennyson reading to her Victorian Majesty, with space before her. Arthur's wife was bending over some music in a remote corner ...
— Aaron's Rod • D. H. Lawrence
... "a few autumnal verses," and there is no real evidence of work on the poem before this time. Walpole evidently inclined to 1746 as the date of commencement, and it may be pointed out that Mason himself is not so sure of 1742 as have been his Victorian successors. All he says is, "I am inclined to believe that the Elegy ... was begun, if not concluded, at this time [1742] also." Gray's reputation for extreme leisurely composition depends largely ...
— An Elegy Wrote in a Country Church Yard (1751) and The Eton College Manuscript • Thomas Gray
... left a sensible stamp. I have seldom seen so good a collection of houses of the period between the elder picturesqueness and the modern baldness. Such places, such houses, such relics and intimations, always carry me back to the near antiquity of that pre-Victorian England which it is still easy for a stranger to picture with a certain vividness, thanks to the partial survival of many of its characteristics. It is still easy for a stranger who has stayed a while in England to form an idea of the tone, the habits, the aspect of English social ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, October, 1877, Vol. XX. No. 118 • Various
... vestige of the eighteenth century had disappeared; cynicism and subtlety were shrivelled into powder; and duty, industry, morality, and domesticity triumphed over them. Even the very chairs and tables had assumed, with a singular responsiveness, the forms of prim solidity. The Victorian Age was in ...
— Queen Victoria • Lytton Strachey
... is as serene as a summer sea, and can look at you without knowing you are there. Mr. Francis is a peaceful man, too. He looks at his wife in a helpless way when she begins to explain the difference between the Elizabethan and the Victorian poets—I don't believe he cares a ...
— Sowing Seeds in Danny • Nellie L. McClung
... pagan spirit, breathes in every bar of Purcell's music. Mid-Victorian critics and historians deplored the resemblance between the profane style of the stage pieces and the sacred style of the anthems and services. Not resemblance, but identity, is the word to use. There ...
— Purcell • John F. Runciman
... effort which, as now usually conducted, succeeds in destroying much budding appreciation of poetry. Why endow these would-be interpreters of poetry, to the neglect of the class of artists whose work they profess to interpret? What should we think of England if her Victorian poets had all happened to be penniless, and she had packed them off to Grub Street and invested, instead, in a few ...
— The Joyful Heart • Robert Haven Schauffler
... had been set to rights they went into the little parlor and sat on the worn Victorian plush-covered sofa. There was much to talk about, matters of grave importance that concerned themselves alone, explanations to be made, hopes to be expressed, and Beth's affair with McGuire to be discussed in all its phases. Peter told her nothing ...
— The Vagrant Duke • George Gibbs
... laughter, has rushed, like a stream of molten gold, to the utmost reaches of the auditorium, and not an ear that has not jumped for joy of it. For he is Rudolfo, the poet; in private life, Enrico Caruso, Knight of the Order of San Giovanni, Member of the Victorian Order, Cavalier of the Order of Santa ...
— Nights in London • Thomas Burke
... was one of those lines of flat-faced pillared, and porticoed houses which are so prominent a product of the middle Victorian epoch in the West End of London. Next door there appeared to be a children's party, for the merry buzz of young voices and the clatter of a piano resounded through the night. The fog still hung about and screened us with ...
— The Adventure of the Bruce-Partington Plans • Arthur Conan Doyle
... rendered with Victorian propriety by a well-known Oxford professor, "What a quantity of perspiration!" etc. Probably Horace had been watching the sowing of barley or oats on a fine March morning, "the peck of March dust," which we know is ...
— Grain and Chaff from an English Manor • Arthur H. Savory
... Canada, as the direct outcome of Confederation, has grown strong, prosperous, energetic. The unhappy divisions which prevailed at the beginning of the nineteenth century, and which darkened with actual revolt and bloodshed the dawn of the Victorian era, are now only a memory. The links which bind the Dominion to Great Britain may on paper seem slight, but they are resistless. Imperial Federation has still great tasks to accomplish within our widely scattered Imperial domains, but its success in Canada may be accepted ...
— The Open Secret of Ireland • T. M. Kettle
... 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 ...
