Victorian London Quotes

In Victorian London they used to burn phosphorus at seances in an attempt to see ghosts, and I suspect that the pop-music equivalent is our obsession with B-sides and alternate versions and unreleased material.

It was a fine day by London's standards. Which meant it was a day slightly less likely to suffocate you and poison your lungs.

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.

Wonderful things didn’t happen because one was cautious. They happened because one dared.

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.

I long to go through the crowded streets of your mighty London, to be in the midst of the whirl and rush of humanity, to share its life, its change, its death, and all that makes it what it is.

The sacrifice our ancestors gave yesterday Gave us today and our tomorrow

Those angels you’ve painted in your mind wouldn’t last for a moment on the streets of London, Mother,” Ellie called out to her. “We’re the devils who stepped in to replace them.

In a platonic and boring fashion, is it all right if I share your fire until me clothes dry out? I have a feeling if I fall asleep damp I'll wake up with some horrid Victorian disease.

William Shakespeare (baptised 26 April 1564 – died 23 April 1616) was an English poet and playwright, widely regarded as the greatest writer in the English language and the world's pre-eminent dramatist. He is often called England's national poet and the "Bard of Avon" (or simply "The Bard"). His surviving works consist of 38 plays, 154 sonnets, two long narrative poems, and several other poems. His plays have been translated into every major living language, and are performed more often than those of any other playwright. Shakespeare was born and raised in Stratford-upon-Avon. At the age of 18 he married Anne Hathaway, who bore him three children: Susanna, and twins Hamnet and Judith. Between 1585 and 1592 he began a successful career in London as an actor, writer, and part owner of the playing company the Lord Chamberlain's Men, later known as the King's Men. He appears to have retired to Stratford around 1613, where he died three years later. Few records of Shakespeare's private life survive, and there has been considerable speculation about such matters as his sexuality, religious beliefs, and whether the works attributed to him were written by others. Shakespeare produced most of his known work between 1590 and 1613. His early plays were mainly comedies and histories, genres he raised to the peak of sophistication and artistry by the end of the sixteenth century. Next he wrote mainly tragedies until about 1608, including Hamlet, King Lear, and Macbeth, considered some of the finest examples in the English language. In his last phase, he wrote tragicomedies, also known as romances, and collaborated with other playwrights. Many of his plays were published in editions of varying quality and accuracy during his lifetime, and in 1623 two of his former theatrical colleagues published the First Folio, a collected edition of his dramatic works that included all but two of the plays now recognised as Shakespeare's. Shakespeare was a respected poet and playwright in his own day, but his reputation did not rise to its present heights until the nineteenth century. The Romantics, in particular, acclaimed Shakespeare's genius, and the Victorians hero-worshipped Shakespeare with a reverence that George Bernard Shaw called "bardolatry". In the twentieth century, his work was repeatedly adopted and rediscovered by new movements in scholarship and performance. His plays remain highly popular today and are consistently performed and reinterpreted in diverse cultural and political contexts throughout the world. Source: Wikipedia

No, the events which I am about to describe were simply too monstrous, too shocking to appear in print. They still are. It is no exaggeration to suggest that they would tear apart the entire fabric of society and, particularly at a time of war, this is something I cannot risk.

The great city seemed to weigh upon me, as though it were crushing me under its heap of brick and stone. Gray, drizzly skies, congested streets, the soot-belching boats and barges chugging up and down the Thames, the teeming mass of four millions hastening about the countless activities of daily life in a metropolis, things adventurous, meaningful, spiritual, quotidian, futile, criminal, meaningless and absurd. Amidst this seething stew of humanity, I painted.

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.

It was immediately clear that the book had been undisturbed for a very long time, perhaps even since it had been laid to rest. The librarian fetched a checked duster, and wiped away the dust, a black, thick, tenacious Victorian dust, a dust composed of smoke and fog particles accumulated before the Clean Air acts.

No book is written; it's always re-written

They were not hacks, working surreptitiously for Victorian special-interest groups. They were not blinded by politics or personal ambition. They were blinded, instead, by an idea.

Victorian London. Rome in the fifth century. Egypt in the early twentieth. There must have been a hundred different places listed, all with small journal entries, like Saw the Queen as she and the Prince rode past us on their way to Buckingham Palace and The camel nearly ate Gus’s hair, ripped it from his scalp like grass and My God, if I never see another big-bellied man wrapped in a toga…

The dining-room was in the good taste of the period. It was very severe. There was a high dado of white wood and a green paper on which were etchings by Whistler in neat black frames. The green curtains with their peacock design, hung in straight lines, and the green carpet, in the pattern of which pale rabbits frolicked among leafy trees, suggested the influence of William Morris. There was blue delft on the chimneypiece. At that time there must have been five hundred dining-rooms in London decorated in exactly the same manner. It was chaste, artistic, and dull.

While the experience of homelessness in Victorian London was one of wretched misery for all who were forced to endure it, women like Polly, who found themselves without shelter, might also expect to become victims of sexual violence.

In Britain, chinoiserie was eclipsed by the medievalism of Sir Walter Scott and the Gothic Revival, while in Europe japonisme would be chinoiserie's successor. Japonisme never compelled the general middle-class British taste as did the indigenous medieval style. Nonetheless, through extensive importations to Britain of Japanese art and artifacts, notably by the shop Liberty's of London, as well as through the artists James McNeill Whistler and Dante Gabriel Rossetti, the architect E.W. Godwin, and the writer Oscar Wilde, the Japanese style of decoration was known in Britain well before 1894.

My very core clenches and spasms, my hips with a mind of their own, lurch. It is as if I no longer have control of any part of my body. ‘Ugh,’ I continue to groan in relief. And then, slowly, the rush is over and I am able to part my eyelids again. David is still looking at my face, a light sheen of sweat on his brow indicates that his task was not without effort. Finding his gaze too forthright in the current circumstances, my eyes move to the arm that still dwells beneath my skirts and the hand that clings viciously to his sleeve. My hand.

