Victorian Era Quotes

We've searched our database for all the quotes and captions related to Victorian Era. Here they are! All 100 of them:

I was never going to get any sleep. I was going to have Alice in Wonderland conversation after Alice in Wonderland conversation until I died of exhaustion. Here, in the restful, idyllic Victorian era.
Connie Willis (To Say Nothing of the Dog (Oxford Time Travel, #2))
They were smart and sophisticated, with an air of independence about them, and so casual about their looks and clothes and manners as to be almost slapdash. I don't know if I realized as soon as I began seeing them that they represented the wave of the future, but I do know I was drawn to them. I shared their restlessness, understood their determination to free themselves of the Victorian shackles of the pre-World War I era and find out for themselves what life was all about.
Colleen Moore
I suppose I really seemed mad, then; but it was only through the awfulness of having said nothing but the truth, and being thought to be deluded.
Sarah Waters (Fingersmith)
The Victorian era was perhaps the last point in Western history when magic and science were allowed to coexist.
Jonathan Auxier
(…) the New Woman of the 1920s boldly asserted her right to dance, drink, smoke, and date—to work her own property, to live free of the strictures that governed her mother’s generation. (…) She flouted Victorian-era conventions and scandalized her parents. In many ways, she controlled her own destiny.
Joshua Zeitz (Flapper: A Madcap Story of Sex, Style, Celebrity, and the Women Who Made America Modern)
She wore tight corsets to give her a teeny waist - I helped her lace them up - but they had the effect of causing her to faint. Mom called it the vapors and said it was a sign of her high breeding and delicate nature. I thought it was a sign that the corset made it hard to breathe.
Jeannette Walls (Half Broke Horses)
Has anyone been corrupted or defiled?" "Since the age of twelve," West said. "I wasn't asking you, I was asking the girls." "Not yet," Cassandra replied cheerfully.
Lisa Kleypas (Cold-Hearted Rake (The Ravenels, #1))
This is the Victorian era," she said. "Women didn't have to make sense.
Connie Willis (To Say Nothing of the Dog (Oxford Time Travel, #2))
I’m talking about the language of flowers. It’s from the Victorian era, like your name. If a man gave a young lady a bouquet of flowers, she would race home and try to decode it like a secret message. Red roses mean love; yellow roses infidelity. So a man would have to choose his flowers carefully.
Vanessa Diffenbaugh (The Language of Flowers)
What do ladies wear beneath their riding trousers?" "I would think an infamous rake would already know." "I was never infamous. In fact, I'm fairly standard as far as rakes go." "The ones who deny it are the worst.
Lisa Kleypas (Cold-Hearted Rake (The Ravenels, #1))
She wanted a choice beyond: Housewife versus lawyer. Madonna versus whore. An option not mired in the lingering detritus of some Victorian-era dream.
Chuck Palahniuk (Beautiful You)
I AM the current curator of the black trunk and the stories it holds within.
Hope Barrett (Discovering Oscar)
I've often thought a blind man could find his way through London simply by gauging the changes in innuendo: mild through Trafalgar Square, less veiled towards the river.
Louis Bayard (Mr. Timothy)
In the mystifying world that was Victorian parenthood, obedience took precedence over all considerations of affection and happiness, and that odd, painful conviction remained the case in most well-heeled homes up until at least the time of the First World War.
Bill Bryson (At Home: A Short History of Private Life)
Don't forget to speak scornfully of the Victorian Age; there will be time for meekness when you try to better it. Very soon you will be Victorian or that sort of thing yourselves; next session probably, when the freshman come up.
J.M. Barrie (Courage)
You make me burn with life, and yearn to set aside my cold and distant, solitary ways.
Stacy Reid (The Duke's Shotgun Wedding (Scandalous House of Calydon, #1))
Maybe I was wrong. Maybe there really is some goodness here in our world. But if goodness existed, that must mean that darkness existed as well.
Erica Sehyun Song
Then I wish you a good day," Accord said. He managed to make it sound like fuck you, the way people in the Victorian era might have.
Wildbow
But she had learnt, in those solemn hours of thought, that she herself must one day answer for her own life, and what she had done with it; and she tried to settle that most difficult problem, how much was to be utterly merged in obedience to authority, and how much might be set apart for freedom in working.
Elizabeth Gaskell (North and South)
Dickens' London was a place of the mind, but it was also a real place. Much of what we take today to be the marvellous imaginings of a visionary novelist turn out on inspection to be the reportage of a great observer.
Judith Flanders (The Victorian City: Everyday Life in Dickens' London)
The Victorians lost a few workers in everything they built, rather like a votive offering.
Christopher Fowler (Full Dark House (Bryant & May, #1))
An unhappy woman with access to weed killer had to be watched carefully.
James Ruddick (Death at the Priory: Love, Sex, and Murder in Victorian England)
Victorian rigidities were such that ladies were not even allowed to blow out candles in mixed company, as that required them to pucker their lips suggestively. They could not say that they were going "to bed"--that planted too stimulating an image--but merely that they were "retiring." It became effectively impossible to discuss clothing in even a clinical sense without resort to euphemisms. Trousers became "nether integuments" or simply "inexpressibles" and underwear was "linen." Women could refer among themselves to petticoats or, in hushed tones, stockings, but could mention almost nothing else that brushed bare flesh.