— Punch, 1917.07.04, Vol. 153, Issue No. 1 • Various
... century farm cottage are not necessarily expensive. Simple pine pieces, made by the village cabinet-maker or, sometimes, by an ingenious farmer in his leisure hours; Windsor and slat-back chairs; low four-post beds; trestle or tuckaway tables; even an occasional Victorian piece; all, if on simple lines, fit into such a house as though made ...
— If You're Going to Live in the Country • Thomas H. Ormsbee and Richmond Huntley
... terribly snubbed, and then I think various Portuguese and other nondescripts and groups of non-commissioned officers and men, some with their wives. The play, admirably chosen, was that crystallization of liberal Victorian snobbery, Caste, and I remember there was a sub-current of amusement because the young officer who played—what is the name of the hero's friend? I forget—had in the haste of his superficiality adopted a moustache ...
— The Passionate Friends • Herbert George Wells
... the Metaphysical Society in 1869 was not without interest as a sign of the times. As in the new birth of thought which put a period to the Middle Ages, so in the Victorian Renaissance, a vast intellectual ferment had taken immediate shape in a fierce struggle with long established orthodoxy. But whereas Luther displaced Erasmus, and the earlier reformers fought out the quarrel with the weapons of the theologian rather than those of the Humanist, the ...
— The Life and Letters of Thomas Henry Huxley Volume 1 • Leonard Huxley
... church, in any town, at almost any hour of the day. They are grey-haired, and sad, and grim, and they hold the more tenaciously to the promise of happiness in After Life because they have sacrificed, or permitted to pass by, the happiness of this. To a great extent it is a "Victorian" sacrifice. They are victims of that passing Belief which was convinced that a girl of gentle birth ought to administer to her parents, pay calls, uphold the Church, and do a little needlework all her life, unless some man came along to marry her and give her emancipation. ...
— Over the Fireside with Silent Friends • Richard King
... was first settled in 1609 by shipwrecked English colonists headed for Virginia. Tourism to the island to escape North American winters first developed in Victorian times. Bermuda has developed into a highly successful offshore financial center. A referendum on independence was ...
— The 2001 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency.
... their loose hair to save it from falling into the hands of sorcerers. This is done by the Patagonians and some of the Victorian tribes. In the Upper Vosges they say that you should never leave the clippings of your hair and nails lying about, but burn them to hinder the sorcerers from using them against you. For the same reason Italian women either burn ...
— The Golden Bough - A study of magic and religion • Sir James George Frazer
... youth, after some journey in which I had lost the key; and this act of violence was probably the reason why the trunk had so long ago ceased to travel. I unstrapped it, not without dust; it exhaled the faint scent of its long closure; it contained a tweed suit of Late Victorian pattern, some bills, some letters, a collar-stud, and—something which, after I had wondered for a moment or two what on earth it was, caused me suddenly to murmur, 'Down below, the sea rustled to and fro ...
— And Even Now - Essays • Max Beerbohm
... good sized table in front of it are considered an indispensable part of its furniture. When Germans come to England and have to live in lodgings or poorly furnished inns, the bedrooms seem to them most comfortless and ill provided. The poor Idealist who lived as an exile in London in the early Victorian age describes her forlorn room with nothing in it but a "colossal" bed, a washstand, and a chest of drawers, and though she does not describe them, you who know London from that side can see the half-dirty honey-combed counterpane, the untempting cotton sheets, the worn uncleanly carpet, ...
— Home Life in Germany • Mrs. Alfred Sidgwick
... can be no difficulty about treating these writers as ordinary citizens of the Republic of Letters—a state, let us try to remember, that not only extends in space beyond the horizons of Tooting but in time beyond the Edwardian and even the Victorian era. ...
— Pot-Boilers • Clive Bell
... covered with stamped red velvet; the ornaments consisted of shells, wax fruit under glass shades, mats of Berlin wool, vases with dangling pendants of glass, and such like elegant survivals of the early Victorian epoch. ...
