Victorian Christmas Quotes

We've searched our database for all the quotes and captions related to Victorian Christmas. Here they are! All 38 of them:

Oh, man," said Jack. "Everyone was nice to us when we looked rich. Now it feels like the whole world's against us.
Mary Pope Osborne (A Ghost Tale for Christmas Time (Magic Tree House, #44))
This is going to be hideously trite,” he says. “Prepare yourself.” “Prepared.” “It’s Christmas. You love them. They love you. More than anything else, that’s what matters. Things will happen the way they happen, and you’ll sort out the way you feel about them, and it will be all right. And you’ll keep loving them, and they’ll keep loving you, and … God bless us, everyone.” I consider this. “Kind of a weak ending.” “I can’t help suspecting it would have resonated more if I were a sickly child in Victorian Britain,” he agrees wistfully.
Hannah Johnson (Know Not Why (Know Not Why, #1))
My intention in writing this book is not to hunt and name the killer. I wish instead to retrace the footsteps of five women, to consider their experiences within the context of their era, and to follow their paths through both the gloom and the light. They were worth more to us than the empty human shells we have taken them for: they were children who cried for their mothers; they were young women who fell in love; they endured childbirth and the deaths of parents; they laughed and celebrated Christmas. They argued with their siblings, they wept, they dreamed, they hurt, they enjoyed small triumphs. The courses their lives took mirrored that of so many other women of the Victorian age, and yet so singular in the way they ended. It is for them that I write this book. I do so in the hope that we may now hear their stories clearly and give back to them that which was so brutally taken away with their lives: their dignity.
Hallie Rubenhold (The Five: The Lives of Jack the Ripper's Women)
She gritted her teeth. The man dances like a clod. I’d rather dance with Mr Jenkins, who can barely move.
A.F. Stewart (Christmas Lites III)
...и благодарение на смъртта на този човек, къщата беше по-щастлива!
Charles Dickens (A Christmas Carol)
ROBERT DOUGLAS-FAIRHURST is Fellow and Tutor in English at Magdalen College, University of Oxford. He is the author of Victorian Afterlives: The Shaping of Influence in Nineteenth-Century Literature (2002).
Charles Dickens (A Christmas Carol and Other Christmas Books)
Една котка дращеше по вратата, а под каменния под на камината се чуваше звук от гризене на плъхове. Какво искаха те в стаята на смъртта и защо бяха тъй неспокойни и тревожни, Скрудж не дръзваше да си помисли.
Charles Dickens (A Christmas Carol)
The tradition of telling ghost stories on Christmas Eve was firmly established by the Victorian period. Its origins are in the early Christian belief that souls in purgatory were most active on the day before a holy
Tanya Kirk (Chill Tidings: Dark Tales of the Christmas Season (British Library Tales of the Weird Book 19))
They are worth more to us than the empty human shells we have taken them for; they were children who cried for their mothers, they were young women who fell in love; they endured childbirth, the death of parents; they laughed, and they celebrated Christmas. They argued with their siblings, they wept, they dreamed, they hurt, they enjoyed small triumphs. The courses their lives took mirrored that of so many other women of the Victorian age, and yet were so singular in the way they ended.
Hallie Rubenhold (The Five: The Untold Lives of the Women Killed by Jack the Ripper)
The tradition of telling ghost stories on Christmas Eve was firmly established by the Victorian period. Its origins are in the early Christian belief that souls in purgatory were most active on the day before a holy day, and thus more likely to intrude into our world.
Tanya Kirk (Chill Tidings: Dark Tales of the Christmas Season (British Library Tales of the Weird Book 19))
To revive the Victorian ghost, invite it in on its own terms. Wait for dark. Dim the lights. If you can arrange a draft to waft through the room, all the better. Meeting the ghosts of Christmas does not limit you to Dickens’s edifying spirits; instead, prepare yourself for a sensual experience of midwinter leisure and Victorian story-telling tradition.
Tara Moore (The Valancourt Book of Victorian Christmas Ghost Stories)
There's an arched bridge that spans one of the narrow spots, and since it's Christmas, it's been decorated with garlands of evergreens and a big wreath with a red bow. There are Victorian gas lamps lining the pathways, and in the middle of the lake is a small island where a hut with a fireplace offers skaters a chance to warm themselves and drink hot chocolate.
