shabby-gentility

Updated: July 14, 2025

Now, shabby people, God knows, may be found anywhere, and genteel people are not articles of greater scarcity out of London than in it; but this compound of the two—this shabby-gentility—is as purely local as the statue at Charing-cross, or the pump at Aldgate.

Charles Dickens - Sketches by Boz, illustrative of everyday life and every-day people