— The Silent House • Fergus Hume
... the roller with a quick movement, and a confusion of brilliant fabrics poured out over his knees. "You lived, Sire, in a period essentially cylindrical—the Victorian. With a tendency to the hemisphere in hats. Circular curves always. Now—" He flicked out a little appliance the size and appearance of a keyless watch, whirled the knob, and behold—a little figure in white appeared kinetoscope fashion on the dial, walking and turning. The tailor caught ...
— When the Sleeper Wakes • Herbert George Wells
... architecture of his town house that he remained conservative, immovable, one might almost say Early-Victorian-Christian. His country house at Dulwich-on-the-Sound was a palace of the Italian Renaissance. But in town he adhered to an architecture which had moral associations, the Nineteenth-Century-Brownstone epoch. It was a symbol of his social position, his religious doctrine, ...
— The Mansion • Henry Van Dyke
... who lived here in the sixteenth century is said to have introduced the first carp from the Danube, the moat being used as their nursery. Notice the great V in firs on the face of the Downs; this is a memorial of the Victorian Jubliee; not particularly beautiful and leading one to speculate upon its permanence. A cutting in the chalk would probably recommend itself to the pious care of coming ages when the personage commemorated had either been entirely forgotten ...
— Seaward Sussex - The South Downs from End to End • Edric Holmes
... woman. It has lain, in lavender as it were, in the dumpy note book, waiting for a publisher to ride that way and rescue it; and here he is at last, not a bit afraid that to this age it may appear "Victorian." Indeed if its pictures of High Life are accurate (as we cannot doubt, the authoress seems always so sure of her facts) they had a way of going on in those times which is really surprising. Even the grand historical figures were free and easy, ...
— The Young Visiters or, Mr. Salteena's Plan • Daisy Ashford
... (in support of Lord Methuen).—Canadian Contingent, New South Wales Lancers, New Zealand, South and West Australian, Tasmanian, and Victorian Contingents. ...
— South Africa and the Transvaal War, Vol. 2 (of 6) - From the Commencement of the War to the Battle of Colenso, - 15th Dec. 1899 • Louis Creswicke
... letters were in the same vein. Regarding the one to England which meant war, he asked of Secretary Seward if its language would be comprehended by our minister at the Victorian court, and added dryly: "Will James, the coachman at the door—will he understand it?" Receiving the answer, he nodded grimly and said: "Then it goes!" It went, and there was no ...
— The Lincoln Story Book • Henry L. Williams
... the Visible Smoke Law, by which any production of visible smoke with or without excuse was punishable by a fine, had already ceased to be the sombre smoke-darkened city of the Victorian time; it had been, and indeed was, constantly being rebuilt, and its main streets were already beginning to take on those characteristics that distinguished them throughout the latter half of the twentieth ...
— The World Set Free • Herbert George Wells
... day of rain the sun came out suddenly at five o'clock and threw a golden bar into the deep Victorian gloom of the front parlour. On the window-sill, midway between the white curtains, a pot of blue hyacinths stood in a cracked china plate, and as the sunlight shone into the room, the scent of the blossoms floated to the corner where Gabriella ...
— Life and Gabriella - The Story of a Woman's Courage • Ellen Glasgow
... upon for their weekly tale of jokes seems struggling upward to the free domain of Comedy; but in vain, his public holds him down, and compels him to laugh in chains. Some day, perchance, a literary historian, filled with the spirit of Cervantes or of Moliere, will give account of the Victorian era, and, not disdaining small things, will draw a picture of the society which inspired and controlled so resolute a jocularity. Then, at last, will the spirit of Comedy recognise that these were indeed what they ...
— Style • Walter Raleigh
... (Applause.) They were doubtless aware of the circumstances under which those gentlemen had become conspicuous amongst the Australian community. Immediately upon the discovery of any danger attending the Victorian explorers Messrs. Burke and Wills—upon discovering that there was a possibility of their being unable to surmount the difficulties which surrounded them in the desert, it was thought desirable to start contingent expeditions from the neighbouring colonies, as well as ...
— Journal of Landsborough's Expedition from Carpentaria - In search of Burke and Wills • William Landsborough
... outfit, but also in the water. However, the suit they provided me with on this occasion did not show me up in a very alluring light. It was quite large and evidently built according to a model of the early Victorian Era. I was swathed in yards of cloth much in the same manner as is a very young child. It delighted Mr. Fogerty, who expressed his admiration by attaching himself to the lower half of my attire and remaining there until I had waded through several colonies ...
