Quotes About Victorian

From 1788 onward, the quantity of iron England produced doubled every eight or ten years, an early industrial version of Moore's law.10 What major product did England manufacture from all that iron? Nails, says Samuel Smiles, the Victorian chronicler, "nails of iron made with pit coal."11 It was still a wooden world, the craftsman's essential tool a hammer.

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

I sat down and put my fingertips to my temples, rubbing hard. "We have one fallen tree, one destroyed Rookery, one delusional butler and no good brandy. Is that what you are telling me?" "And the cook's down with piles and more than half the staff are suffering from catarrh," she added maliciously. I looked to Brisbane, who was smiling broadly. "God bless us, everyone," he said, spreading his arms wide.

Deanna Raybourn

Deanna Raybourn

Have I shocked you? Remember I was born in a different time, Miss Speedwell. Virginity is Queen Victoria's legacy. The rest of us are not quite so blinkered," she told me. "Take my advice and get rid of yours as fast as you can.

Wearing corsets all the time was completely incapacitating, as far as digestion goes.

I grew up reading 19th-century novels and late Victorian children's books, so I try for a good story full of coincidence and error, landscape and weather. However, the world was radically changed during my lifetime, and I tell of that battering as best I can.

Britain's passion for Christmas and huge white weddings dates from Victorian times - both were low-key celebrations before Victoria and her PR machine.

Whatever the Victorians did right in England, we need to resuscitate over here. In the late 19th century, the entire English population were propagandised into buying into a certain code of morals. I would be happy if we could emulate that in some way in America.

With Daphne half the work was done for me once I was cinched into that corset. Immediately, because of the way the corset is fitted, your posture is held back, which means your head's up, and you are moving in a certain way.

Nineteenth-century English literature I know; 19th-century sewage systems, not so much.

Our reaction against the sentimentality embodied in Victorian and post-Victorian writing was so resolute writers came to believe that the further from sentimentality we got, the truer the art. That was a mistake. ...if you are not risking sentimentality, you are not close to your inner self.

One of my ambitions has been to go back to what those great authors were doing then ... to bridge that sensibility of old Victorian Gothic tales and reconstruct them in a modern way.

Certainly, Doctor. Let's talk about your chair. Victorian?

There may be a logical or historical reason why mid-Victorian English butchers should have been predominantly Conservative (a link with agriculture?) and grocers overwhelmingly Liberal (a link with overseas trade?), but none has been established, and perhaps what needs explaining is not this, but why these two omnipresent types of shopkeeper refused to share the same opinions, whatever they were.

Likewise, Oscar Wilde asked an English journalist to look over 'The Picture of Dorian Gray' before publication: "Will you also look after my 'wills' and 'shalls' in proof. I am Celtic in my use of these words, not English." Wilde's novel upset virtually every code of late Victorian respectability, but he had to get his modal auxiliaries just right.

There is a certain degree of 'steampunkishness' that creeps into my books.

More recent critics of the folk revival have suggested that the entire body of work considered 'British folk', from the Victorian age onwards, has been nothing more than carefully staged illusion, the product of a wholesale middle-class appropriation of working people's culture.

Lady Molly, perhaps?

His statement to himself should have been, 'I possess this now, therefore I am happy', instead of what it so Victorianly was: "I cannot possess this for ever, and therefore am sad."

Steampunk is Victorian science fiction

The Victorian era was perhaps the last point in Western history when magic and science were allowed to coexist.

In any system of terror, the functionaries must first of all see the victims as less than human, and Victorian ideas about race provided such a foundation.