As it was

A few quotes from old fiction – snippets of life as it was.

Now an old basket, stuck sideways on a chimney by way of cowl, is not an uncommon thing in parts of the country, but it is very unusual in London.
Arthur Morrison

He would teach a fisherman, who had tried to raise potatoes unsuccessfully, how to fertilize the sandy strand with seaweed and the refuse from fish, as he had seen the people on the coast of England do with marked success; all was in vain.
August Strindberg

One afternoon he sees them lighting the lamps in the street. A cousin draws his attention to the fact that they have no oil and no wicks, but only a metal burner. They are the first gas-lamps. 
August Strindberg

Then, there's the footman, who stands outside, with a bag of oranges and a jug of toast-and-water, and sees the play for nothing through the little pane of glass in the box-door—it's cheap at a guinea; they gain by taking a box.'
Charles Dickens

And it wasn’t rats. Everybody knows the kind of sound that rats make, scampering about an empty room.
R. Austin Freeman

Strange gaunt females used to come down from London, with small parcels full of tough food that tasted of travelling-bags and contained so much nutrition that a portmanteau full of it would furnish the daily rations of an army.

E. F. Benson 

...as the years passed and the countryside faded away under the withering touch of mechanical transport.
R. Austin Freeman

Cosh-carrying was near to being the major industry of the Jago. The cosh was a foot length of iron rod, with a knob at one end, and a hook (or a ring) at the other. The craftsman, carrying it in his coat sleeve, waited about dark staircase corners till his wife (married or not) brought in a well drunken stranger: when, with a sudden blow behind the head, the stranger was happily coshed, and whatever was found on him as he lay insensible was the profit on the transaction. In the hands of capable practitioners this industry yielded a comfortable subsistence for no great exertion.
Arthur Morrison

He still loved, too, such Devonshire dishes of his boyhood, as “junket” and “toad in the hole”; and one of his favourite memories was that of the meals snatched at the old coaching Inn at Exeter, while they changed the horses of the Plymouth to the London coach. Twenty-four hours at ten miles an hour, without even a break! Glorious drive! Glorious the joints of beef, the cherry brandy! Glorious the old stage coachman, a “monstrous fat chap” who at that time ruled the road!
John Galsworthy 

Or a miller would call out:— "Are we responsible for what is in the sacks? We find in them a quantity of small seed which we cannot sift out, and which we are obliged to send through the mill-stones; there are tares, fennel, vetches, hempseed, fox-tail, and a host of other weeds, not to mention pebbles, which abound in certain wheat, especially in Breton wheat. I am not fond of grinding Breton wheat, any more than long-sawyers like to saw beams with nails in them. You can judge of the bad dust that makes in grinding. And then people complain of the flour. They are in the wrong. The flour is no fault of ours."

Victor Hugo 

The room was unpapered, and not more than ten feet square; it contained a double bed, over whose dirty mattress was stretched a black-brown rag; a fireplace and no fire; a saucepan, but nothing in it; two cups, a tin or two, no carpet, a knife and spoon, a basin, some photographs, and rags of clothing; all blackish and discoloured.

John Galsworthy

Having passed a few more compliments, we saluted and walked on; and, coming presently to the edge of the cliff, lay down on the thyme and the crumbled leaf-dust. All the small singing birds had long been shot and eaten; there came to us no sound but that of the waves swimming in on a gentle south wind.
John Galsworthy

There that poor unfortunate woman lay, with her unconscious tyrant of a husband snoring beside her, desolately wakeful under the night-light in the large, luxurious bedroom — three servants sleeping overhead, champagne in the cellar, furs in the wardrobe, valuable lace round her neck at that very instant, grand piano in the drawing-room, horses in the stable, stuffed bear in the hall — and her life was made a blank for want of fourteen and fivepence!

Arnold Bennett

As for Hyacinthe, he had gone off in pursuit of a flight of larks, with his hands crammed full of pebbles. Whenever one of the birds, distressed by the wind, stopped still a couple of seconds in, mid-air with quiver­ing wings, he felled it to the ground with the skill of a savage. Three fell, and he thrust them bleeding into his pocket.

Emile Zola

Then, the train rattled among the house-tops, and among the ragged sides of houses torn down to make way for it, and over the swarming streets, and under the fruitful earth, until it shot across the river: bursting over the quiet surface like a bomb-shell, and gone again as if it had exploded in the rush of smoke and steam and glare. A little more, and again it roared across the river, a great rocket: spurning the watery turnings and doublings with ineffable contempt, and going straight to its end, as Father Time goes to his.

Charles Dickens

Back-swording and wrestling were the most serious holiday pursuits of the Vale--those by which men attained fame--and each village had its champion. I suppose that, on the whole, people were less worked then than they are now; at any rate, they seemed to have more time and energy for the old pastimes.
Thomas Hughes

Out in the Pool certain other boats caught the eye as they dodged about among the colliers, because each carried a bright fire amidships, in a brazier, beside a man, two small barrels of beer, and a very large handbell. The men were purlmen, Grandfather Nat told me, selling liquor — hot beer chiefly, in the cold mornings — to the men on the colliers, or on any other craft thereabout.

Arthur Morrison