— Biltmore Oswald - The Diary of a Hapless Recruit • J. Thorne Smith, Jr.
... among the black tents as that of some fabulous hero. But what interests me most is the style of Sallust himself. How ultra-modern this historian reads! His outlook upon life, his choice of words, are the note of tomorrow; and when I compare with him certain writers of the Victorian epoch, I seem to be unrolling a papyrus from Pharaoh's tomb, or spelling out the elucubrations of some ...
— Fountains In The Sand - Rambles Among The Oases Of Tunisia • Norman Douglas
... the wits of the 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 done, the old woman gave a tolerant: "Noa—noa! They ...
— The Testing of Diana Mallory • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... but beside it stood a peculiar and unexplained erection, shaped like a pagoda, in three tiers of black and battered tar-boarding. It had a slight cant towards the church, and suggested nothing so much as a disreputable Victorian widow, in tippet, mantle and crinoline, seeking the support of a stone wall ...
— Joanna Godden • Sheila Kaye-Smith
... Ashridge Park I remembered that a year ago I had been bicycling down to the football field for a punt about on Upper. As I listened to a lecture on the establishment of an infantry brigade, I thought of the sixth form sitting under that fine scholar and Wordsworthian Nowell Smith to a discussion of Victorian poetry. In the evenings on my way to night operations, passing Berkhamsted School and looking at the lighted windows, I would think, "At Sherborne now they are sitting round the games study fire waiting for the bell to ring for hall". Day by day, hour by hour, I pictured ...
— The Loom of Youth • Alec Waugh
... MILLS [LXIX]. When we remember early and mid-Victorian conditions in English mills and the conditions of the sweat shops in New York and other American cities (vide "Susan Lenox"), we shall be less inclined to take a harsh view of industrial Japan during a period of transition. But it is to ...
— The Foundations of Japan • J.W. Robertson Scott
... the Victorian era witnessed three great agitations, two of which ended in fiasco and the third in a triumph which wrought tremendous changes in the kingdom. "Chartism," "Repeal," and "Free Trade" were the three topics on which the ...
— Ten Englishmen of the Nineteenth Century • James Richard Joy
... them and Starmidge and Easleby glanced round before taking the chairs to which Mr. Stipp had pointed. There was little to see. A big, roomy desk, middle-Victorian in style, some heavy middle-Victorian chairs, a well-worn carpet and rug, a book-case filled with peerages, baronetages, county directories, Army lists, Navy lists, and other similar volumes of reference to high life, a map or ...
— The Chestermarke Instinct • J. S. Fletcher
... 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 ...
— The Three Clerks • Anthony Trollope
... made up of American residents of Melbourne and members of the Victorian Cricket Association, met us with four-in-hand drags appropriately trimmed with the American colors, and as we entered them and drove up Collins street we felt that we were the observed of all observers. At the Town Hall we were ...
— A Ball Player's Career - Being the Personal Experiences and Reminiscensces of Adrian C. Anson • Adrian C. Anson
... a lady emerged from a distant door at the end of the verandah and walked towards me. I can tell you I was mighty surprised, for not only was Captain Malet-Marsac a lone bachelor and a misogynist of blameless life, but the lady looked as though she had stepped straight out of an Early Victorian phonograph-album. She had on a crinoline sort of dress, a deep lace collar, spring-sidey sort of boots, mittens, and a huge cameo brooch. Also she had long ringlets. Her face is stamped on my memory and I could pick her ...
— Driftwood Spars - The Stories of a Man, a Boy, a Woman, and Certain Other People Who - Strangely Met Upon the Sea of Life • Percival Christopher Wren
... in a crowded street—through all the beauty and freshness of the new city project the bones of the old: the lofty ruins, ivy-hung, of a huge Nob Hill Palace here; the mere foundation, bush-encircled, of a big old family mansion there; elaborate rusty fences of Mid-Victorian iron which enclose nothing; wide low steps of Mid-Victorian marble which lead nowhere. The San Franciscan speaks always with a tender, regretful affection of that dead city, but, as is natural, he speaks of it less and less. For myself, I am glad now that I never saw ...