Most archaeology in London these days is rescue archaeology – projects designed to preserve as much as possible from the relentless cash-driven redevelopment. It’s not a new problem. Ask a medievalist about Victorian cellars or an Iron Age specialist about medieval ploughing – but take snacks, because you’re going to be there for a while.

By the mid-eighteenth century, another new attitude was emerging, one which encouraged reflection on death as a spiritual exercise and a valid form of artistic expression. The experts on Victorian death, James Stevens Curl and Chris Brooks, have described this tendency as, respectively, ‘the cult of sepulchral melancholy’ and ‘graveyard gothic’.

Oh to be blissfully ignorant, he thought. But in truth there was nothing he hated more in this life. Ignorance was the root of every manmade evil he had ever encountered.

It’s not his responsibility to educate me. The ignorance is mine, and so must be the remedy for it.

Modern Londoners live in a great Victorian city; the Victorians lived through it, so to speak.

It's elementary, my dear Winifred.

Dogs cocked their legs on anything perpendicular, carriages clopped and growled along the cobblestones, and all with the prevailing aroma of rancid fish quietly melding the confusion together...

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?

...in other spheres of Victorian Society the appeal of a young woman dressed in black from head to toe was acknowledged. In Victorian popular culture, widows had two manifestations: the battleaxe and the man-eater, preying upon husbands and bachelors alike. Even today, an attractive, dark-haired person dressed in all black has vampiric connotations, as the novelist Alison Lurie has noted, 'so archetypally terrifying and thrilling, that any black-haired, pale-complexioned man or woman who appears clad in all black formal clothes projects a destructive eroticism, sometimes without concious intention.

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")

The symptoms syphilis engendered worsened over time. In addition to the unsightly skin ulcers that pockmarked the body in the later stages of the disease, many victims endured paralysis, blindness, dementia, and “saddle nose,” a grotesque deformity that occurs when the bridge of the nose caves into the face. (Syphilis was so common that “no nose clubs” sprang up all over London. One newspaper reported that “an eccentric gentleman, having taken a fancy to see a large party of noseless persons, invited every one thus afflicted, whom he met in the streets, to dine on a certain day at a tavern, where he formed them into a brotherhood.” The man, who assumed the alias of Mr. Crampton for these clandestine parties, entertained his noseless friends every month for a year until his death, at which time the group “unhappily dissolved.”)

(...Masked parties, Savage parties, Victorian parties, Greek parties, Wild West parties, Russian parties, Circus parties, parties where one had to dress as somebody else, almost naked parties in St John's Wood, parties in flats and studios and houses and ships and hotels and night clubs, in windmills and swimming baths, tea parties at school where one ate muffins and meringues and tinned crab, parties at Oxford where one drank brown sherry and smoked Turkish cigarettes, dull dances in London and comic dances in Scotland and disgusting dances in Paris--all that succession and repetition of massed humanity.... Those vile bodies...)

And the feel of the Park itself was most strange and interesting - what I noticed most was its separateness; it seemed to be smiling and amiable, but somehow aloof from the miles and miles of London all around. At first I thought this was because it belonged to an older London - Victorian, eighteenth century, earlier than that. And then, as I watched the sheep peacefully nibbling the grass, it came to me that Hyde Park has never belonged to any London - that it has always been, in spirit, a stretch of the countryside; and that it thus links the Londons of all periods together most magically - by remaining forever unchanged at the heart of the ever-changing town.

When she paused, I embraced the opportunity to turn the trend of conversation by saying: 'I am afraid that I was a little rude to you last night,' but I hardly expected such a blunt reply as she made. 'Yes, you were exceedingly rude, and I hate rude men.' 'I hope you don't hate me,' I cried, laughingly. 'Oh no, not quite. You're a Londoner, you see.' This was very severe. I confess I was hardly prepared for it, and I was tempted to say something cutting in reply, but checked myself, bowed, and merely remarked: 'Which is not my fault. Therefore pity me rather than blame me.' 'Certainly I do that,' she replied, with an amusing seriousness. ("The Doomed Man")

we sat down; not wishing to part in the tumult and blaze of Piccadilly. I had told her again that she should share in my good fortune, if I met with any; and that I would never forsake her, as soon as I had power to protect her.

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?

As we drifted away from the Tower Bridge, I saw a single silhouette standing against the bright lamplight. Even now when I was nearly asleep, I could recognise her. Her shoulders were hunched up as if she was upset. Whether she was upset that she had nearly killed me or that she had let me get away, I was unsure. Then she turned around and walked to join the other silhouettes standing in a group farther back. Now I could not see which one was Rose – they were all joint together to make one.

Thereafter he gave up on a career in the arts and filled a succession of unsuitable vacancies and equally unsuitable women, falling in love whenever he took up a new job, and falling out of love - or more correctly being fallen out of love with - every time he moved on. He drove a removal van, falling in love with the first woman whose house he emptied, delivered milk in an electric float, falling in love with the cashier who paid him every Friday night, worked as an assistant to an Italian carpenter who replaced sash windows in Victorian houses and replaced Julian Treslove in the affections of the cashier, managed a shoe department in a famous London store, falling in love with the woman who managed soft furnishings on the floor above.

But the stream of London, charity flows in a channel which, though deep and mighty, is yet noiseless and underground; not obvious or readily accessible to poor houseless wanderers: and it cannot be denied that the outside air and frame-work of London society is harsh, cruel, and repulsive.

Ci scrutammo in silenzio per un lungo minuto, abituandoci di nuovo alla presenza dell’altro, all’essere ancora entrambi vivi, in salvo, al sicuro nella civilizzata Londra. La pioggia che batteva sui vetri e il cla-clam-cla-clam dei pistoni della Pneumopolitana divennero solo un rumore bianco in sottofondo.