Bill Bryson (At Home: A Short History of Private Life)
Up the still, glistening beaches, Up the creeks we will hie, Over banks of bright seaweed The ebb-tide leaves dry. We will gaze, from the sand-hills, At the white, sleeping town; At the church on the hill-side— And then come back down. Singing: "There dwells a loved one, But cruel is she! She left lonely for ever The kings of the sea. (from poem 'The Forsaken Merman')
Matthew Arnold (The Poetical Works of Matthew Arnold)
IN THE TORRID London summer of 1886, William Gladstone was up against Benjamin Disraeli for the post of prime minister of the United Kingdom. This was the Victorian era, so whoever won was going to rule half the world. In the very last week before the election, both men happened to take the same young woman out to dinner. Naturally, the press asked her what impressions the rivals had made. She said, “After dining with Mr. Gladstone, I thought he was the cleverest person in England. But after dining with Mr. Disraeli, I thought I was the cleverest person in England.” Guess who won the election? It was the man who made others feel intelligent, impressive, and fascinating: Benjamin Disraeli.
Olivia Fox Cabane (The Charisma Myth: How Anyone Can Master the Art and Science of Personal Magnetism)
Abigail had no interest in the dolls themselves. Only in what she could keep from them.
Christie Stratos (Anatomy of a Darkened Heart (Dark Victoriana Collection #1))
It is perhaps little wonder that the end of Victorianism almost exactly coincided with the invention of psychoanalysis.
Bill Bryson (At Home: A Short History of Private Life)
Poor Miss Porchester. She had sacrificed herself on the altar of Victorian morality, and I am afraid the consciousness that she had behaved beautifully was the only benefit she had got from it.
W. Somerset Maugham
You have a spine of steel and fire in your eyes, Rosalie. To have such a quality, one must be shaken to the foundation of one’s soul and put back together. I want to know how you emerged from hell made of steel and fire.
Moriah Densley (Song For Sophia (Rougemont, #1))
The Victorian era was an age of superlatives and larger-than-life characters, and as far as that goes, Dr. Wildman Whitehouse fit right in: what Victoria was to monarchs, Dickens to novelists, Burton to explorers, Robert E. Lee to generals, Dr. Wildman Whitehouse was to assholes. The only 19th-century figure who even comes close to him in this department is Custer.
Neal Stephenson (Some Remarks: Essays and Other Writing)
Thus the British Empire came into existence; and thus - for there is no stopping damp; it gets into the inkpot as it gets into the woodwork - sentences swelled, adjectives multiplied, lyrics became epics, and little trifles that had been essays a column long were now encyclopaedias in ten or twenty volumes.
Virginia Woolf (Orlando)
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)
Let me kiss you here,” he coaxed. “Just once.” “Oh, God… no.” She reached down and weakly pushed his hand away. “It’s a sin.” “How do you know?” “Because it feels like one,” she managed to say. He laughed quietly and pulled her hips farther toward him with a decisiveness that drew a little yelp from her. “In that case… I never sin by half measures.
Lisa Kleypas (Cold-Hearted Rake (The Ravenels, #1))
The concept “penis envy,” which Freud coined to describe a phenomenon he observed in women—that is, in the middle-class women who were his patients in Vienna in the Victorian era—was seized in this country in the 1940’s as the literal explanation of all that was wrong with American women.
Betty Friedan (The Feminine Mystique)
Sunlight streamed in a steady flow, casting flecks of gold onto the floor, bathing my skin. I inhaled deeply. Already, the air inside my bedroom had been perfumed with nature. A breeze whispered softly and breathed carefully onto my skin.
Erica Sehyun Song (Thorns in the Shadow)
Father has taught me that when something is lost, whether dear or not, giving up the search is sometimes best and often enough the lost article finds its owner.
Cassandra Krivy Hirsch (Under the Linden Tree)
Was it possible to be homesick for a soul?
Jessica Dotta (Price of Privilege (Price of Privilege, #3))
I’m an idiot for trying to avoid these feelings because they have caused me pain in the past.
Kellyn Roth (The Dressmaker's Secret (The Chronicles of Alice and Ivy, #1))
Thinking back on the outing to the theatre, she added, ‘I want a man, not a preening peacock!
Katherine Givens (In Her Dreams)
As a general rule, political talk appears to me to be of all talk the most dreary and the most profitless.
Wilkie Collins (The Moonstone)
In the Victorian era, a flapper had been a child prostitute;
Peter Ackroyd (Innovation (The History of England #6))
My friend, it is a firm belief of mine that if a gentleman is to secure the services of a London cab then he should certainly carry a carrot on his person. Why only tip the driver and not the horse?
Kevin Ansbro (The Minotaur's Son & Other Wild Tales)
The steampunk genre often works as a form of alternate history, showing us how small changes to what actually happened might have resulted in momentous differences: clockwork Victorian-era computers, commercial transcontinental dirigible lines, and a host of other wonders. This is that kind of book.
Nisi Shawl (Everfair (Everfair #1))
Upper-class Victorians feared an overabundance of passion, believing it only complicated matters and, more dangerously, led to thoughts of unrealistic liaisons between persons of unequal social stations.
Jerrold M. Packard (Victoria's Daughters)
The world of shadows and superstition that was Victorian England, so well depicted in this 1871 tale, was unique. While the foundations of so much of our present knowledge of subjects like medicine, public health, electricity, chemistry and agriculture, were being, if not laid, at least mapped out, people could still believe in the existence of devils and demons. And why not? A good ghost story is pure entertainment. It was not until well into the twentieth century that ghost stories began to have a deeper significance and to become allegorical; in fact, to lose their charm. No mental effort is required to read 'The Weird Woman', no seeking for hidden meanings; there are no complexities of plot, no allegory on the state of the world. And so it should be. At what other point in literary history could a man, standing over the body of his fiancee, say such a line as this: 'Speak, hound! Or, by heaven, this night shall witness two murders instead of one!' Those were the days. (introduction to "The Weird Woman")
Hugh Lamb (Terror by Gaslight: More Victorian Tales of Terror)
For reasons I have yet to define, Signor Arpelli stood out from his colleagues. The curled brim of his hat, perhaps. A certain mingling of gravity and levity- I thought the masks of Janus had merged in his eyes.