— The Californiacs • Inez Haynes Irwin
... reverse. Boys she tolerated. In the eyes of young men she sunned herself taking her ease, since these are slow to criticize, swift to believe—between eighteen and eight-and-twenty, that is.—We speak of the mid-Victorian era and then obtaining ...
— Deadham Hard • Lucas Malet
... a gold victorian toothpick from the pocket of her mannish jacket and used it energetically. I shuddered. "Unfortunately," she went on, a little indistinctly, "unfortunately, I lack resources for further experiment ...
— Greener Than You Think • Ward Moore
... of course, obvious. It applies to more than one of my Victorian uncles. "Medium rich" to a cousin or so. More subtle is "medium body." This must be Uncle Hilary; he takes little exercise nowadays and his figure is suffering. Soon he will be "full-bodied" or "full and round." "Elegant, high class" is my Cousin Isabel. "Pretty flavour" also is hers. ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 159, December 22, 1920 • Various
... the spirit seems to enter one of those prodigious periods of incubation for a type of which we turn automatically to the age that saw the last infirmity of Roman imperialism and of Hellenistic culture. About Victorian men and movements there is something uneasy. It is as though, having seen a shilling come down "tails," one were suddenly to surprise the ghost of a head—you could have sworn that "heads" it was. It doesn't matter, but it's disquieting. And after all, perhaps it does matter. Seen from ...
— Art • Clive Bell
... like fireflies in a gold dusk. One imagined him saying to himself: "A perfect woman! A perfect woman—God bless her!" Saying "God bless" any one, mind you, with a distinct warming of the heart, but a thoroughly late-Victorian disbelief in any god to bless.... At least, you thought ...
— O. Henry Memorial Award Prize Stories of 1920 • Various
... sort of apartment furnished chiefly with bookcases, and having a general atmosphere of early Victorian stuffiness. At a big table in the centre two men were sitting. One was Latimer; the other I recognized ...
— A Rogue by Compulsion • Victor Bridges
... have taken on myself the continuation of the story outlined twenty-three years ago by Mr. Shaw in its late Victorian stage. He had a prior claim to do so; just as he might have shown us the life—but not the letters, for she was illiterate—of Catherine Warren's mother, the frier of fish and letter of lodgings on Tower Hill in the 'forties and 'fifties of the last century; and of ...
— Mrs. Warren's Daughter - A Story of the Woman's Movement • Sir Harry Johnston
... favored him with a frown, and the back view of a sharp shoulder blade. To her mid-Victorian mind Sinclair Spencer was not conducting himself as a gentleman should, and her half-considered resolve to drop him from her visiting list became adamantine as she observed his appearance. Slipping her hand inside Kathleen's arm she led her ...
— I Spy • Natalie Sumner Lincoln
... and elsewhere poured in by the thousand. Before many months the province's population had doubled, and the prayerful and painful era of caution, the day of small things, was whisked away in a whirl of Victorian enterprise. For the next few years the history of Otago became a series of rushes. Economically, no doubt, "rush" is the proper word to apply to the old stampedes to colonial goldfields. But in New Zealand, at any rate, the physical methods of progression thither were laborious ...
— The Long White Cloud • William Pember Reeves
... settled 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 ...
— The 2007 CIA World Factbook • United States
... In the years when Victorian standards and ideals began to dance an increasingly rapid jig before amazed lookers-on, who presently found themselves dancing as madly as the rest—in these years, there lived in Mayfair, in a slice of a house, Robert Gareth-Lawless ...
— Robin • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... year I went to school— The second of life's seven ages— How fragrant of Victorian rule Are these forgotten pages! When meat and fruit were still uncanned; When good CHARLES DICKENS still was writing; And SWINBURNE'S poetry was banned As ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 152, May 2, 1917 • Various
... fling at the artificiality of the eighteenth century, and treated it with contempt as the age of doctrinaires. And now that the twentieth century is coming to the age of discretion, we hear a new term of reproach, Mid-Victorian. It expresses the sum of all villainies in taste. For some fifty years in the nineteenth century the English-speaking race, as it now appears, was under the sway of Mrs. Grundy. It was living in a state of most reprehensible ...
