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“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

“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

“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

“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

“I have, at last, come to understand my role. It is not to discourage your exuberance or your audacity. How could I want to when those are the very qualities I admire most? If I have lectured or harangued in the past, it is because I am afraid. Every moment of every day I am afraid.

Afraid of losing that which I have come to realize I cannot live without. But I do not want a small and stifled version of you. I want you- in all your intrepid and audacious glory. I want you just as you are, the entirety of your chaos and your wildness. Your are the whirlwind I did not know I needed, but now that you are here, I will not be the one to ask you to be anything different than exactly as you are. More than anyone, I ought to understand that nature cannot be denied. And your nature is tumult.”
― Deanna Raybourn, A Grave Robbery

“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

“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

“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

“Surely Victoria's mental health suffered because all the men around her expected it to.”
― Lucy Worsley, Queen Victoria: Daughter, Wife, Mother, Widow

“There are fewer things sadder than a poorly attended funeral.”
― Chris Priestley, The Dead of Winter

“If I could have created a perfect woman, I could never have imagined you. But that is my failure. Not yours.”
― Deanna Raybourn, A Grave Robbery

“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

“While the wound was not fatal, Victorian medicine unfortunately was.”
― Emma Southon, A Fatal Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum: Murder in Ancient Rome

“A man cannot choose to die when he has not yet learnt to live." Stoker”
― Deanna Raybourn, A Grave Robbery

“Do you mean to dissuade me? Point out the flaws in my plan? Express your objections with vehemence and eloquence?"

He tipped his head. "Actually, no."

"Are you entirely well? Have you a fever? Should I palpate something?”
― Deanna Raybourn, A Grave Robbery

“She’d been made small for so long, the words hadn’t existed to articulate the wild yearnings within her... She knew now what she wanted-- what she’d always wanted... The freedom to want, to choose, to be. To live a colorful, conspicuous, unconventional life.”
― Mimi Matthews, The Muse of Maiden Lane

“He wanted to be recognized for the things he could control, not for those things he couldn’t.”
― Mimi Matthews, The Muse of Maiden Lane

“He had the vague thought that riding a difficult mare for so many years had given her an unseen reservoir of power. Luminous as she appeared, she was no will-o��-the-wisp. She was formidable. Strong.”
― Mimi Matthews, The Muse of Maiden Lane

“Starlight, of course,�� he said solemnly. “For you, it will always be starlight.”
― Mimi Matthews, The Muse of Maiden Lane

“That beautiful faith in human nature and in freedom which had made delicate the dry air of John Stuart Mill; that robust, romantic sense of justice which had redeemed even the injustices of Macaulay—all that seemed slowly and sadly to be drying up. Under the shock of Darwinism all that was good in the Victorian rationalism shook and dissolved like dust. All that was bad in it abode and clung like clay. The magnificent emancipation evaporated; the mean calculation remained. One could still calculate in clear statistical tables, how many men lived, how many men died. One must not ask how they lived; for that is politics. One must not ask how they died; for that is religion. And religion and politics were ruled out of all the Later Victorian debating clubs; even including the debating club at Westminster. What third thing they were discussing, which was neither religion nor politics, I do not know. I have tried the experiment of reading solidly through a vast number of their records and reviews and discussions; and still I do not know. The only third thing I can think of to balance religion and politics is art; and no one well acquainted with the debates at St. Stephen's will imagine that the art of extreme eloquence was the cause of the confusion. None will maintain that our political masters are removed from us by an infinite artistic superiority in the choice of words. The politicians know nothing of politics, which is their own affair: they know nothing of religion, which is certainly not their affair: it may legitimately be said that they have to do with nothing; they have reached that low and last level where a man knows as little about his own claim, as he does about his enemies'. In any case there can be no doubt about the effect of this particular situation on the problem of ethics and science. The duty of dragging truth out by the tail or the hind leg or any other corner one can possibly get hold of, a perfectly sound duty in itself, had somehow come into collision with the older and larger duty of knowing something about the organism and ends of a creature; or, in the everyday phrase, being able to make head or tail of it. This paradox pursued and tormented the Victorians. They could not or would not see that humanity repels or welcomes the railway-train, simply according to what people come by it. They could not see that one welcomes or smashes the telephone, according to what words one hears in it. They really seem to have felt that the train could be a substitute for its own passengers; or the telephone a substitute for its own voice.”
― G.K. Chesterton

“She was lovely, of course. But it wasn’t that which had beguiled him so thoroughly against his will -- against his self-interest and his reason. It was the softness of her. The tender gravity in her gaze, and the reticence in her manner.”
― Mimi Matthews, A Lady of Conscience

“Not The Done Thing by Stewart Stafford

Pass the strawberry conserve here,
Layer some cream on top,
This is how one eats scones, my dear,
We’re not pigs feeding in a trough.

Pinky raised when you sip tea,
No slurping sounds escaping your mouth,
Cucumber sandwiches in tiny triangles,
Crusts of bread all cut out.

Drawing room dramas over cordials ensue,
Gossip exchanged with finest manners,
Secrets kept as the cabal breaks up,
The public face flew on their banners.

© 2021, Stewart Stafford. All rights reserved.”
― Stewart Stafford

“All that life in him, the sensitivity in his art and his ability to see things in all their light and shadow, stems from his own vulnerability... Indeed, there are times when he still struggles mightily with his condition.”
― Mimi Matthews, The Muse of Maiden Lane

“The temptation was too great to resist. Heart thundering madly, Teddy closed the distance and pressed his lips to hers.
Her eyes fell shut as he captured her mouth. A soft murmur of assent throbbed in her throat.
The sound sent a wild rush of heat through his veins...”
― Mimi Matthews, The Muse of Maiden Lane

“در پایان قرن نوزدهم میانگین درآمد کشیشان انگلیسی کمتر از نصف پانزده سال پیش و از نظر قدرت خرید در حد بخور و نمیر بود و شغل کشیشی در روستاها کاری تشریفاتی و بی جذابیت شده بود. بسیاری از کشیشان دیگر استطاعت ازدواج نداشتند و کسانی که فکر و امکانات داشتند استعداد خود را در جای دیگری به کار می گرفتند. دیوید کانادین در کتاب افول و سقوط طبقه ی اشراف بریتانیا می نویسد در پایان قرن نوزدهم بهترین مغزهای یک نسل از کلیسا بیرون رفته بودند.”
― Bill Bryson, At Home: A Short History of Private Life

“بنابراین در ظاهر، به نظر می رسد مردم عصر ویکتوریا نه تنها کودکی را ابداع نکردند بلکه آن را از بین بردند. اما در واقع مسئله پیچیده تر از این بود. والدین عصر ویکتوریا با دریغ محبت از کودکان در دوره ی کودکی و بعد با تلاش برای کنترل رفتار آنان حتی تا بزرگسالی،در این موقعیت بسیار عجیب قرار داشتند که در همان شرایطی که می کوشیدند جلوی کودکی را بگیرند تلاش داشتند کاری کنند تا همیشه دوام داشته باشد. شاید تعجب آور نباشد که پایان عصر ویکتوریا تقریبا دقیقا با ابداع روانکاوی همزمان شد.”
― Bill Bryson, At Home: A Short History of Private Life