Definition of "respectable"

In former days every tavern of repute kept such a room for its own select circle, a club, or society, of habitués, who met every evening, for a pipe and a cheerful glass. In this way all respectable burgesses, down to fifty years ago, spent their evenings.

1892, Walter Besant, chapter III, in The Ivory Gate […], New York, N.Y.: Harper & Brothers, […]

They forced their way into the meetings called by the respectables; and the respectables disappeared. It was of their own respectable good pleasure that they withdrew.

1872, Thomas Cooper, The Life of Thomas Cooper, page 221

The “respectables”, then, impute to themselves an absence of such character blemishes, or stated in more positive terms, an allegiance to American mainstream morality.

2014, Mitchell Duneier, Philip Kasinitz, Alexandra Murphy, The Urban Ethnography Reader, page 38