Miss Fields," said a servant, stepping into the room and closing the door, "There is a visitor for you. Are you in?" Clare blinked. "Yes, obviously." "Ah. Miss Fields, I should advise -- you may be in without being 'in', if you prefer," he said, offering her a tray. There was a calling card on it; Arthur Conan Doyle, Edinburgh.

«Hai presente come ci chiamano… invertiti. Come se indossassimo la giacca con la fodera all’esterno, o come se tutti gli altri nuotassero da una parte e noi fossimo sulla riva sbagliata del fiume. Per tutta la vita mi sono sentito a quel modo: sottosopra. Così pensai che per una volta avrei potuto lasciarmi trascinare dalla corrente» concluse, poi tacque per lungo tempo.

SHE LET US INTO THE house, which had the subtle smell of old wood and old wool—as I used to imagine Victorian homes smelled in Victorian times, before I was recently alerted to the painful truth that actually, at least here in London, they stink of whale oil, patchouli (woven into shawls to keep worms from eating the fabric in transit), and backed-up sewers. I am now convinced everyone here goes to church for the incense.

was an English poet and playwright, widely regarded as the greatest writer in the English language and the world's pre-eminent dramatist. He is often called England's national poet and the "Bard of Avon" (or simply "The Bard"). His surviving works consist of 38 plays, 154 sonnets, two long narrative poems, and several other poems. His plays have been translated into every major living language, and are performed more often than those of any other playwright. Shakespeare was born and raised in Stratford-upon-Avon. At the age of 18 he married Anne Hathaway, who bore him three children: Susanna, and twins Hamnet and Judith. Between 1585 and 1592 he began a successful career in London as an actor, writer, and part owner of the playing company the Lord Chamberlain's Men, later known as the King's Men. He appears to have retired to Stratford around 1613, where he died three years later. Few records of Shakespeare's private life survive, and there has been considerable speculation about such matters as his sexuality, religious beliefs, and whether the works attributed to him were written by others. Shakespeare produced most of his known work between 1590 and 1613. His early plays were mainly comedies and histories, genres he raised to the peak of sophistication and artistry by the end of the sixteenth century. Next he wrote mainly tragedies until about 1608, including Hamlet, King Lear, and Macbeth, considered some of the finest examples in the English language. In his last phase, he wrote tragicomedies, also known as romances, and collaborated with other playwrights. Many of his plays were published in editions of varying quality and accuracy during his lifetime, and in 1623 two of his former theatrical colleagues published the First Folio, a collected edition of his dramatic works that included all but two of the plays now recognised as Shakespeare's. Shakespeare was a respected poet and playwright in his own day, but his reputation did not rise to its present heights until the nineteenth century. The Romantics, in particular, acclaimed Shakespeare's genius, and the Victorians hero-worshipped Shakespeare with a reverence that George Bernard Shaw called "bardolatry". In the twentieth century, his work was repeatedly adopted and rediscovered by new movements in scholarship and performance. His plays remain highly popular today and are consistently performed and reinterpreted in diverse cultural and political contexts throughout the world. Source: Wikipedia

Even today, every night of the year, the Queen’s Keys are carried in great ceremony to lock up the gates of the Tower. The Chief Yeoman Warder at 9:53 meets his escort warders and they walk to the gates. They arrive at 10:00 p.m. exactly and are challenged by a sentry with a bayonet who cries loudly, “Who comes here?” The reply by the Chief is, “The Keys.” “Whose keys?” “Queen Elizabeth’s keys.” “Pass, Queen Elizabeth’s keys, and all is well.” The party passes through the Bloody Tower Archway into the fortress and halts at the Broadway Steps. At the top of the stairs, the Tower Guard presents arms and the Chief Warder raises his hat and proclaims, “God preserve Queen Elizabeth.” The sentry replies, “Amen!” Afterward, the keys are taken to the Queen’s House for safekeeping and the Last Post is sounded. This ancient ceremony was interrupted only once since the 14th century. During World War II there was an air raid on London. Bombs fell on the Victorian guardroom just as the party was coming through the Bloody Tower Archway. The noise knocked down the Chief Yeoman and one of the Warder escorts. In the Tower is a letter from the Officer of the Guard in which he apologizes to King George VI for the ceremony finishing late, as well as a reply from the King which states that the officer is not to be punished since the delay was due to enemy action.

It is worth pausing for a second to reflect on Snow’s willingness to pursue his investigation this far. Here we have a man who had reached the very pinnacle of Victorian medical practice—attending on the queen of England with a procedure that he himself had pioneered—who was nonetheless willing to spend every spare moment away from his practice knocking on hundreds of doors in some of London’s most dangerous neighborhoods, seeking out specifically those houses that had been attacked by the most dread disease of the age. But without that tenacity, without that fearlessness, without that readiness to leave behind the safety of professional success and royal patronage, and venture into the streets, his “grand experiment”—as Snow came to call it—would have gone nowhere. The miasma theory would have remained unchallenged.

Your brother is the most ridiculous, hardheaded, stupid man I know!” Rose half expected Archer to chastise her. Instead, he took a second glass of champagne from the footman passing with the tray and offered it to her. “And you are surprised by this?” “Astonishingly, yes.” She took a long, unladylike swallow of the crisp, bubbly liquid. “I’m astounded. Ah, here are two scoundrels you should know to avoid.” His grin told her he considered them quite the opposite. They were good-looking men, one tall and dark, the other almost as tall with brown hair and blue eyes and enough of the Kane countenance that she picked him for Grey's relation instantly. They met Archer enthusiastically, and then turned polite curiosity in her direction. "Lady Rose Danvers," Archer said jovially. "May I present the Earl of Autley." The dark man bowed over her offered hand. "And my cousin, Mr. Aiden Kane?" The man who looked a bit like Grey smiled and took her hand next. "It's lovely to meet you, Lady Rose," the earl said smoothly. "I hope you are enjoying your time in London?" "Oh, yes," she replied. "Lord Archer has been a very entertaining companion." "I don't doubt it," Aiden said with a grin as he clapped Archer on the shoulder.