Louis Bayard (Mr. Timothy)
Matthew shook his head. “Whoever said anything of women in the Victorian era being prim and proper apparently hadn’t met Maxine Fleming.” Tahatan chuckled. “I’m sure a publisher somewhere would make a nice fortune with putting this into print. The fact is, people tend to look back on bygone times through rose-colored glasses. All eras have encouraged values that are pushed on the surface, but in the end, people are still people.
Tiffany Apan (Descent (The Birthrite Series, #1))
The revolutionary idea that children have rights was born in the Enlightenment, but the practical application of that concept, in schools and within families, was very much a product of the progressive side of the Victorian era.
Susan Jacoby (Freethinkers: A History of American Secularism)
We think about mortality so little, these days, except to flail hysterically at it with trendy forms of exercise and high-fiber cereals and nicotine patches. I thought of the stern Victorian determination to keep death in mind, the uncompromising tombstones: Remember, pilgrim, as you pass by, As you are now so once was I; As I am now so will you be.…Now death is un-cool, old-fashioned. To my mind the defining characteristic of our era is spin, everything tailored to vanishing point by market research, brands and bands manufactured to precise specifications; we are so used to things transmuting into whatever we would like them to be that it comes as a profound outrage to encounter death, stubbornly unspinnable, only and immutably itself.
Tana French (In the Woods (Dublin Murder Squad, #1))
You took Theo's title and his home," West continued in appalled disbelief, "and now you want his wife." "His widow," Devon muttered. "Have you seduced her?" "Not yet." West clapped his hand to his forehead. "Christ. Don't you think she's suffered enough?
Lisa Kleypas (Cold-Hearted Rake (The Ravenels, #1))
But the loneliness of her life had developed in her a sensitiveness which could not endure situations such as the present; difficulties which are of small account to people who take their part in active social life, harassed her to the destruction of all peace.
George Gissing (New Grub Street)
The Victorian era was an age of superlatives and larger-than-life characters, and as far as that goes, Dr. Wildman Whitehouse fit right in: what Victoria was to monarchs, Dickens to novelists, Burton to explorers, Robert E. Lee to generals, Dr. Wildman Whitehouse was to assholes.
Neal Stephenson (Some Remarks: Essays and Other Writing)
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. 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)
The feminine mystique, elevated by Freudian theory into a scientific religion, sounded a single, overprotective, life-restricting, future-denying note for women. Girls who grew up playing baseball, baby-sitting, mastering geometry -- almost independent enough, almost resourceful enough, to meet the problems of the fission-fusion era -- were told by the most advanced thinkers of our time to go back and live their lives as if they were Noras, restricted to the doll's house by Victorian prejudice. And their own respect and awe for the authority of science -- anthropology, sociology, psychology share that authority now -- kept them from questioning the feminine mystique.
Betty Friedan (The Feminine Mystique)
I wish you'd let my missus introduce you to one of her available lady friends." "Absolutely not. I appreciate the thought, but no. I'm not lonely or starved for feminine companionship." "What if I guarantee Margaret won't pester you with matchmaker questions?" "You cannot guarantee such a thing. She will pester me. It is a woman's nature.
Chris Karlsen (Silk (The Bloodstone, #1))
And if heroic figures, in days that never were, seem to startle out from their surroundings in fashion unbecoming to a Forsyte of the Victorian era, we may be sure that tribal instinct was even then the prime force, and that ‘family’ and the sense of home and property counted as they do to this day, for all the recent efforts to ‘talk them out.
John Galsworthy (The Forsyte Saga Complete Novels (The Forsyte Saga - A Modern Comedy - End of the Chapter))
I see. Because I'm not hideous, not a drunkard, and appear to bathe regularly, you picked me. How you flatter me.
Chris Karlsen (Silk (The Bloodstone, #1))
O que antes era impossível passou a se realizável. O que antes fora inconcebível podia ser então imaginado. De repente, o futuro da medicina pareceu não ter limites.
Lindsey Fitzharris (The Butchering Art: Joseph Lister's Quest to Transform the Grisly World of Victorian Medicine)
It was a complete inversion of the natural order. It was a man's job to worry about wealth and wordly success, and a woman's merely to adorn him.
Lucy Worsley (Queen Victoria: Daughter, Wife, Mother, Widow)
indulged in excess in the flowing bowl”—a polite term, in those days, for drunkenness.
Dean Jobb (The Case of the Murderous Dr. Cream: The Hunt for a Victorian Era Serial Killer)
Making friends is not a big deal. Replacing me with them after talking to them for only one bloody day is a big deal.
Erica Sehyun Song (Thorns in the Shadow)
The remaining half of my gin stands before me, and yet, no amount of drink can quench this thirst.
Ilse V. Rensburg (Blood Sipper)
Confound it! It's just because nobody does anything that things have come to this pass!
George Gissing (New Grub Street)
Time becomes your enemy when you convince yourself it moves faster for you than anyone else.
David F Burrows (Fish Bone Alley)
My wishing star glowed slightly and winked back at me. I could almost hear its voice, tinkling like wind chimes and church bells, reassuring me that everything would return to normal.
Erica Sehyun Song (Thorns in the Shadow)
Apology accepted. If you're finished Mrs. Porter ---" "Allegra." "Fine. If you're finished, Allegra, I'd like to go." "I'm not." Good Lord, but the woman was a blister that refused to pop.
