Quotes About Victorian

Netherton was watching the intricate texture of her bustier, which resembled a microminiature model of some Victorian cast-iron station roof, its countless tiny panes filmed as by the coal smoke of fingerling locomotives, yet flexing as she breathed and spoke.

Aubrey Beardsley.

An obscure shame grips me. I had a fixed idea of what a goshawk was, just as those Victorian falconers had, and it was not big enough to hold what goshawks are. No one had ever told me goshawks played. It was not in the books. I had not imagined it was possible. I wondered if it was because no one had ever played with them. The thought made me terribly sad.

He had the narrow face and long-legged, hipless figure that Victorian novelists called 'aristocratic'. Basil had seen the same leanness to often in the families of farmers and factory workers to believe that the human bone structure can be altered in a few generations by property and leisure.

Ebenezer Scrooge is no castoff drunk, but the very emblem of economic achievement.

It is revealing of the American culture that its prototypic hero is the cowboy: an uneducated, boorish, Victorian migrant agricultural worker.

I, whose youth was passed in the august, unchallenged and tranquil glories of the Victorian era, may well feel a thrill in invoking once more the prayer and the anthem, "God save the Queen!

For young Brits like Xan and Paddy, brute force was everything they were trying to escape. Biê was boarding school beatings, Victorian prudishness, the blind obedience to the dogma of "Theirs not to make reply, / Theirs not to reason why, / Theirs but to do and die" that sent their fathers and brothers marching into machine-gun fire during the Great War. Weirdly, religion had a lot to

The season of domestic goodwill and festivity must have posed a problem to all good Victorian family men with more than one family to take care of, particularly when there were two lots of children to receive the demonstrations of paternal love.

You might loosen your corset strings," he advised. "It will make your journey more pleasant." "I'm not wearing a c-corset," she said without looking at him. "You aren't? My God." His gaze slid over her with expert assessment.

Parents who needed a little chemical help to develop that favorable attitude could turn to pharmaceuticals. As in the Victorian era—the last time mothers were encouraged to do all the child-rearing themselves—drugs again became a popular at-home activity. Enter Miltown and Valium, aka mother's little helper.*

if only the comfortable prosperity of the Victorian age hadn't lulled us into a false conviction of individual security and made us believe that what was going on outside our homes didn't matter to us, the Great War might never have happened.

As early as the 1830s Charles Babbage had managed to construct a "Difference Engine" which could perform simple sums, but he soon became preoccupied with the far more complicated "Analytical Engine" which could add, subtract, multiply and divide as well as solve both algebraic and numerical equations; it had also been able to print out the results of its calculations onto stereotype plates. This was the engine which Gissing had come to see.

In the Victorian era, a flapper had been a child prostitute;

Indeed, the suffragette movement and its link to fascism represented one kind of genteel revolt by spirited upper-middle-class woman against the stultifying effects of the Victorian ethic of limiting the role of respectable ladies to ornaments in the social round.

Because it is written by a nineteenth-century American, and because of its closeness to the twentieth century, The Portrait of a Lady foregoes Victorian affirmations. The price it pays, however (together with several twentieth-century novels) is that it eventually leaves the reader, along with its heroine, 'en Vair' amid its self-reflections.

In serious Victorian fiction, as in Shakespearian tragedy, melodrama normally functions as metaphor. The author finds a vivid equivalent for a reality too elaborate or too extended to be briefly depicted.

The reason Victorian society was so restricted and repressed was that it was impossible to move without knocking something over.

Previous generations understood about death, and undoubtedly would have seen a reasonable amount of death. Once you get into the Victorian era, you might well have seen the funerals of many of your siblings before you were very old.

The four of us enjoyed a most wonderful family atmosphere filled with love and reciprocal devotion. Both parents were highly cultured and instilled in us their high appreciation of intellectual pursuit. It was, however, a typical Victorian style of life, all decisions being taken by the head of the family, the husband and father.

Politics is a rough and tumble business, and yet there seems to be an effort by the commentariat to sanitise American politics to some type of high-level Victorian debating society.

I'm fascinated by steam engines and with Victorian engineering generally, and as a corollary to that, I'm fascinated by the idea of long-lived technologies.

The readership of Victorian novels, when they were published, was much less diverse. People were probably white, and had enough money to be literate. Very often, there are phrases in Italian, German and French that are left untranslated.

The ideal death, I think, is what was the ideal Victorian death, you know, with your grandchildren around you, a bit of sobbing. And you say goodbye to your loved ones, making certain that one of them has been left behind to look after the shop.