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Updated: June 22, 2025
But it is more important to say that all three books are delightfully authentic studies of upper-class society in England as Thackeray knew it: the social range is comparatively restricted, for even the rascals are shabby-genteel.
Running to the nearest door-way he found it to be the wrong one, and before he found the right one and reached the street the two soldiers had vanished from the scene. "You seem to be a stranger here, sir. Can I direct you?" said an insinuating voice at his elbow. The speaker was an elderly man of shabby-genteel appearance and polite address. Miles did not quite like the look of him.
This was in the early days, when Dad, threatened with starvation, had passed the hotels at a run to avoid temptation, for which he made amends by drinking himself blind for a week at a time. Then, after years of genteel poverty, the Duchess had consented to Clara giving lessons on the piano that last refuge of the shabby-genteel.
At the window of a shabby-genteel London lodging-house a young woman sat, this dreary April evening, looking out at the cheering prospect of dripping roofs and muddy pavement. She sat with her chin resting on her hands, staring vacantly at the passers-by, with eyes that took no interest in what she saw.
Dick took him in from top to toe, in a long incredulous stare; but turned and went without another word. It may have been five minutes before the door opened and Mrs. Flood entered, with an air nicely balanced between curiosity, hauteur, and injured innocence a shabby-genteel woman, in a widow's cap and a black cashmere gown which had been too near the frying-pan. "Good morning." Mrs.
There are the early walks through the parks and green Kensington Gardens, which now change their character of resort, and seem rural and countrylike, but yet with more life than the country; for on the benches beneath the trees, and along the sward, and up the malls, are living beings enough to interest the eye and divert the thoughts, if you are a guesser into character, and amateur of the human face, fresh nursery-maid and playful children; and the old shabby-genteel, buttoned-up officer, musing on half-pay, as he sits alone in some alcove of Kenna, or leans pensive over the rail of the vacant Ring; and early tradesman, or clerk from the suburban lodging, trudging brisk to his business, for business never ceases in London.
A glance at that depressed face, and timorous air of conscious poverty, will make your heart ache—always supposing that you are neither a philosopher nor a political economist. We were once haunted by a shabby-genteel man; he was bodily present to our senses all day, and he was in our mind’s eye all night.
But the shabby-genteel man was nowhere in sight. WHEN Joseph Wylie disappeared from the scene, Nancy Rouse made a discovery which very often follows the dismissal of a suitor that she was considerably more attached to him than she had thought. The house became dull, the subordinate washerwomen languid; their taciturnity irritated and depressed Nancy by turns.
It was a poky, little, shabby-genteel place, where four lines of dingy two-storied brick houses looked out into a small railed-in enclosure, where a lawn of weedy grass and a few clumps of faded laurel-bushes made a hard fight against a smoke-laden and uncongenial atmosphere.
He is not shabby-genteel. The ‘harmonic meetings’ at some fourth-rate public-house, or the purlieus of a private theatre, are his chosen haunts; he entertains a rooted antipathy to any kind of work, and is on familiar terms with several pantomime men at the large houses.
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