VICTORIAN FUNERAL BISCUITS Adapted from the third edition of Miss Beecher’s Domestic Receipt-Book, published in 1862. ½ c sugar ½ c salted butter, softened 1 c molasses ½ c warm water 2 tbs fresh minced ginger 2 ¼ c flour ½ tsp baking soda In a large bowl, use an electric mixer to beat the sugar and butter together until light and fluffy, about 1 minute. Add the molasses, water, and ginger, and beat until combined. In a separate bowl, whisk together the flour and baking soda. Add flour to molasses mixture and use electric mixer to combine well. Dough will be stiff. Split dough into two balls. Knead each dough ball several times to remove any air bubbles. Form dough into two even logs, approximately 8 inches long. Wrap each log tightly in plastic wrap. Refrigerate for several hours until firm. Preheat oven to 350°F. Line two baking sheets with parchment paper. Slice each log of dough into ¼-inch rounds and place one inch apart on baking sheets. Each dough log makes approximately 25 biscuits. If desired, use a knife or stamp to impress an image onto the biscuits. Bake 20 minutes. Let cool completely (biscuits should be crunchy). Wrap several biscuits in wax paper and secure with a black wax stamp or black string.

I can never understand why Londoners fail to see that they live in the most wonderful city in the world. It is, if you ask me, far more beautiful and interesting than Paris and more lively than anywhere but New York—and even New York can’t touch it in lots of important ways. It has more history, finer parks, a livelier and more varied press, better theaters, more numerous orchestras and museums, leafier squares, safer streets, and more courteous inhabitants than any other large city in the world. And it has more congenial small things—incidental civilities, you might call them—than any other city I know: cheery red mailboxes, drivers who actually stop for you at pedestrian crossings, lovely forgotten churches with wonderful names like St. Andrew by the Wardrobe and St. Giles Cripplegate, sudden pockets of quiet like Lincoln’s Inn and Red Lion Square, interesting statues of obscure Victorians in togas, pubs, black cabs, double-decker buses, helpful policemen, polite notices, people who will stop to help you when you fall down or drop your shopping, benches everywhere. What other great city would trouble to put blue plaques on houses to let you know what famous person once lived there, or warn you to look left or right before stepping off the curb? I’ll tell you. None.

The plot of Love on a Mortal Lease is not unlike those Shakespear would use later, nor unlike those of commonplace Victorian works. The heroine, Rachel Gwynne, has dead parents, as is the case from Oliver Twist (1837) through hundreds of other ensuing tripledeckers. Rachel is a novelist – most of Shakespear’s heroines would be writers – in love with a military man many years her senior. After he refuses to marry her because he fears his mother will dislike Rachel and therefore disinherit him, Rachel becomes his mistress. Once the snobby old mother meets Rachel by happenstance in London, however, they immediately adore each other, and the Colonel may now safely marry Rachel – though she doesn’t love him anymore, and he seems none too fond of her, either. They muddle along in unhappy matrimony until Rachel conveniently discovers (as we’ve known for a while) that the Colonel has had another longtime mistress, a stupid society girl, throughout the course of their marriage, and even during their preceding affair. When the Colonel even more conveniently falls on his head and dies, Rachel is made a wealthy widow in her mid-twenties, free to marry a nice young writer who knows about, but forgives her, her former relationship. A happily wish-fulfilling story, perhaps, for a young woman writer in a bad marriage, and Rachel has some interesting ideas about her profession: speaking of clever girls who scribble, she hopes for the day that “the cleverness and the scribbling . . . fall from her, like a disguise, and she stands revealed in her true form – then she may never write another word, or she may write something immortal.”8

It was an imprudent idea to begin with.” “I shan’t argue with you on that point.” Rose scoffed at him. “You don’t get to play morally superior with me, Grey. I may have been stupid enough to conspire against you, but you didn’t even recognize someone you’ve known for years! If one of us must be the bigger idiot, I think it must be you!” Oh dear God. She covered her mouth with her hand. What had she just said? Dark arched brows pulled together tightly over stormy blue eyes. “You’re right,” he agreed. “I am an idiot, but only because I allowed this ridiculous ruse past the point when I realized your identity.” Rose froze-like a damp leaf on an icy pond. “You knew?” And yet he continued to pretend…oh, he was worse than she by far. “Of course I knew.” He glowered at her. “Blindfold me and I would know the scent of your skin, the exact color and texture of your skin. Do you not realize that I know the color of your eyes right down to the flecks of gold that light their depths?” Heart pounding, stomach churning in shock, Rose could only stare at him. How could he say such things to her and sound so disgusted? “When?” Her voice was a ragged whisper. “When did you know?” “I suspected before but tried to deny it. The morning after we last met I took one look at your sweet mouth and knew there couldn’t be two women in the world, let alone London with the same delectable bottom lip.” It hurt. Oh, she hadn’t thought hearing him say such wonderful things could hurt so much! She pressed a hand to her chest. “You suspected and yet you made love to me any way.” “Made love?” He snorted. “That’s a girl’s term, Rose. What you and I did…it was something far worse than making trite love.” Worse? How could he malign what had transpired between them. “So you regret it, despite your own choice to continue with the charade.” “What I regret,” he growled, suddenly moving toward her, “is your sudden attack of conscience.” He was mad. She took a step back. “I don’t understand you.” “If only you had managed to keep your guilt where it belonged.” A ravaged smile curved his lips as he shook his head. “We might have continued on, with neither being the wiser, but now we must endure the rest of the Season together, knowing what we can no longer have.” “Then you admit you have feelings for me.” He laughed hollowly. “So many I can scarce discern them all.” It was a hollow victory at best. “If you care for me and I for you, then why can we not reveal our feelings? You have but to ask and I’m yours.