Chris Karlsen (Silk (The Bloodstone, #1))
When in 1863 Thomas Huxley coined the phrase 'Man's Place in Nature,' it was to name a short collection of his essays applying to man Darwin's theory of evolution. The Origin of Species had been published only four years before, and the thesis that man was literally a part of nature, rather than an earthy vessel charged with some sublimer stuff, was so novel and so offensive to current metaphysics that it needed the most vigorous defense. Half the civilized world was rudely shocked, the other half skeptically amused. Nearly a century has passed since the Origin shattered the complacency of the Victorian world and initiated what may be called the Darwinian revolution, an upheaval of man's ideas comparable to and probably exceeding in significance the revolution that issued from Copernicus's demonstration that the earth moves around the sun. The theory of evolution was but one of many factors contributing to the destruction of the ancient beliefs; it only toppled over what had already been weakened by centuries of decay, rendered suspect by the assaults of many intellectual disciplines; but it marked the beginning of the end of the era of faith.
Homer W. Smith (Man and His Gods)
University of Otago social historian Hera Cook provides a beautiful illustration of exactly this point in her rich account of the sexual revolution.49 Cook notes that in eighteenth-century England, women were assumed to be sexually passionate. But drawing on economic and social changes, fertility-rate patterns, personal accounts, and sex surveys and manuals, Cook charts the path toward the sexual repression of the Victorian era. This was a time of reduced female economic power, thanks to a shift from production in the home to wage earning, and there was less community pressure on men to financially support children fathered out of wedlock. And so, in the absence of well-known, reliable birth control techniques, “women could not afford to enjoy sex. The risk made it too expensive a pleasure.”50
Cordelia Fine (Testosterone Rex: Myths of Sex, Science, and Society)
Thought I’d try something different for a change. The dress is from the vintage shop a few shops down. I love the Georgian and the Victorian era — Jane Austen, the Bronte sisters, and all that,” Tess said excitedly, remembering her plan to read Jane Eyre that night. She pictured a night seated in her cosy armchair with a pot of Earl Grey tea, some gourmet sandwiches from the deli, reading until way past midnight.
Anthea Syrokou (True Colours)
Their fear of the open and of the naked. Hide reality, shut out nature. The revolutionary art movement of Charles's day was of course the Pre-Raphaelite. They, at least, were making an attempt to admit nature and sexuality.
John Fowles (The French Lieutenant's Woman)
decided that the absence of women did matter. A lack of representation might mean that the first edition of the Oxford English Dictionary was biased in favour of the experiences and sensibilities of men. Older, white, Victorian-era men at that. This novel is my attempt to understand how the way we define language might define us. Throughout, I have tried to conjure images and express emotions that bring our understanding of words into question.
Pip Williams (The Dictionary of Lost Words)
In fact, vibrators were one of the first appliances to be electrified in the late nineteenth century, not long after the sewing machine but well ahead of the vacuum cleaner. It seems the Victorians had their priorities right.
Karen Dolby (History's Naughty Bits)
Deciphering the rabbit warren that made up the minds of most women was never his strong suit. All he could do was ask for clarification. "Allegra, are you flirting with me?" Her thumb stopped its stroking. "Um, yes. Am I not doing it right?
Chris Karlsen (Silk (The Bloodstone, #1))
It’s true enough that the Victorians were grappling with heady issues like utilitarianism and class consciousness. But the finest minds of the era were also devoted to an equally pressing question: What are we going to do with all of this shit?
Steven Johnson (The Ghost Map: The Story of London's Most Terrifying Epidemic—and How It Changed Science, Cities, and the Modern World)
The rain landed on my skin with a barely audible patter and changed the tempo of its repetitive dance, letting the wind change its course and angle. The cold soon seeped through my dress and into my bones. An iris from my garland fell in my lap.
Erica Sehyun Song (Thorns in the Shadow)
We’re in a period right now where nobody asks any questions about psychology. No one has any feeling for human motivation. No one talks about sexuality in terms of emotional needs and symbolism and the legacy of childhood. Sexuality has been politicized--“Don’t ask any questions!” "No discussion!" “Gay is exactly equivalent to straight!” And thus in this period of psychological blindness or inertness, our art has become dull. There’s nothing interesting being written--in fiction or plays or movies. Everything is boring because of our failure to ask psychological questions. So I say there is a big parallel between Bill Cosby and Bill Clinton--aside from their initials! Young feminists need to understand that this abusive behavior by powerful men signifies their sense that female power is much bigger than they are! These two people, Clinton and Cosby, are emotionally infantile--they're engaged in a war with female power. It has something to do with their early sense of being smothered by female power--and this pathetic, abusive and criminal behavior is the result of their sense of inadequacy. Now, in order to understand that, people would have to read my first book, "Sexual Personae"--which of course is far too complex for the ordinary feminist or academic mind! It’s too complex because it requires a sense of the ambivalence of human life. Everything is not black and white, for heaven's sake! We are formed by all kinds of strange or vague memories from childhood. That kind of understanding is needed to see that Cosby was involved in a symbiotic, push-pull thing with his wife, where he went out and did these awful things to assert his own independence. But for that, he required the women to be inert. He needed them to be dead! Cosby is actually a necrophiliac--a style that was popular in the late Victorian period in the nineteenth-century. It's hard to believe now, but you had men digging up corpses from graveyards, stealing the bodies, hiding them under their beds, and then having sex with them. So that’s exactly what’s happening here: to give a woman a drug, to make her inert, to make her dead is the man saying that I need her to be dead for me to function. She’s too powerful for me as a living woman. And this is what is also going on in those barbaric fraternity orgies, where women are sexually assaulted while lying unconscious. And women don’t understand this! They have no idea why any men would find it arousing to have sex with a young woman who’s passed out at a fraternity house. But it’s necrophilia--this fear and envy of a woman’s power. And it’s the same thing with Bill Clinton: to find the answer, you have to look at his relationship to his flamboyant mother. He felt smothered by her in some way. But let's be clear--I’m not trying to blame the mother! What I’m saying is that male sexuality is extremely complicated, and the formation of male identity is very tentative and sensitive--but feminist rhetoric doesn’t allow for it. This is why women are having so much trouble dealing with men in the feminist era. They don’t understand men, and they demonize men.
