shabby-genteel

Even more of Dickens's characters are what became known as "shabby-genteel": people who are keeping up appearances despite precarious finances, as the Dickens family once was.

Our Dickens Judith Flanders 2012

It was a poky, little, shabby-genteel place, where four lines of dingy two-storied brick houses looked out into a small railed-in enclo - sure, where a lawn of weedy grass and a few clumps of faded laurel-bushes made a hard fight against a smoke-laden and uncongenial atmosphere.

Sole Music 2010

Her own shabby-genteel clothing fit in perfectly here, giving her no cause for embarrassment.

red dust Ryn Cricket 2010

But in the original double album, and in the Who's live performances of the work, they created a musical earthquake that opened cracks in the complacency of a shabby-genteel culture.

From The Who To The Whom 2008

I turn now to that commentary: a series of moments when the encounter of well-heeled bibliomaniac and shabby-genteel minor Romantic seems to make them each other's mirror images, united by a common unwillingness to conceive of books as something we might assimilate as pure mental phenomena, and a readiness to allow literariness to be effaced by the volumes that lodge it.

"Wedded to Books': Bibliomania and the Romantic Essayists 2004

He was an eccentric mixture, a novelist of talent but a pamphleteer of genius, an aesthete whose trademark was gritty realism, a radical socialist with a conservative nostalgia for the shabby-genteel England of his Edwardian childhood.

The saint of common decency 2003

In the kind of shabby-genteel family that I am talking about there is far more consciousness of poverty than in any working-class family above the level of the dole.

The Road to Wigan Pier 2004

On the other hand the children of shabby-genteel families could not be blamed if they grew up with a hatred of the working class, typified for them by prowling gangs of

The Road to Wigan Pier 2004

The Faubourg Saint-Germain may have its barriers also, but these are less ‘telling’ to the eyes and imagination of the ‘shabby-genteel.’

Within a Budding Grove 2003

The newcomer was a man short and powerfully built, dressed in a shabby-genteel sort of way, with a massive head covered with black hair, heavy side whiskers and moustache, and a clean shaved chin, which had that blue appearance common to very dark men who shave.

Madame Midas 2003