What could split its soul into a thousand pieces? A million? And with it, the answer: God. God could divide Himself infinitesimally. God could fracture his soul into one and a half billion pieces and place a little of it in each and every man and woman walking the earth. And then, as understanding settled, he beheld

There was permanence in change. It was the only way life could flourish.

God

Norwich station has your standard late-Victorian brick, cast-iron, and glass shed retrofitted with the bright molded plastic of various fast-food franchises. I gratefully staggered in the direction of Upper Crust and considered asking if I could stick my head under their coffee spigot but settled for a couple of double espressos and a chicken tikka masala baguette instead.

It is abundantly clear that our planet is warming. But not only the warming itself will change our world as we know it. We are already seeing changing weather patterns with extreme weather and droughts. We are already in the middle of three pandemics: The HIV/Aids pandemic is slowly retreating, the seventh cholera pandemic that started in the 1960s is still not under control, and the tuberculosis pandemic infects roughly one third of the human population. The World Health Organization warns about the spreading of multidrug-resistant tuberculosis bacteria with 900,000 cases each year. Microbiologists warn about the spreading of antibiotics-resistance genes in a great number of pathogenic bacteria, and they expect us to reach a point when antibiotics are no longer effective. Think of Victorian London with diseases like syphilis, cholera, typhus — there were no antibiotics available back then and a lot of people died a gruesome death.  What has disease to do with climate

One of the classic settings in fiction, a little world as reassuring as imperial St Petersburg or Victorian London, is suburban Connecticut in the 1950s. If you close your eyes, you can picture autumn leaves drifting down on quiet streets, you can see commuters in fedoras streaming off the platforms of the New Haven Line, you can hear the tinkle of the evening's first pitcher of martinis; and hear the ugly fights then, after midnight; and smell the desperate or despairing sex. (Introduction to "The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit")

Transport costs increased as the city grew, making the sale of mud less and less profitable; competition in the form of guano and chemical fertilisers undermined sales further.

London was the heart of the greatest empire ever known; a financial and mercantile hub for the world; but it was also infamously filthy.

Between 1801 and 1901, the population of London soared from one million to over six million.

Filth implied social and domestic disorder; and, when discovered in the home, inculcated immoral habits – for it was widely agreed that working men, faced with poor housekeeping, sought refuge in the glittering comforts of the gin palace.

Before taking his leave of a premises, the dustman would request either beer or a tip for his trouble, quaintly known in the trade as ‘sparrows’.

Dustmen, employed by private contractors, were in no sense public servants, or part of a ‘public sector’ – a concept which barely belongs to the Victorian era.

Ashes had always had some value to farmers as fertiliser,

CURIOSITIES OF LONDON LIFE Charles Manby Smith   Copyright © Charles Manby Smith 1853.   The right of Charles

In London, night came too soon, it hung in the morning air like a threat, and then in the afternoon a blue-gray dusk descended, and the Victorian buildings all wore a mournful air.

and we’re in Victorian London. Meet the characters in the story… Elsie is a homeless orphan, who lives on the streets of London.

Victoria would in fact be the only married woman in the whole country who'd retain control over her own income and property. This was important. The reason Albert had nearly given up on the courtship was because it placed him "in a very ridiculous position. "Even now, everyone would know that he wasn't really the master in his own household. ... And then again, there was the distressing fact that she'd been the one to speak first. "Since the Queen did herself for a husband 'propose'," ran a London ballad, "the ladies will all do the same, I suppose: Their days of subserviency now will be past, For all will "speak first" as they always did last!

The ghost story was also a hugely popular form for Victorian women writers, enabling them to discuss gender dynamics, sexuality, the constraints of domestic life and other taboo topics.

It is best for a man to try to be both poet and naturalist — not to be too much of a naturalist and so overlook the beauty of things, or too much of a poet and so fail to understand them or even perceive those hidden beauties only revealed by close observation.

Parthena Just a thank you to anyone who purchased my western novel 'Parthena' on Amazon Kindle, during its promotional period. The promotion is now over however if anyone is interested, it is still available at the normal price on Amazon Kindle. Thankfully it is not an expensive read. If you like a western with a difference, this one links Victorian London with the Wild West of Wyoming. Many thanks again. GARY DIAMOND

shot.” The truth was the station had never made money because it had been built in the wrong place, a place chosen to save on restitution payments. In the great industrial age of Victorian Britain, landowners had to be paid when a new railway line was constructed across their land, especially if it was agricultural land. The landowners closer to Cranbrook were asking a pretty penny for the railway to go through in the mid-1800s, so instead the station was built in the hamlet of Hartley two miles outside the town. And there it lost money hand over fist, because not enough people wanted to come from Cranbrook to the station. Yet there’s many who would agree with my dad about the shortsighted Beeching and his axe, as Britain’s roads became choked with traffic—perhaps in time many of those railway lines and stations could have become profitable. Certainly old Beeching might have had a change of heart if he’d ever been in a car stuck on the M25 outer London orbital motorway at any time of day.

matter of principal

Give me the wilds of an English moor, or the gritty urban streets of Victorian London, and I would feel, if nothing else, at home.

Neither train nor bus, at this point in time, was interested in carrying working-class passengers; theirs was a service for the wealthy or middle-class person; the timetables and routes were tailored to their specific needs. Trains and omnibuses alike were in the business of delivering gentlemen to the City of London and to the business and commercial districts of all of the major towns and cities in time for a ten o’clock start.