Camille Paglia
I reviewed in thought the modern era of raps and apparitions, beginning with the knockings of 1848, at the hamlet of Hydesville, N.Y., and ending with grotesque phenomena at Cambridge, Mass.; I evoked the anklebones and other anatomical castanets of the Fox sisters (as described by the sages of the University of Buffalo ); the mysteriously uniform type of delicate adolescent in bleak Epworth or Tedworth, radiating the same disturbances as in old Peru; solemn Victorian orgies with roses falling and accordions floating to the strains of sacred music; professional imposters regurgitating moist cheesecloth; Mr. Duncan, a lady medium's dignified husband, who, when asked if he would submit to a search, excused himself on the ground of soiled underwear; old Alfred Russel Wallace, the naive naturalist, refusing to believe that the white form with bare feet and unperforated earlobes before him, at a private pandemonium in Boston, could be prim Miss Cook whom he had just seen asleep, in her curtained corner, all dressed in black, wearing laced-up boots and earrings; two other investigators, small, puny, but reasonably intelligent and active men, closely clinging with arms and legs about Eusapia, a large, plump elderly female reeking of garlic, who still managed to fool them; and the skeptical and embarrassed magician, instructed by charming young Margery's "control" not to get lost in the bathrobe's lining but to follow up the left stocking until he reached the bare thigh - upon the warm skin of which he felt a "teleplastic" mass that appeared to the touch uncommonly like cold, uncooked liver. ("The Vane Sisters")
Vladimir Nabokov (American Fantastic Tales: Terror and the Uncanny from the 1940s to Now)
I want morning and noon and nightfall with you. I want your tears, your smiles, your kisses...the smell of your hair, the taste of your skin, the touch of your breath on my face. I want to see you in the final hour of my life...to lie in your arms as I take my last breath.
Lisa Kleyplas, Again the Magic
What interests me - and indeed many others today, now women's contributions to history are better recognised - is [Victoria's] eventual return to fiery form. "While the Prince Consort lived," she told a visitor in the early 1860s, "he thought for me, now I have to think for myself.
Lucy Worsley (Queen Victoria: Daughter, Wife, Mother, Widow)
It was the dog Abel, who - as animals have been reported to do - had made his way over all England's hills and rivers, to return to that home where he was first kindly treated. The warm fire, by which he sleeps even now, and the fattening dish will be his rewards to the end of his days.
K.W. Jeter (Infernal Devices (Infernal Devices, #1))
What if you should forget yourself in the excitement and just peddle straight through the park and out the other end?’ she warns. ‘If you keep your feet on the pedals and don’t stop, where might you end up?’ The idea appeals to Maud more than she can say. She doesn’t want to know where she may ‘end up’.
Emmanuelle de Maupassant (The Gentlemen's Club)
In Confucian China, in ancient Sparta, in Republican Rome, in the early Pilgrim settlements of New England, and among the British upper classes of the Victorian era, people were held responsible for keeping a tight rein on their emotions. Anyone who indulged in self-pity, who let instinct rather than reflection dictate actions, forfeited the right to be accepted as a member of the community. In other historical periods, such as the one in which we are now living, the ability to control oneself is not held in high esteem. People who attempt it are thought to be faintly ridiculous, “uptight,” or not quite “with
Mihály Csíkszentmihályi (Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience)
Why, all our art treasures of to-day are only the dug-up commonplaces of three or four hundred years ago. I wonder if there is real intrinsic beauty in the old soup-plates, beer-mugs, and candle-snuffers that we prize so now, or if it is only the halo of age glowing around them that gives them their charms in our eyes. The “old blue” that we hang about our walls as ornaments were the common every-day household utensils of a few centuries ago; and the pink shepherds and the yellow shepherdesses that we hand round now for all our friends to gush over, and pretend they understand, were the unvalued mantel-ornaments that the mother of the eighteenth century would have given the baby to suck when he cried. Will it be the same in the future? Will the prized treasures of to-day always be the cheap trifles of the day before? Will rows of our willow-pattern dinner-plates be ranged above the chimneypieces of the great in the years 2000 and odd? Will the white cups with the gold rim and the beautiful gold flower inside (species unknown), that our Sarah Janes now break in sheer light-heartedness of spirit, be carefully mended, and stood upon a bracket, and dusted only by the lady of the house? That china dog that ornaments the bedroom of my furnished lodgings. It is a white dog. Its eyes blue. Its nose is a delicate red, with spots. Its head is painfully erect, its expression is amiability carried to verge of imbecility. I do not admire it myself. Considered as a work of art, I may say it irritates me. Thoughtless friends jeer at it, and even my landlady herself has no admiration for it, and excuses its presence by the circumstance that her aunt gave it to her. But in 200 years’ time it is more than probable that that dog will be dug up from somewhere or other, minus its legs, and with its tail broken, and will be sold for old china, and put in a glass cabinet. And people will pass it round, and admire it. They will be struck by the wonderful depth of the colour on the nose, and speculate as to how beautiful the bit of the tail that is lost no doubt was. We, in this age, do not see the beauty of that dog. We are too familiar with it. It is like the sunset and the stars: we are not awed by their loveliness because they are common to our eyes. So it is with that china dog. In 2288 people will gush over it. The making of such dogs will have become a lost art. Our descendants will wonder how we did it, and say how clever we were. We shall be referred to lovingly as “those grand old artists that flourished in the nineteenth century, and produced those china dogs.” The “sampler” that the eldest daughter did at school will be spoken of as “tapestry of the Victorian era,” and be almost priceless. The blue-and-white mugs of the present-day roadside inn will be hunted up, all cracked and chipped, and sold for their weight in gold, and rich people will use them for claret cups; and travellers from Japan will buy up all the “Presents from Ramsgate,” and “Souvenirs of Margate,” that may have escaped destruction, and take them back to Jedo as ancient English curios.