Heather Vogel Frederick (Home for the Holidays)
Wild animals enjoying one another and taking pleasure in their world is so immediate and so real, yet this reality is utterly absent from textbooks and academic papers about animals and ecology. There is a truth revealed here, absurd in its simplicity. This insight is not that science is wrong or bad. On the contrary: science, done well, deepens our intimacy with the world. But there is a danger in an exclusively scientific way of thinking. The forest is turned into a diagram; animals become mere mechanisms; nature's workings become clever graphs. Today's conviviality of squirrels seems a refutation of such narrowness. Nature is not a machine. These animals feel. They are alive; they are our cousins, with the shared experience kinship implies. And they appear to enjoy the sun, a phenomenon that occurs nowhere in the curriculum of modern biology. Sadly, modern science is too often unable or unwilling to visualize or feel what others experience. Certainly science's "objective" gambit can be helpful in understanding parts of nature and in freeing us from some cultural preconceptions. Our modern scientific taste for dispassion when analyzing animal behaviour formed in reaction to the Victorian naturalists and their predecessors who saw all nature as an allegory confirming their cultural values. But a gambit is just an opening move, not a coherent vision of the whole game. Science's objectivity sheds some assumptions but takes on others that, dressed up in academic rigor, can produce hubris and callousness about the world. The danger comes when we confuse the limited scope of our scientific methods with the true scope of the world. It may be useful or expedient to describe nature as a flow diagram or an animal as a machine, but such utility should not be confused with a confirmation that our limited assumptions reflect the shape of the world. Not coincidentally, the hubris of narrowly applied science serves the needs of the industrial economy. Machines are bought, sold, and discarded; joyful cousins are not. Two days ago, on Christmas Eve, the U.S. Forest Service opened to commercial logging three hundred thousand acres of old growth in the Tongass National Forest, more than a billion square-meter mandalas. Arrows moved on a flowchart, graphs of quantified timber shifted. Modern forest science integrated seamlessly with global commodity markets—language and values needed no translation. Scientific models and metaphors of machines are helpful but limited. They cannot tell us all that we need to know. What lies beyond the theories we impose on nature? This year I have tried to put down scientific tools and to listen: to come to nature without a hypothesis, without a scheme for data extraction, without a lesson plan to convey answers to students, without machines or probes. I have glimpsed how rich science is but simultaneously how limited in scope and in spirit. It is unfortunate that the practice of listening generally has no place in the formal training of scientists. In this absence science needlessly fails. We are poorer for this, and possibly more hurtful. What Christmas Eve gifts might a listening culture give its forests? What was the insight that brushed past me as the squirrels basked? It was not to turn away from science. My experience of animals is richer for knowing their stories, and science is a powerful way to deepen this understanding. Rather, I realized that all stories are partly wrapped in fiction—the fiction of simplifying assumptions, of cultural myopia and of storytellers' pride. I learned to revel in the stories but not to mistake them for the bright, ineffable nature of the world.
David George Haskell (The Forest Unseen: A Year’s Watch in Nature)
Grievous words stir up anger.
Liz Curtis Higgs (A Wreath of Snow: A Victorian Christmas Novella)
No one knows the weight of another’s burden. GEORGE HERBERT
Liz Curtis Higgs (A Wreath of Snow: A Victorian Christmas Novella)
Gordon could ignore his conscience, but he could not disregard the Almighty.
Liz Curtis Higgs (A Wreath of Snow: A Victorian Christmas Novella)
At Christmas, we remember God’s gift to us by giving gifts to each other.
Catherine Palmer (A Victorian Christmas)
Snow began to fall as he laid his head on the ice and cried. Alone in a Currier & Ives painting, beside a Victorian gazebo adorned with colorful Christmas lights, Bob Cole lost his only son.
James Duffy (eDream)
weeks. It was the same stuff every year. Santa mugs filled with candy canes. Canisters of homemade hot chocolate mix. Starbucks cards she’d never use—not because she didn’t like coffee but because she rarely made the seven-mile drive to the nearest Starbucks. Enough cookies for a bake sale wrapped in various colors of cellophane and tied with ribbons. Garish ornaments that would never hang on her tasteful Victorian tree in the bay window—which she hadn’t even put up this year. The odd handmade scarf in a color outside a palette she would ever don. Spruce Valley was small, with distinct but overlapping social circles. Re-gifting was next to impossible, even if she waited a year, though she might be able to give away the Starbucks cards if she took them out of the envelopes. She might use the hot chocolate mix, though she never found it a bother to make hot cocoa on the stove. At least the mix would keep. She had no appetite for the cookies.