Beatrice Hall, the local Victorian monstrosity, was legendary among North London builders. Rumours had been circulating of late that the owner, a reclusive Russian scientist whom nobody had ever met, was looking for decorators.

New transport systems meant that diet ceased to be regionally based, and by 1900, thanks to the emergence of the processing industry, canning and refrigeration, food became international.’3 This coincided with the Victorian craze for celebrity expatriate chefs who balanced a flair for novel recipes and publicity, including Louis Eustache Ude, chef de cuisine of Crockford’s from 1827 to 1838, and his successor from 1838 to 1840, Charles Elmé Francatelli. Yet it was the celebrated Alexis Soyer at the Reform Club who would become the most famous Clubland chef.

In the palmy days of the (eighteen) sixties, the memory of which is preserved for us in the evergreen pages of 'Punch'; when skirts were wide, when minds were narrow, and whiskers did prodigiously abound; when ladies veiled their graces in chignons and crinolines, and gentlemen, inexpressibly peg-topped, fortified their manly bosoms with barricades of beard; when the cultured delighted in wooden woodcuts of gilt-edged table books, and the vulgar worshipped albums of painfully realistic family photographs; when the outside of cup and platter received much attention, and due regard was had to the whitening of sepulchres, and whatever was "respectable" was right; …there resided … one Mr Samuel Saville Kent, gentleman.

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.

Have you qualifications, sir?” Warner’s wavy hair was half brown, half gray, and stood out from his head despite obvious efforts with bear grease. His beard quivered in restrained rage. “Yes, sir. Medical degree from University of London, and I’m a surgeon at St. Bartholomew’s.” “Hummph. Why the carbolic and the hand washing? Are you one of those young pups touting germ theory?” “I tout nothing. Cleaner is better, that’s all, whether it’s miasma, dust, or germs. He’ll have a better chance of survival.

She'd headed out early, walking the short distance to Kew Gardens and arriving as it opened, taking an hour to explore the grounds before her meeting. The huge expanses of green immediately soothed her as she wandered. She barely scratched the surface of what the great gardens had to offer, but gazed in awe at the spectacular Alpine House, the elegant Nash Conservatory, and sweltered in the giant Victorian glasshouse. She stopped to admire the succulent garden and the giant lilies in the Waterlily House, some of the pads of the Victoria amazonica more than a meter across, before wandering into the Rose Pergola, through a tunnel of blooms, rambling roses--- including the 'Danse Des Sylphes' and the pink-blossomed 'Mary Wallace', she read--- trained to climb in an arch over her head.

Inevitably, such a profound sexual disjunction found another outlet: the obverse to the worship of female innocence has always been the degradation and humiliation of women. The number of child brothels in London indicated that Victorian gentlemen were not content to swoon over sentimental portrayals of little girls. A reporter for the French newspaper Le Figaro on a single evening counted 500 girls aged between five and fifteen parading as prostitutes between Piccadilly Circus and Waterloo Place in the city’s fashionable West End district. One madam advertised her brothel as a place where ‘you can gloat over the cries of the girls with the certainty that no one will hear them besides yourself.’272

In fact, looking through the historical record, there are powerful examples of democratic regimes making long-term planning a policy priority. But under what circumstances are they willing to do so? To answer this question, we must descend deep into the sewers of Victorian London.

One of the key lessons to draw from Bazalgette’s sewers is that successful long-term planning needs to be based on building adaptability, flexibility, and resilience into the original design. In his book How Buildings Learn, Stewart Brand points out that the most long-lasting buildings are those that can “learn” by adapting to new contexts over time: They can accommodate different users or be easily extended, retrofitted, or upgraded. He draws an analogy with biology: “The more adapted an organism to present conditions, the less adaptable it can be to unknown future conditions.”24 This is exactly where the London sewers were exemplary. By making the tunnels double the size needed at the time, Bazalgette designed long-term adaptability into the system, just as his use of the finest building materials gave the sewers enough resilience to survive over a century of constant wear and tear. Of course, we can learn about resilience not just from cases like the Victorian sewers, but from natural phenomena such as a delicate spider web that manages to survive a storm or the way sweating and shivering help regulate human body temperature.

Circassian Bloom was first advertised during the eighteenth century. A typical advert, as seen in a 1772 edition of London’s Public Advertiser, begins by declaring that ‘Circassians are the most beautiful Women in the World’. To enhance their beauty, the advert states that Circassian ladies have long been accustomed to using a ‘liquid bloom’ to bring colour to their cheeks. An enterprising Englishman claims to have duplicated the secret of this liquid bloom via an extract from a Circassian vegetable.

the removal of the refuse of a large town,' he wrote, 'is perhaps one of the most important of social operations.' And the scavengers of Victorian London weren't just getting rid of that refuse—they were recycling it.

THE PRACTICE & SCIENCE OF DRAWING BY HAROLD SPEED Associé de la Société Nationale des Beaux-Arts, Paris; Member of the Royal Society of Portrait Painters, &c. With 93 Illustrations & Diagrams LONDON SEELEY, SERVICE & CO. LIMITED 38 GREAT RUSSELL STREET 1913 Superior Formatting Publishing If you want more well formatted, classic books which have been formatted specifically for the Kindle platform then just search Amazon for "Superior Formatting Publishing". You can also browse and purchase our entire inventory at our website: SuperiorFormatting.com All of our books are priced as low as possible, feature a linked table of contents, cover art, and superior formatting. Our formatting techniques insures that all page breaks, indents, spacing and quotes are properly displayed on your Kindle device. Plate I. FOUR PHOTOGRAPHS OF SAME MONOCHROME PAINTING IN DIFFERENT STAGES ILLUSTRATING A METHOD OF STUDYING MASS DRAWING WITH THE BRUSH PREFACE Permit me in the first place to anticipate the disappointment of any student who opens this book with the idea of finding "wrinkles" on how to draw faces, trees, clouds, or what not, short cuts to excellence in drawing, or any of the tricks so popular with the drawing masters of our grandmothers and still dearly loved by a large number of people. No good can come of such methods, for there are no short cuts to excellence. But help of a very practical kind it is the aim of the following pages to give; although it may be necessary to make a greater call upon the intelligence of the student than these Victorian methods attempted.

