English family

“ But you are of English descent surely.”
“I really don’t know,” laughed Lulu. “I know that my parents, and grandparents, and great-grandparents were all born in America, and I never thought of asking about my ancestors any farther back than that.”
“We think a great deal of family in England; [135] it’s a grand thing—a thing to be proud of—if one can boast of a long line of noble ancestors.”
“Yes; papa says the knowledge that we’re descended from honest, upright, pious people is something to be very thankful for. ”

“ Many years ago, an English translation of the first part of this charming tale appeared; and few books have obtained such deserved popularity. The gradual progress of the family from utter destitution and misery, to happiness and abundance, arising from their own labour, perseverance, and obedience, together with the effect produced on the different characters of the sons by the stirring adventures they met with, created a deep and absorbing interest. ”

“ The foregoing charts and text tell a story as instructive as it is amazing. We have here a family of good English blood of the middle class, settling upon the original land purchased from the proprietors of the state in Colonial times, and throughout four generations maintaining a reputation for honor and respectability of which they are justly proud. Then a scion of this family, in an unguarded moment, steps aside from the paths of rectitude and with the help of a feeble-minded girl, starts a line of mental defectives that is truly appalling. ”

“ Though a nation, as an individual, must act on the lines of its own character, and we are, on the whole, well content with our English homes, yet we might learn something from the inclusiveness of the French family, where mother-in-law and father-in-law, aunt and cousins, widow and spinster, are cherished ”

“ In marriage, the custom of all the family living together seems strange to English ideas, and we cannot help picturing petty jealousies and quarrels amongst such a groupe. Custom, however, and their natural happy temper, free from the corroding cares of more populous countries, prevent these. ”

“ In those of English ancestry the disgrace of having a near relative, even so distant as a great-uncle or great-aunt or sister-in-law, "come upon the town" is felt keenly. The sacrifices of many people of limited means to prevent such a catastrophe would make a long and heavy list of discomforts and privations. ”

“ The English Board was apparently shocked by the picture of these dissensions. ‘When the Trinity House can,’ I find my grandfather writing at Beachy Head, in 1834, ‘they do not appoint two keepers, they disagree so ill. A man who has a family is assisted by his family ”

“ A FAMILY on the throne is an interesting idea also. It brings down the pride of sovereignty to the level of petty life. ”

“ It is pleasant to think of this royal family—parents, children, and grand-children—laying aside the cares of royalty and state, and meeting every summer at the old home, like any family in the lower walks of life, in common love and affection, and enjoying themselves in simple ways. ”

“ The greatness of England, sir, strikes its roots in the old families of England. They may be rich, or they may be poor—that don’t matter. An old family is an old family; it’s sad to see their hearths and homes sold to wealthy manufacturers who don’t know who their own grandfathers were. Would you allow me to ask what is the family motto of the Goldenhearts?”
Shall I own the truth? The bottles circulated freely at Mr. Farnaby’s table—I began to wonder whether he was quite sober. ”

“ The filial respect, the family government, the family economy, the family unity, the family simplicity, and withal the family hospitality, so sincere and generous as to include the soldier, the sailor, the farmer, John Eliot the missionary, the London lawyer, and the Oxford scholar, who are welcomed without fuss or fume to succotash, hominy, hasty pudding, pumpkin pie, and a feather bed, exhibit a type of family life that puts to shame a merely outward colonial home—a house—full of things, and empty of real lives. ”

“ The whole contrast between our two civilizations, French and American, is here,—in the family. Thinking on this to-night, I understand Bernoline better. The sense of duty that dominates her life and makes sacrifice so easily possible is the sense of family solidarity. Love of the mother, respect for the authority of the father, companionship with the children,—it is a France in miniature, and that greater love of country is but a tradition of family pride. ”

“ But I suppose it is always the case in England that, when a marriage is being arranged, one ought to follow the direction of one's family, as, for instance, a prince, called to rule a hereditary kingdom, ought to hear his parliament. ”

“ They were of people who had a life in common with the house, wives and mothers and daughters, sons and husbands and fathers, married into it or born into it, and all receiving from it as much as they imparted to it, as if they were of one substance with it and it shared their consciousness that it was the home of their race. We have no like terms in America, and our generations, which are each separately housed, can only guess at the feeling for the place of their succession which the generations of such an English house must feel. ”

“ In England, it frequently happens, where a man has seven, eight, or more children, there has not been a descendant in the next generation, occasioned by the difficulties the number of children has brought on the family, in a luxurious dear country, and which have prevented their marrying. ”

“ Now it is the boast of Englishmen that our aristocracy is a supremely reasonable one, that there is no nobility clinging to the children of cadets, and that the highest peer marries freely into the commercial classes, and has done so for centuries past without requiring sixteen quarters in a wife, or even two generations of gentility. All the more noteworthy is it that family after family passes away as if it were laden with a mysterious curse. ”

“ Other ship-loads of maids followed, and with the establishment of these Virginian families was dealt, as is everywhere else that the family exists, a fatal blow at a community of property and interests, but the colony flourished, and the civilization of the new world was begun. For the unit of society may be the individual, but the molecule of civilization is the family. ”

“ All these families were made up of persons who preserved a high tradition of courtesy, of true graciousness of life, of refined speech, with a family pride, and a squeamish sense of noblesse oblige which suited well with the kind of life they led; a life wholly filled with occupations which become contemptible so soon as they cease to be accessories and take the chief place in existence. ”

