ten-and-six-penny

Updated: May 27, 2025

For this is what happened to Jill, the English girl, as she sat on her cushions in the Egyptian desert, and has nothing to do with table-turning, or ten-and-six-penny visions in Maida Vale, or whisperings, or touchings in a conveniently darkened room; neither must you put it down to magnetism or hypnotism, or any of those "isms" which we, of a glacier-born country and a machine-made life, so irreverently tag on as terms descriptive to all that which we cannot label and place upon a museum shelf, or conveniently start by motor power.

Joan Conquest - Desert Love

John's wood, or Park Village perhaps even in Camden Town, ride home in the omnibus every night like one of a tin of sardines, wear half-crown gloves, cotton socks, and ten-and-six-penny hats: the prospect was too hideous to be ludicrous even! Would the sweetness of the hand that darned the socks make his over-filled shoe comfortable?

George MacDonald - Weighed and Wanting