Jerome K. Jerome (Complete Works of Jerome K. Jerome)
What the hell is this stuff?" he muttered, frowning at the oily spot on the linen cloth. "Pearlman slathered it on me this morning." "It's macassar oil. Gentlemen use it to keep their hair neat. Nicholas used it," she added pointedly. "Well, tomorrow he's giving it up. I smell like a rotten apple." "You do not. And I think it looks rather nice." He sent her an incredulous look. "I look like an otter. And everything I put my head against gets greasy." "That's why someone invented the antimacassar," she told him, almost smiling. "The-aha!" He laughed as he made the connection. "Of course. First they invent something stupid, then something ugly to make up for it. We live in a wondrous age, Annie.
Patricia Gaffney (Thief of Hearts)
Faith leaned closer, inches from his face, her loips a hands breadth from his. She shook her head side to side a bit faster than the average metronome and waggled a finger back and forth. "They not going to find out though, are they? He stared into merry eyes almost as dark as his coffee. The devil was a woman and Faith one of her most beautiful minions.
Chris Karlsen (Silk (The Bloodstone, #1))
We've been brought up to think of the Victorians as prudes, horrified by a glimpse of table leg, but that myth was constructed in the 1920s out of whole cloth, to give their rebellious children an excuse to point and say, "We invented sex!" The reality is stranger: the Victorians were licentious in the extreme behind closed doors, only denying everything in public in the pursuit of probity.
Charles Stross (The Fuller Memorandum (Laundry Files, #3))
Tonight, I'd like to fuck like every other bloody Englishman, with you on your back and me on top groaning and pumping away for a minute or so, then a nice sleep." A sneer touched the edge of her mouth, then Isabeau laughed. "You English, you are so uninspired, a pity for your women. My soul cries for them." "Yes, unimaginative lot that we are, we have somehow managed to colonize much of the world.
Chris Karlsen (Silk (The Bloodstone, #1))
State schooling in Britain both today and when I was a child seems stuck in a Victorian-era paradigm, guided by notions of discipline, obedience and deference to ones betters, of becoming a good worker and getting a good job. The idea that we go to school to find our passions, our calling, to learn to be happy, to ‘draw out that which is within’, as the root meaning of the word ‘educate’ commands, is almost entirely absent.
Akala (Natives: Race and Class in the Ruins of Empire)
The Hotel dining-room, like most of the others I was to find in the Highlands, had its walls covered with pictures of all sorts of wild game, living or in the various postures of death that are produced by sport. Between these pictures the walls were alert with the stuffed heads of deer, furnished with antlers of every degree of magnificence. A friend of mine has a theory that these pictures of dying birds and wounded beasts are intended to whet the diner's appetite, and perhaps they did in the more lusty age of Victoria; but I found they had the opposite effect on me, and had to keep my eyes from straying too often to them. In one particular hotel this idea was carried out with such thoroughness that the walls of its dining room looked like a shambles, they presented such an overwhelming array of bleeding birds, beasts and fishes. To find these abominations on the walls of Highland hotels, among a people of such delicacy in other things, is peculiarly revolting, and rubs in with superfluous force that this is a land whose main contemporary industry is the shooting down of wild creatures; not production of any kind but wholesale destruction. This state of things is not the fault of the Highlanders, but of the people who have bought their country and come to it chiefly to kill various forms of life.
Edwin Muir (Scottish Journey)
Miss Boyd’s voyages to Greenland were conducted during a transitional period in polar exploration between “the Golden Age,” in which conquering the poles was accomplished by overland routes and by sea, and the modern technological era heralded by early polar flights by Amundsen, Ellsworth, and Byrd. Gillis wrote that Louise Arner Boyd “represented one of the last revivals of a Victorian phenomenon the wealthy explorer who poured a personal fortune into expeditions aimed at advancing science and satisfying profound personal curiosity.” [3] In rejecting a sedate and sheltered life as a wealthy wife and mother, she defied societal expectations. But she also challenged the ideal of a polar explorer as defined by manliness, stoicism, and heroism. Her seven daring expeditions to northern Norway and Greenland between 1926 and 1955 paved the way for later female polar explorers,
Joanna Kafarowski (The Polar Adventures of a Rich American Dame: A Life of Louise Arner Boyd)
[...] era un viso indimenticabile, un viso tragico. Sgorgava dolore con la stessa purezza, naturalezza e inarrestabilità con cui sgorga l'acqua da una sorgente nei boschi. Non c'era artificio in esso, né ipocrisia, né isterismo, né maschera; soprattutto non c'era la minima traccia di pazzia. La pazzia era nel mare vuoto, nel vuoto orizzonte, [...]; come se la sorgente fosse stata naturale in sé ma innaturale in quanto sgorgava da un deserto.
John Fowles (The French Lieutenant's Woman)
Joseph was murdered in Illinois by a mob of Mormon haters in 1844. Brigham Young assumed leadership of the church and led the Saints to the barren wilds of the Great Basin, where in short order they established a remarkable empire and unabashedly embraced the covenant of “spiritual wifery.” This both titillated and shocked the sensibilities of Victorian-era Americans, who tended to regard polygamy as a brutish practice on a par with slavery.