“ Isolated from all previous connections, hearing no word from England, living in the heavy, monotonous routine of a family with one man for head, and this man esteemed a hero by most of those around him, simply because he was the only man in the family,—these facts alone would have formed strong presumptions that most girls would have yielded to the offers of such a one. ”

“ The beginning of society, it has been said a thousand times, is the family, a natural association of kindred by blood, composed of father, mother and their descendants. In this family, the father is absolute master of his wife, his children and the goods of the little community; at his death his eldest son succeeds him; and in course of time this association of kindred, by natural increase and by adoption, develops into the clan, gens, or γένος. ”

“ The writers who, from Plato to Locke, and thence onwards, have discoursed upon the family, have esteemed it as the central pivot in human affairs, yet perhaps these thinkers have alike failed to lay sufficient emphasis upon two important features in what may be termed its unwritten constitution or natural structure. The first of these is that, as the family consists normally of a man in his prime and of a woman and children, the balance of sheer power inclines in favour of the man. ”

“ The consideration of the house and its parts and furniture, and of the outward forms of domestic life, leads us naturally to that of the constitution of the family. It was the chief pride of the aristocratic class to live very extravagantly, and to support a great household, with an immense number of personal attendants of different classes. In the first place the old system of fostering, which was kept up to a comparatively late period, added to the number of the lord’s or knight’s family. ”

“ In time, however, through the marriage of the daughters—for in savage life the young men usually roam off and take wives elsewhere, while the young women stay at home—instead of the original single family, we have the grown daughters, with their husbands, living still with their parents and rearing children, thus forming a group of families, closely united by kinship. ”

“ Your good and bad qualities are weighed in the scale of domestic criticism; for every member of the family sees in you, eventually, a bridegroom, brother-in-law, son-in-law, uncle, or master. At all events you are considered as a suitor for the privileges of a friend of the family, for the slight and passing acquaintances of continental life are unknown in these circles. ”

“ It was hard explaining how all our desires lay towards the completer and completer affirming of the individual, that we in Anglo-Saxon countries felt that the family was dead as a social unit, that new cohesions were in the making. ”

“ Where father and mother sit at the head and foot of the table, their sons with their wives and their children each in his or her place, often to the number of twenty souls—all living under one roof, one name, and one bond of family unity—there is likely to be a great similarity of feeling upon all questions of family pride, especially among people who discuss everything with vehemence, from European politics to the family cook. ”

“ A family in England would be justly esteemed objects of great pity, if they were burnt out of their home in the midst of winter, although many friendly habitations might be humanely opened for their reception. ”

“ The Imperial mother may virtually go to sleep, until aroused at this stage of her children's and her grandchildren's growth by a call to adjudicate, as the supreme parent, upon the impending and, perhaps, contentious question of separation, while she finds at the same moment that a forty-fifth or a fiftieth member is about to be added to the world-wide colonial family. ”

“ The religious aspect of ancestor-worship, the political aspect of the building up of great families from which the state could derive its power and the economic necessity of having the industrial system develop more highly all vocations, combined in the patriarchal system to make the family the main expression of social order and the chief heir of social privilege. ”

“ They lived, in fact, as one great family bound in close association by their habits of life and their family relationships, and they knew no such unnatural distinction as king or subject, lord or vassal. ”

“ The family, which the fiercest blasts of the revolutionary tempest in the last century had left untouched, is, in our day, radically assailed in its two essential foundations, marriage and inheritance. ”

“ In some there were four families—the grand-parents, the parents, the eldest son with his wife and family, and a daughter or two with their husbands and children. The eldest son, who inherits the house and land, almost invariably brings his wife to his father's house, where she often becomes little better than a slave to her mother-in-law. ”

“ Let me say on this score that I could name a long list of families in which this custom prevailed, and must say that the private and domestic life of these people was far above that of the average families in fashionable society. Almost invariably the members of each family were devoted to each other and were refined and intelligent. ”

“ There is a certain profit in studying one's own ancestry. It has been somewhat astonishing to me to find how very slight are the social oscillations traceable in a middle-class family and the families it intermarries with through several centuries. A professional family tends to form a caste marrying within that caste. An ambitious member of the family may marry a baronet's daughter, and another, less pretentious, a village tradesman's daughter ”

“ Whole families have come. One whole family we see clearly, of three generations: the father picking, the mother shovelling, the young ones wheeling assiduous; old grandfather, hoary with ninety-three years, holds in his arms the youngest of all: [297] frisky, not helpful this one ”

“ Failing father or husband, the unmarried daughters were placed under the guardianship of the nearest male members of the family. Thus the family, in the narrower sense in which we commonly use the word, as meaning descendants of a common father or grandfather, was, as it were, a single point of growth in a larger organism, the gens, which consisted of all those who shared a common ancestry. ”

“ The royal family is as a mother to the kingdom, a nursing mother. She is a lioness, fierce, and cruel, and ravenous. When they had left their divinity they soon lost their humanity too; and, when they feared not God, neither did they regard man. ”

“ A work in which every gentleman will find a domestic interest, as it contains the fullest account of every known family in the United Kingdom. It is a dictionary of all names, families, and their origin,—of every man's neighbour and friend, if not of his own relatives and immediate connexions. ”

“ The sons and daughters of the family are gentlemen and ladies by birthright—and were the former to be seen at the plough, or the latter at the churn, or the wash tub, the honour of the family would be stained, and the dignity of the house degraded. ”