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Updated: June 22, 2025
He finished dressing, putting on his discriminatingly chosen shabby-genteel clothes with a care for the effect he intended them to produce. The collar and cuffs of his shirt were frayed and yellow, and he fastened his collar with a pin and tied his worn necktie carelessly. His overcoat was beginning to wear a greenish shade and look threadbare, so was his hat.
My man John, who used to drive two of those six equine females which I told you I had owned, for, look you, my friends, simple though I stand here, I am one that has been driven in his "kerridge," not using that term, as liberal shepherds do, for any battered old shabby-genteel go-cart that has more than one wheel, but meaning thereby a four-wheeled vehicle with a pole, my man John, I say, was a retired soldier.
The public, represented by a boy with a comforter, and a shabby-genteel man secretly eating crumbs out of his coat pockets, was warming itself at a stove in the centre of the Court.
Now, a good hat like yours has a long life, and remains serviceable long after it has become shabby; and the probability is that many of your hats pass from owner to owner; from you to the shabby-genteel, and from them to the shabby ungenteel.
They included bankrupts, hypochondriacs, persons who were what is called "out of a situation" from fault or lucklessness, the inefficient of the professional class shabby-genteel men, who did not know how to get rid of the weary time between breakfast and dinner, and the yet more weary time between dinner and dark.
The shabby-genteel little houses of the Appian Way, in Cambridge, whose window-eyes with their blue-green lids had watched Bennie Hooker come and go, trudging back and forth to lectures and recitations, first as boy and then as man, for thirty years, must have blinked with amazement at the sight of the little professor as he started on the afterward famous Hooker Expedition to Labrador in search of the Flying Ring.
He first attracted our notice, by sitting opposite to us in the reading-room at the British Museum; and what made the man more remarkable was, that he always had before him a couple of shabby-genteel books—two old dog’s-eared folios, in mouldy worm-eaten covers, which had once been smart.
The shabby-genteel middle-class schoolmaster of the England of to-day, in or a little way out of orders, with his smattering of Greek, his Latin that leads nowhere, his fatuous mathematics, his gross ignorance of pedagogics, and his incomparable snobbishness, certainly does not represent the schoolmaster of this coming class.
A ragged boy, established at the crossing, who had indeed rendered himself conspicuous by his endeavours to ferry Puckers over dry-shod, was accosted by a shabby-genteel and remarkably good-looking man in the following vernacular "On this minnit, off at six, Buster; two bob an' a bender, and a three of eye-water, in?"
He turned at last into a narrow, quiet street, and going up to the door of a shabby-genteel house, applied the knocker with considerable vigour. "Now then, go along with you; we don't want your services here; we clear off our own snow, we do. Imprence! to knock, too, as if he was a gentleman!"
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