Jon Krakauer (Under the Banner of Heaven: A Story of Violent Faith)
Self-preservation and determination meant she could get away with anything. As her law-abiding, conventionally minded daughter, I secretly envied her this. She was not the clinging-vine type, nor one who could coax sugar from a lemon. Hers was the frontal attack with no inhibitions. She told the Nazis you could not trust Hitler, and they let her go. In the days of chaperones, she hitch-hiked a ride on a French destroyer along the coast of Crete; 'All quite proper, I had my cook with me,' she explained.
Mary Allsebrook
Parishioners will welcome the assurance, if news of changes and experiments has come their way, that no such changes are contemplated in this parish church; they will not be used as guinea pigs for liturgical experiments. The form used at weddings and at the baptism of their children will be exactly the same as it has been for centuries. There have been changes in the world around – especially perhaps in the Victorian era, which we are pleased to think of as solid – but human needs are very constant and those who study it will find that the Book of Common Prayer, compiled from ancient sources in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries meets those needs in a manner more realistic than more contemporary efforts in this direction. It is difficult for instance to discover any need in 1966 which is not fittingly brought to God in the 400 year old words of the Litany. So the motto for our public transactions with Almighty God in the churches of our parish will be ‘Business as usual’. If any declare that we stick in the mud, we retort that by loyalty to the Prayer Book we stand on a rock.
Beeston Parish Paper
No one was planning to travel light. One brigadier claimed that he needed fifty camels to carry his kit, while General Cotton took 260 for his. Three hundred camels were earmarked to carry the military wine cellar. Even junior officers travelled with as many as forty servants—ranging from cooks and sweepers to bearers and water carriers. According to Major General Nott, who had to work his way up through his career without the benefit of connections, patronage or money and who looked with a jaundiced eye on the rich young officers of the Queen's Regiments, it was already clear that the army was not enforcing proper military austerity. Many of the junior officers were already treating the war as though it were as light-hearted as a hunting trip—indeed one regiment had actually brought its own foxhounds with it to the front.
William Dalrymple (Return of a King: The Battle for Afghanistan)
Certain shapes and patterns hover over different moments in time, haunting and inspiring the individuals living through those periods. The epic clash and subsequent resolution of the dialectic animated the first half of the nineteenth century; the Darwinian and social reform movements scattered web imagery through the second half of the century. The first few decades of the twentieth century found their ultimate expression in the exuberant anarchy of the explosion, while later decades lost themselves in the faceless regimen of the grid. You can see the last ten years or so as a return to those Victorian webs, though I suspect the image that has been burned into our retinas over the past decade is more prosaic: windows piled atop one another on a screen, or perhaps a mouse clicking on an icon. These shapes are shorthand for a moment in time, a way of evoking an era and its peculiar obsessions. For individuals living within these periods, the shapes are cognitive building blocks, tools for thought: Charles Darwin and George Eliot used the web as a way of understanding biological evolution and social struggles; a half century later, the futurists embraced the explosions of machine-gun fire, while Picasso used them to re-create the horrors of war in Guernica. The shapes are a way of interpreting the world, and while no shape completely represents its epoch, they are an undeniable component of the history of thinking. When I imagine the shape that will hover above the first half of the twenty-first century, what comes to mind is not the coiled embrace of the genome, or the etched latticework of the silicon chip. It is instead the pulsing red and green pixels of Mitch Resnick’s slime mold simulation, moving erratically across the screen at first, then slowly coalescing into larger forms. The shape of those clusters—with their lifelike irregularity, and their absent pacemakers—is the shape that will define the coming decades. I see them on the screen, growing and dividing, and I think: That way lies the future.
Steven Johnson (Emergence: The Connected Lives of Ants, Brains, Cities, and Software)
At this point, another trope makes its appearance. It can be called the invention of anachronistic space, and it reached full authority as an administrative and regulatory technology in the late Victorian era. Within this trope, the agency of women, the colonized and the industrial working class are disavowed and projected onto anachronistic space: prehistoric, atavistic and irrational, inherently out of place in the historical time of modernity. According to the colonial version of this trope, imperial progress across the space of empire is figured as a journey backward in time to an anachronistic moment of prehistory. By extension, the return journey to Europe is seen as rehearsing the evolutionary logic of historical progress, forward and upward to the apogee of the Enlightenment in the European metropolis. Geographical difference across space is figured as a historical difference across time. The ideologue J.-M. Degerando captured this notion concisely: “The philosophical traveller, sailing to the ends of the earth, is in fact travelling in time; he is exploring the past.” 46 The stubborn and threatening heterogeneity of the colonies was contained and disciplined not as socially or geographically different from Europe and thus equally valid, but as temporally different and thus as irrevocably superannuated by history. Hegel, for example, perhaps the most influential philosophical proponent of this notion, figured Africa as inhabiting not simply a different geographical space but a different temporal zone, surviving anachronistically within the time of history. Africa, announces Hegel, “is no Historical part of the world … it has no movement or development to exhibit.” Africa came to be seen as the colonial paradigm of anachronistic space, a land perpetually out of time in modernity, marooned and historically abandoned. Africa was a fetish-land, inhabited by cannibals, dervishes and witch doctors, abandoned in prehistory at the precise moment before the Weltgeist (as the cunning agent of Reason) manifested itself in history.