Olivia Newport (Colors of Christmas: Two Contemporary Stories Celebrate the Hope of Christmas)
Part 2: After that, he’d turned to fighting, and not the good kind either. Finn, physically older by seven years, mentally older by about a hundred, had single-handedly saved Sean from just about every situation he’d ever landed himself in. Thanks to Finn, there’d been a lot fewer situations than there should’ve been and it hadn’t been for lack of trying. Fact was, everyone knew Sean had taken the slowest possible route on his way to growing up, complete with plenty of detours, but he’d hit his stride now. Or at least he hoped so because Finn was counting on him in a big way over the next week and Sean had let him down enough for a lifetime. He wouldn’t let him down now. Sean pulled into the B&B’s parking lot and turned to face the crowd he’d driven from San Francisco to Napa. And he did mean crowd. They’d had to rent a fourteen-seat passenger van to fit everyone, and he was the weekend’s designated driver. Oh, how times had changed. “Ready?” he asked. Finn nodded. Pru was bouncing up and down in her seat with excitement. Willa, her BFF, was doing the same. Keane, Willa’s boyfriend, opened the door for everyone to tumble out. It was two weeks before Christmas and the rolling hills of Napa Valley were lined with grape vines for as far as the eye could see, not that they could actually see them right now. It was late, pitch dark, and rain had been pouring down steadily all day, which didn’t detract from the beauty of the Victorian B&B in front of them. It did, however, detract from Sean’s eagerness to go out in the rain to get to it though. Not Pru and Willa. The two raced through the downpour laughing and holding hands with Elle, Colbie, Kylie, and Tina—the rest of Pru’s posse—moving more cautiously in deference to the preservation of their heels. Sean, Finn, and Finn’s posse—Archer, Keane, Spence, and Joe—followed. They all tumbled in the front door of the B&B and stopped short in awe of the place decorated with what had to be miles of garland and lights, along with a huge Christmas tree done up in all the bells and whistles. This place could’ve passed for Santa’s own house. Collectively the group “oohed” and “ahhhed” before turning expectedly to Sean. This was because he was actually in charge of the weekend’s activities that would lead up to the final countdown to the wedding happening next week at a winery about twenty minutes up the road. This was what a best man did apparently, take care of stuff. All the stuff. And that Finn had asked Sean to be his best man in the first place over any of the close friends with them this weekend had the pride overcoming his anxiety of screwing it all up. But the anxiety was making a real strong bid right at the moment. He shook off some of the raindrops and started to head over to the greeting desk and twelve people began to follow. He stopped and was nearly plowed over by the parade. “Wait here,” he instructed, pausing until his very excited group nodded in unison. Jesus. He shouldn’t have poured them that champagne to pre-game before they’d left O’Riley’s, the pub he and Finn owned and operated in San Francisco. And that he was the voice of reason right now was truly the irony of the century. “Stay,” he said firmly and then made his way past the towering Christmas tree lit to within an inch of its life, past the raging fire in the fireplace with candles lining the mantel . . . to the small, quaint check-in desk that had a plate with some amazing looking cookies and a sign that said: yes, these are for you—welcome! “Yum,” Pru said and took one for each hand.
Jill Shalvis (Holiday Wishes (Heartbreaker Bay, #4.5))
In the Victorian times there was much demand for Christmas books, which would make an ideal gift, as well provide amusing entertainment over the holiday period. Without a doubt the most famous of these is Dickens’ A Christmas Carol, published in 1843, but he was by no means the only popular writer of such books. Published in 1847, Thackeray’s first Christmas book, Mrs Perkins’s Ball, is a humorous portrait of a seasonal social gathering, with a broad panorama of guests, from the hilarious sot Mulligan to the prissy middle-class characters he upsets. However, it is Thackeray’s ability as an illustrator that is the most impressive in this novella.
Charles Dickens (Delphi Christmas Collection Volume I (Illustrated) (Delphi Anthologies Book 6))
And please don’t give me some crap about it being Celtic in origin. I’ve researched the subject far more than you and your crackpot crowd and I can assure you that the pagan thing is total bollocks. To start with, the festival of Christmas is not derived from Yule. Yule dates back to 400 AD at the earliest, whereas Christmas is referred to in Roman records some two centuries before that. Also, the birth of Jesus is not a Christianised version of the birth of Mithras … Mithras was not born of a human mother, and his cult came much later during the Empire. There is no provable connection between Christmas and the solstice celebrated by the druids. We don’t even know if the druids celebrated the solstice because they didn’t write anything down, whereas the Romans wrote an awful lot down about Christmas. Sorry to disappoint you, Soph, but Christmas is solidly Christian with a few pagan trappings that the Victorians added because they were midwinter emblems.
Paul Finch (The Christmas You Deserve: five festive terror tales)
said
Nell Harte (The Abandoned Waif's Christmas Miracle: Victorian Romance)
parents. I
Ella Cornish (His Christmas Angel: Victorian Romance)
is common knowledge that many of the Christmas traditions we observe today come from the Victorians. Dickens solidified and immortalized the image of a perfect family Christmas—much of which the English had adopted from the Germans via Prince Albert
Tasha Alexander (That Silent Night (Lady Emily, #10.5))
The Victorian era in England began when Queen Victoria came to the throne in 1837. She ruled for the rest of the century and helped her country become a powerful world empire.