— Humanly Speaking • Samuel McChord Crothers
... Tom Folio's favorite. His poet was Alexander Pope, though he thought Mr. Addison's tragedy of "Cato" contained some proper good lines. Our friend was a wide reader in English classics, greatly preferring the literature of the earlier periods to that of the Victorian age. His smiling, tenderly expressed disapprobation of various modern authors was enchanting. John Keats's verses were monstrous pretty, but over-ornamented. A little too much lucent syrup tinct with cinnamon, ...
— Ponkapog Papers • Thomas Bailey Aldrich
... Hawk's Hall, a timber building of the sort common in Essex as some of its premises still show, has long since disappeared. About the beginning of the Victorian era a fish-merchant of the name of Brown, erected on its site a commodious, comfortable, but particularly hideous mansion of white brick, where he dwelt in affluence in the midst of the large estate that had once belonged to the monks. An attempt ...
— Love Eternal • H. Rider Haggard
... proper legislation, be divested of all its force. At all events no trouble from such a source has been experienced since Australian railways were placed under control of non-partisan commissions, such a commission, having had charge of the Victorian railways since February, 1884, or a little more than one term, they being appointed for seven years instead of for life, as stated by Mr. W. M. Acworth in his argument against ...
— The Arena - Volume 4, No. 20, July, 1891 • Various
... street," as Tennyson calls it, is holy ground to the lover of literature: for at Number 67 lived Arthur Henry Hallam, and diagonally opposite, at Number 50, lived Elizabeth Barrett. This street—utterly commonplace in appearance—is forever associated with the names of our two great Victorian poets: and the association with Tennyson is ...
— Robert Browning: How To Know Him • William Lyon Phelps
... dim reflection of himself in the mirror of the immense Victorian mahogany wardrobe ...
— The Price of Love • Arnold Bennett
... then was in one of its times of slackness, rather than full flow. The great tide of the beginning of the century had ebbed. The tide of the Victorian age had scarcely begun to do more than ripple and flash on the horizon. Byron was dead, and Shelley and Keats and Coleridge and Lamb; Southey's life was on the decline; Wordsworth had long executed his best work; while of the coming men, Carlyle, though in the plenitude ...
— Life of Charles Dickens • Frank Marzials
... and detailed treatment, Taine's History of English Literature, or Chambers' Cyclopaedia of English Literature, two volumes, with specimens of the writers of every period, are the best. E. C. Stedman's Victorian Poets is admirable, as is also his Poets of America. For a bird's eye view of American authors and their works, C. F. Richardson's Primer of American Literature can be studied to advantage, while for more full reference ...
— A Book for All Readers • Ainsworth Rand Spofford
... civil reckoning, so that Port Phillip was really discovered on the afternoon of Monday, January 4th, 1802. According to the Admiralty librarian the change from nautical to civil reckoning in the logs did not take place until 1805.) as the vessel ran along the Victorian coast towards Port Phillip dense smoke from native fires hid the land from view. At 3 P.M. the smoke had cleared away and Bowen, who was at the masthead, espied an opening in the land ahead which "had the appearance of a harbour." Keeping ...
— The Logbooks of the Lady Nelson - With The Journal Of Her First Commander Lieutenant James Grant, R.N • Ida Lee
... be cooler back here," she explained. 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 ...
— Slave Narratives: A Folk History of Slavery in the United States From Interviews with Former Slaves - Georgia Narratives, Part 4 • Works Projects Administration
... We walked, too, in the gardens of the Nymphenburg Palace where the mad king used to play. We visited the State Theatre, where Wagnerian opera still holds the patient ear, and there we heard, not Wagner, but Shakespeare's "Lear," done in a jog-trot, uninspired, later-Victorian style. One felt as if the theatre had slept for thirty years and then, awakening, had resumed in the same style as before. It is often said reproachfully in Germany that Queen Victoria would never have made the late war, and that Victorian England was much ...
— Europe—Whither Bound? - Being Letters of Travel from the Capitals of Europe in the Year 1921 • Stephen Graham
... have 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 ...
— Gilbert Keith Chesterton • Patrick Braybrooke |