By the early Victorian period, there were eighteen receiving houses in London, and the Illustrated London News estimated some 200,000 people were bathing in the Serpentine each year. In winter, the lifeguards donned greatcoats emblazoned with ‘Iceman’ on the back and patrolled the banks for any skater who might fall through the ice. Icemen operated throughout London at all regular skating grounds.

In director Guy Ritchie’s entertainingly bumptious movies for Warner Bros., Robert Downey Jr. and Jude Law ricochet around a grimy Victorian-ish London replete with slow-motion fight scenes and massive exploding fireballs. (Watching those movies is like huffing gasified cotton candy, but the world loves them.

One of the benefits of the national police force was the inception of national crime statistics. Although these represent only crimes recorded by the police, they offer real figures to work with, if only to map trends. Despite all the usual caveats about their unreliability, most historians have endorsed the official picture. The homicide rate for England and Wales was as high as 2 per 100,000 only once during the century, in 1865; otherwise it was about 1.5 per 100,000 and occasionally as low as i per 100,000, a record low.81 Between 1857 and 189o there were rarely more than 400 homicides reported each year, and in the 189os the average was below 350.82 In 1835-1837 9 percent of all English crimes were violent crimes, and from 1837 through 1845 the share declined to 8 percent.83 Even that 8 percent is inflated by the fact that of the crimes against the person some 25-33 percent were cases of infanticide, which would not have involved firearms. Crimes committed with guns were rare. Between 1878 and 1886 the average number of burglaries in London in which firearms were used was two per year; from 1887 to 18g1 this rose to 3.6 cases a year.84 "It was a rough society," David Philips concluded after examining Victorian crime, "but it was not a notably homicidal society. The manslaughter cases do not show a free use of lethal weapons."85 On the other hand, ordinary citizens were free to use lethal weapons to defend themselves. And as the difficulties of imposing restrictions on private firearms indicate, members of Parliament and their constituents were vigorously opposed to such attempts.

It is nine o'clock, and London has breakfasted. Some unconsidered tens of thousands have, it is true, already enjoyed with what appetite they might their pre-prandial meal; the upper fifty thousand, again, have not yet left their luxurious couches, and will not breakfast till ten, eleven o'clock, noon; nay, there shall be sundry listless, languid members of fast military clubs, dwellers among the tents of Jermyn Street, and the high-priced second floors of Little Ryder Street, St. James's, upon whom one, two, and three o'clock in the afternoon shall be but as dawn, and whose broiled bones and devilled kidneys shall scarcely be laid on the damask breakfast-cloth before Sol is red in the western horizon. I wish that, in this age so enamoured of statistical information, when we must needs know how many loads of manure go to every acre of turnip-field, and how many jail-birds are thrust into the black hole per mensem for fracturing their pannikins, or tearing their convict jackets, that some M'Culloch or Caird would tabulate for me the amount of provisions, solid and liquid, consumed at the breakfasts of London every morning. I want to know how many thousand eggs are daily chipped, how many of those embryo chickens are poached, and how many fried; how many tons of quartern loaves are cut up to make bread-and-butter, thick and thin; how many porkers have been sacrificed to provide the bacon rashers, fat and streaky ; what rivers have been drained, what fuel consumed, what mounds of salt employed, what volumes of smoke emitted, to catch and cure the finny haddocks and the Yarmouth bloaters, that grace our morning repast. Say, too, Crosse and Blackwell, what multitudinous demands are matutinally made on thee for pots of anchovy paste and preserved tongue, covered with that circular layer - abominable disc! - of oleaginous nastiness, apparently composed of rancid pomatum, but technically known as clarified butter, and yet not so nasty as that adipose horror that surrounds the truffle bedecked pate  de  foie gras. Say, Elizabeth Lazenby, how many hundred bottles of thy sauce (none of which are genuine unless signed by thee) are in request to give a relish to cold meat, game, and fish. Mysteries upon mysteries are there connected with nine o'clock breakfasts.

The smallest lapse in emotion leaves me spinning, overcome with bloodlust.

I swivel my back to her, my eyes gluttonous and eager to get their fill of this intimate piece of what has come to be her puzzle.

My mind is blank. Yet, one word rides the Ferris wheel of my psyche, whirling around and leaving me dizzy - monster. It is unavoidable. I am a monster.

For anyone, man or woman to desire me, it is absurd! I am nothing but a gargoyle filled with the blood of others.

Like a kelpie the sunlight feigns innocence until it meets my skin, transforming into a sharp-toothed monster that tears away at my cold dead flesh.