Anne McClintock (Imperial Leather: Race, Gender, and Sexuality in the Colonial Contest)
THE THING THAT ENTRANCED ME about Chicago in the Gilded Age was the city’s willingness to take on the impossible in the name of civic honor, a concept so removed from the modern psyche that two wise readers of early drafts of this book wondered why Chicago was so avid to win the world’s fair in the first place. The juxtaposition of pride and unfathomed evil struck me as offering powerful insights into the nature of men and their ambitions. The more I read about the fair, the more entranced I became. That George Ferris would attempt to build something so big and novel—and that he would succeed on his first try—seems, in this day of liability lawsuits, almost beyond comprehension. A rich seam of information exists about the fair and about Daniel Burnham in the beautifully run archives of the Chicago Historical Society and the Ryerson and Burnham libraries of the Art Institute of Chicago. I acquired a nice base of information from the University of Washington’s Suzallo Library, one of the finest and most efficient libraries I have encountered. I also visited the Library of Congress in Washington, where I spent a good many happy hours immersed in the papers of Frederick Law Olmsted, though my happiness was at times strained by trying to decipher Olmsted’s execrable handwriting. I read—and mined—dozens of books about Burnham, Chicago, the exposition, and the late Victorian era. Several proved consistently valuable: Thomas Hines’s Burnham of Chicago (1974); Laura Wood Roper’s FLO: A Biography of Frederick Law Olmsted (1973); and Witold Rybczynski’s A Clearing in the Distance (1999). One book in particular, City of the Century by Donald L. Miller (1996), became an invaluable companion in my journey through old Chicago. I found four guidebooks to be especially useful: Alice Sinkevitch’s AIA Guide to Chicago (1993); Matt Hucke and Ursula Bielski’s Graveyards of Chicago (1999); John Flinn’s Official Guide to the World’s Columbian Exposition (1893); and Rand, McNally & Co.’ s Handbook to the World’s Columbian Exposition (1893). Hucke and Bielski’s guide led me to pay a visit to Graceland Cemetery, an utterly charming haven where, paradoxically, history comes alive.
Erik Larson (The Devil in the White City)
While the visual areas of the brain are active, other areas involved with smell, taste, and touch are largely shut down. Almost all the images and sensations processed by the body are self-generated, originating from the electromagnetic vibrations from our brain stem, not from external stimuli. The body is largely isolated from the outside world. Also, when we dream, we are more or less paralyzed. (Perhaps this paralysis is to prevent us from physically acting out our dreams, which could be disastrous. About 6 percent of people suffer from “sleep paralysis” disorder, in which they wake up from a dream still paralyzed. Often these individuals wake up frightened and believing that there are creatures pinning down their chest, arms, and legs. There are paintings from the Victorian era of women waking up with a terrifying goblin sitting on their chest glaring down at them. Some psychologists believe that sleep paralysis could explain the origin of the alien abduction syndrome.) The hippocampus is active when we dream, suggesting that dreams draw upon our storehouse of memories. The amygdala and anterior cingulate are also active, meaning that dreams can be highly emotional, often involving fear. But more revealing are the areas of the brain that are shut down, including the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (which is the command center of the brain), the orbitofrontal cortex (which can act like a censor or fact-checker), and the temporoparietal region (which processes sensory motor signals and spatial awareness). When the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex is shut down, we can’t count on the rational, planning center of the brain. Instead, we drift aimlessly in our dreams, with the visual center giving us images without rational control. The orbitofrontal cortex, or the fact-checker, is also inactive. Hence dreams are allowed to blissfully evolve without any constraints from the laws of physics or common sense. And the temporoparietal lobe, which helps coordinate our sense of where we are located using signals from our eyes and inner ear, is also shut down, which may explain our out-of-body experiences while we dream. As we have emphasized, human consciousness mainly represents the brain constantly creating models of the outside world and simulating them into the future. If so, then dreams represent an alternate way in which the future is simulated, one in which the laws of nature and social interactions are temporarily suspended
Michio Kaku (The Future of the Mind: The Scientific Quest to Understand, Enhance, and Empower the Mind)
Dio, che stupido era stato a lasciarsi andare alla collera! Non era così che sarebbe riuscito a proteggerla. Perché, se non poteva averla, almeno avrebbe fatto di tutto per tenerla sotto la sua ala protettrice, come un pulcino indifeso. Per la verità, più che un pulcino indifeso in quel momento gli parve una gatta pronta a graffiare. Quando si decise a parlare, la sua voce uscì controllata e bassa. «Camille, state prendendo questa storia del giornalismo troppo seriamente…» La lingua di lei scattò come una lama acuminata. «Dal momento che mi pagate per farlo, dovreste esserne soddisfatto.» Già. Frank scosse la testa, irritato dalla logica inattaccabile di lei, poi si alzò e si sedette al suo fianco, abbastanza da poterne respirare il calore e il profumo. Per un istante temette che se ne andasse, ma invece rimase ferma, le mani in grembo, lo sguardo basso. «Voi non potete capire, Mr Raleigh…» «Cosa, di grazia?» «Cosa questo lavoro significhi per me…» Lui deglutì, cercando di non rispondere in modo affrettato, cercando di assorbire ogni più piccolo particolare di lei. Le mani sottili, la nuca bianca disegnata da alcuni riccioli sfuggiti allo chignon, il profilo perfetto, le lunghe ciglia, il seno armonioso che si muoveva al ritmo del respiro accelerato. Sospirando, si passò la mano fra i capelli e distolse lo sguardo prima che gli saltassero in testa delle pessime idee. «In effetti, non riesco a capire cosa significhi per voi. Non è che un lavoro, in fondo. Spiegatemelo, vi prego, Miss Brontee.» Con lentezza Camille si girò verso di lui, gli occhi che brillavano. «Ecco… significa tutto.»
Viviana Giorgi (Un amore di fine secolo)