Quotes: Social Class (1)

 Social class       26           "Raveloe lay low among the bushy trees and the rutted lanes, aloof from the currents of industrial energy and Puritan earnestness: the rich ate and drank freely, accepting gout and apoplexy as things that ran mysteriously in respectable families, and the poor thought the rich were entirely in the right of it to lead a jolly life." George Eliot, Silas Marner.

Social class       36           "The lives of those rural forefathers, whom we are apt to think very prosaic figures--men whose only work was to ride round their land, getting heavier and heavier in their saddles, and who passed the rest of their days in the half-listless gratification of senses dulled by monotony...and then what was left to them, especially when they had become too heavy for the hunt, or for carrying a gun over the furrows, but to drink and get merry, or to drink and get angry, so that they might be independent of variety, and say over again with eager emphasis the things they had said already any time that twelvemonth." George Eliot, Silas Marner.

Social class       86          " ...something in the presence of the old Squire distinguishable from that of the ordinary farmers in the parish, who were perhaps every whit as refined a he, but, having slouched their way through life with a consciousness of being in the vicinity of their 'betters,' wanted that self-possession and authoritativeness which belonged to a man who thought of his superiors as remote existences with whom he had personally little more to do than with America or the stars...had been used to parish homage all his life, used to the presupposition that his family, his tankards, and everything that was his, were the oldest and best...." George Eliot, Silas Marner.

Social class       199         "…but we must remember that many of the impressions which Godfrey was likely to gather concerning the laboring people around him would favor the idea that deep affection can hardly go along with callus palms and scant means…." George Eliot, Silas Marner.

Social class       218         Eppie: "I shouldn’t know what to think on or to wish for with fine things about me, as I haven’t been used to…it ‘ud be poor work for me to put on things and ride in a gig, and sit in a place at church, as ‘ud make them as I’m fond of think me unfitting company for ‘em." George Eliot, Silas Marner.