Category: Essays, Letters & Speeches
Respectable is a word that has been wrested from its true meaning of worthy of respect, and applied to the most sordid characteristics and conditions of human life. Respectability, like vulgarity and prudery, is an Anglo-Saxon attribute appertinent chiefly to the huge middle-c...
It is the boast of the ordinary patriotic Briton that he lives in a highly civilised country. During his tutelage, he learns that climate, or insularity of position on the face...
7. CHAPTER VII.Everyone knows Pugsley, _the great Pugsley_, proprietor of Pugsley's Pure Piquant Pickles. You have seen his gracefully alliterative advertisements on the hoardings at the railw...
4. CHAPTER IV.Women are particularly susceptible to the disease of Respectability. Our sisters esteem rank and birth; they bow down to all kinds of idols with a veneration seldom equalled in...
6. CHAPTER VI."I hardly know an _intellectual_ man, even, who is so broad and truly liberal that you can think aloud in his society. Most with whom you endeavour to talk soon come to a stand...
11. CHAPTER XI.Respectable reader, you are perchance by this time partly inclined to at least agree that this disease of yours may be harmful to yourself and to others. I have not minced my wo...
1. CHAPTER I.Respectable is a word that has been wrested from its true meaning of worthy of respect, and applied to the most sordid characteristics and conditions of human life. Respectabili...
3. CHAPTER III."Is she a Lady or a Person?" asked a British Matron when I spoke of a certain young woman. The question is well calculated to set one pondering on those nice distinctions of cla...
5. CHAPTER V.That which people call thorough Respectability is, in the main, very bad morality. I do not state that the disease under discussion invariably annihilates the subject's sense of...
2. CHAPTER II."The evil is not merely a stagnation of blood, but a stagnation of spirit. Many, no doubt, are well disposed, but sluggish by constitution and by habit, or they cannot conceive...
8. CHAPTER VIII."I sojourned perforce for a long while in Villadom," says an enemy of Respectability; "and I came away with some of its froust about my person." You can't bide there without get...
9. CHAPTER IX."Men, and still more women, who lift themselves above the ordinary standard by their philosophical tastes and speculations, may indeed be accounted fortunate if they escape calu...