I knew you forever and you were always old, soft white lady of my heart. Surely you would scold me for sitting up late, reading your letters, as if these foreign postmarks were meant for me. You posted them first in London, wearing furs and a new dress in the winter of eighteen-ninety. I read how London is dull on Lord Mayor's Day, where you guided past groups of robbers, the sad holes of Whitechapel, clutching your pocketbook, on the way to Jack the Ripper dissecting his famous bones. This Wednesday in Berlin, you say, you will go to a bazaar at Bismarck's house. And I see you as a young girl in a good world still, writing three generations before mine. I try to reach into your page and breathe it back… but life is a trick, life is a kitten in a sack. This is the sack of time your death vacates. How distant your are on your nickel-plated skates in the skating park in Berlin, gliding past me with your Count, while a military band plays a Strauss waltz. I loved you last, a pleated old lady with a crooked hand. Once you read Lohengrin and every goose hung high while you practiced castle life in Hanover. Tonight your letters reduce history to a guess. The count had a wife. You were the old maid aunt who lived with us. Tonight I read how the winter howled around the towers of Schloss Schwobber, how the tedious language grew in your jaw, how you loved the sound of the music of the rats tapping on the stone floors. When you were mine you wore an earphone. This is Wednesday, May 9th, near Lucerne, Switzerland, sixty-nine years ago. I learn your first climb up Mount San Salvatore; this is the rocky path, the hole in your shoes, the yankee girl, the iron interior of her sweet body. You let the Count choose your next climb. You went together, armed with alpine stocks, with ham sandwiches and seltzer wasser. You were not alarmed by the thick woods of briars and bushes, nor the rugged cliff, nor the first vertigo up over Lake Lucerne. The Count sweated with his coat off as you waded through top snow. He held your hand and kissed you. You rattled down on the train to catch a steam boat for home; or other postmarks: Paris, verona, Rome. This is Italy. You learn its mother tongue. I read how you walked on the Palatine among the ruins of the palace of the Caesars; alone in the Roman autumn, alone since July. When you were mine they wrapped you out of here with your best hat over your face. I cried because I was seventeen. I am older now. I read how your student ticket admitted you into the private chapel of the Vatican and how you cheered with the others, as we used to do on the fourth of July. One Wednesday in November you watched a balloon, painted like a silver abll, float up over the Forum, up over the lost emperors, to shiver its little modern cage in an occasional breeze. You worked your New England conscience out beside artisans, chestnut vendors and the devout. Tonight I will learn to love you twice; learn your first days, your mid-Victorian face. Tonight I will speak up and interrupt your letters, warning you that wars are coming, that the Count will die, that you will accept your America back to live like a prim thing on the farm in Maine. I tell you, you will come here, to the suburbs of Boston, to see the blue-nose world go drunk each night, to see the handsome children jitterbug, to feel your left ear close one Friday at Symphony. And I tell you, you will tip your boot feet out of that hall, rocking from its sour sound, out onto the crowded street, letting your spectacles fall and your hair net tangle as you stop passers-by to mumble your guilty love while your ears die.

Ken Wharfe In 1987, Ken Wharfe was appointed a personal protection officer to Diana. In charge of the Princess’s around-the-clock security at home and abroad, in public and in private, Ken Wharfe became a close friend and loyal confidant who shared her most private moments. After Diana’s death, Inspector Wharfe was honored by Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II at Buckingham Palace and made a Member of the Victorian Order, a personal gift of the sovereign for his loyal service to her family. His book, Diana: Closely Guarded Secret, is a Sunday Times and New York Times bestseller. He is a regular contributor with the BBC, ITN, Sky News, NBC, CBS, and CNN, participating in numerous outside broadcasts and documentaries for BBC--Newsnight, Channel 4 News, Channel 5 News, News 24, and GMTV. My memory of Diana is not her at an official function, dazzling with her looks and clothes and the warmth of her manner, or even of her offering comfort among the sick, the poor, and the dispossessed. What I remember best is a young woman taking a walk in a beautiful place, unrecognized, carefree, and happy. Diana increasingly craved privacy, a chance “to be normal,” to have the opportunity to do what, in her words, “ordinary people” do every day of their lives--go shopping, see friends, go on holiday, and so on--away from the formality and rituals of royal life. As someone responsible for her security, yet understanding her frustration, I was sympathetic. So when in the spring of the year in which she would finally be separated from her husband, Prince Charles, she yet again raised the suggestion of being able to take a walk by herself, I agreed that such a simple idea could be realized. Much of my childhood had been spent on the Isle of Purbeck in Dorset, a county in southern England approximately 120 miles from London; I remembered the wonderful sandy beaches of Studland Bay, on the approach to Poole Harbour. The idea of walking alone on miles of almost deserted sandy beach was something Diana had not even dared dream about. At this time she was receiving full twenty-four-hour protection, and it was at my discretion how many officers should be assigned to her protection. “How will you manage it, Ken? What about the backup?” she asked. I explained that this venture would require us to trust each other, and she looked at me for a moment and nodded her agreement. And so, early one morning less than a week later, we left Kensington Palace and drove to the Sandbanks ferry at Poole in an ordinary saloon car. As we gazed at the coastline from the shabby viewing deck of the vintage chain ferry, Diana’s excitement was obvious, yet not one of the other passengers recognized her. But then, no one would have expected the most photographed woman in the world to be aboard the Studland chain ferry on a sunny spring morning in May. As the ferry docked after its short journey, we climbed back into the car and then, once the ramp had been lowered, drove off in a line of cars and service trucks heading for Studland and Swanage. Diana was driving, and I asked her to stop in a sand-covered area about half a mile from the ferry landing point. We left the car and walked a short distance across a wooded bridge that spanned a reed bed to the deserted beach of Shell Bay. Her simple pleasure at being somewhere with no one, apart from me, knowing her whereabouts was touching to see. Diana looked out toward the Isle of Wight, anxious by now to set off on her walk to the Old Harry Rocks at the western extremity of Studland Bay. I gave her a personal two-way radio and a sketch map of the shoreline she could expect to see, indicating a landmark near some beach huts at the far end of the bay, a tavern or pub, called the Bankes Arms, where I would meet her.

and no illustration of the disastrous effects of reckless indulgence in intoxicating liquors appeals to an audience with such telling force as that of the once sober and well-conducted female yielding by degrees to the terrible temptation until she at length sinks to the condition of a gin-soddened poor wretch, lost to every glimmer of self-respect, and capable even of starving herself and her children rather than forego her only remaining enjoyment in life ... It