Mary Pope Osborne (A Ghost Tale for Christmas Time (Magic Tree House, #44))
See,” she cried, “the river-bank— the dark rushing stream. Ah, we are all alone, side by side, far away from every one. Fool! if you could read my heart, would you walk so near to the giddy brink ? Do you think the memory of the old love will stay my hand when the chance comes? Old love is dead: you beat it, cursed it to death. How fast does the stream run ? Can a strong man swim against it ? Oh, if I could be sure — sure that one push would end it all and give me freedom! Once I longed for love — your love. Now I long for death — your death. Oh, brave swift tide, are you strong enough to free me forever ? Hark ! I can hear the roar of the rapids in the distance. There is a deep fall from the river cliff; there are rocks. Fool ! you stand at the very edge, and look down. The moment is come. Ah !
Hugh Conway (Victorian Christmas Stories: 13 Scary Ghost Stories to Read on A Dark, Snowy Night)
He had a great dislike to all ghosts, but a particular aversion to the Christmas species. They were so moral, so improving, so bent on doing good.
Simon Stern (The Valancourt Book of ​Victorian Christmas Ghost Stories: Volume Three)
And isn't Susan a man? Of course he is! A made-up young villain, who bamboozled the old Vicar, and nearly canoodled with George, the groom
Simon Stern (The Valancourt Book of ​Victorian Christmas Ghost Stories: Volume Three)
As we saw him first on the beach, with a dress-skirt on over his other clothes, he looked like a pretty sleeping girl. Some women cried, and not a man said a word against him.
Simon Stern (The Valancourt Book of ​Victorian Christmas Ghost Stories: Volume Three)
Well, I ain't goin' to be left like an owl in the ivy bush...It's too terrifyin
Simon Stern (The Valancourt Book of ​Victorian Christmas Ghost Stories: Volume Three)
Send Charley -in his nightdress too- to meet a wandering ghost of a suicided parson! Not I!
Simon Stern (The Valancourt Book of ​Victorian Christmas Ghost Stories: Volume Three)
Na! Na! Never turn back to meet the deevil, when ye have once got past him!
Tara Moore (The Valancourt Book of Victorian Christmas Ghost Stories)
who possessed the nerves of a rhinoceros
James Skipp Borlase (The Shrieking Skull & Other Victorian Christmas Ghost Stories)
One day in the country was worth a month in town and better than Christmas, her birthday, or even Papa saying she was like the moon risen at the full.
D.M. Denton (The Dove Upon Her Branch: A Novel Portrait of Christina Rossetti)
Good hair is wasted on men,” she continues, oblivious. “Like eyelashes. Why do you all have such long eyelashes? I pay fifty euro for my lash lift; meanwhile, you’re just walking around like some Victorian doll.
Catherine Walsh (Snowed In (Fitzpatrick Christmas, #2))
Christmas time, when it has come round—apart from the veneration due to its sacred name and origin, if anything belonging to it can be apart from that—as a good time; a kind, forgiving, charitable, pleasant time; the only time I know of, in the long calendar of the year, when men and women seem by one consent to open their shut-up hearts freely, and to think of people below them as if they really were fellow-passengers to the grave, and not another race of creatures bound on other journeys.
Charles Dickens (A Christmas Carol (Annotated Glossary): A Christmas Story Classic of Ebenezer Scrooge by Charles Dickens. Victorian Christmas Ghost Tale. Christmas Books for Adults. Christmas books for Kids)
It didn’t take peering at the brass plates at the bottom of the paintings to guess who they must have been: my very own Lord and Lady Uppington, presiding over Uppington Hall in paint as they once had in the flesh. One could almost picture them stepping out of their frames to play host, sweeping aside the tourists and signaling the silent harp into song. The re-enactors were all wrong; from their costumes, they were late Regency, 1820 or so, rather than the pre-Regency period in which I was interested. There was a wide gap between the two, in style and in outlook. But the servants would probably have looked very much the same, in their livery in the Uppington colors, and so would the pre-Victorian Christmas decorations. If I ignored the “party guests” and the other tourists, it was just possible to picture what it might have been like two hundred years ago, when Lord and Lady Uppington had held Christmas at the family seat. I paused, struck by the symmetry of it. It would have been almost exactly two hundred years ago, wouldn’t it? December 1803 to December 2003. It would have been Colin’s ancestors’ first Christmas together after the mad upheaval of their marriage the previous spring. There would have been candles, just as there were now, and the smell of oranges and cloves. There would have been gaily gowned ladies and excited children and tables laden with ratafia biscuits and dried fruit and the inevitable sticky sweet slices of mince pie….
Lauren Willig (Ivy and Intrigue: A Very Selwick Christmas)