Quotes & Sayings About Victorians

His joy was a release of Paul's conversion, not the heavy backslapping practical-joking humor of the Victorians, nor the cynical satire or the flippancy of the twenty first century mass media, just the gift of not taking himself or his adversaries too seriously. — John Charles Pollock

I inhaled Dickens as a kid, and I've always been fascinated by the Victorians. So many ridiculous objects they had! They created things like mustache cups, so you wouldn't wet your mustache when you were drinking tea. And eyebrow combs. What's happened to all the eyebrow combs? Marvelous things. — Edward Carey

Tracy thought she must be missing something, it felt like the same world as ever to her. The rich getting richer, the poor getting poorer, kids everywhere falling through the cracks. The Victorians would have recognized it. People just watched a lot more TV and found celebrities interesting, that was all that was different. — Kate Atkinson

For the more skeptical of the Victorians, love performed some of the functions of the God whom they had lost. Faced with it, many of even the most hard-headed turned, for the moment; mystical. They found themselves in the presence of something which awoke in them that sense of reverence which nothing else claimed, and something to which they felt, even in the very depth of their being, that an unquestioning loyalty was due. For them love, like God, demanded all sacrifices; but like Him, also, it rewarded the believer by investing all the phenomena of life with a meaning not yet analysed away. We have grown used - more than they - to a Godless universe, but we are not yet accustomed to one which is loveless as well, and only when we have so become shall we realise what atheism really means. — Bertrand Russell

I believe that in our culture of simulation, the notion of authenticity is for us what sex was for the Victorians - threat and obsession, taboo and fascination. I have lived with this idea for many years; yet, at the museum, I found the children's position strangely unsettling. For them, in this context, aliveness seemed to have no intrinsic value. Rather, it is useful only if needed for a specific purpose. Darwin's endless forms so beautiful were no longer sufficient unto themselves. — Sherry Turkle

But there is no doubt that to attempt a novel of ideas is to give oneself a handicap: the parochialism of our culture is intense. For instance, decade after decade bright young men and women emerge from their universities able to say proudly: 'Of course I know nothing about German literature.' It is the mode. The Victorians knew everything about German literature, but were able with a clear conscience not to know much about the French. — Doris Lessing

It is impossible to determine precisely how many Victorians were dependent on the drug, but since millions used it on a daily basis, the number must have been considerable. The pallor of many women in the middle and upper classes, their frequent lack of appetite, their tendency to faint and to spend considerable time alone in dark rooms, the ornate patterns of overupholstered and overfurnished rooms, the persistently closed, thick draperies - these are evidence of a national dependency that the restraints of Victorian society discouraged anyone from discussing. — David Morrell

One of the causes, by the way, of the apparent lack, at the present time, of great men lies in the poverty of the contemporary male coiffure. Rich in whiskers, beards, and leonine manes, the great Victorians never failed to look the part, nowadays it is impossible to know a great man when you see one. — Aldous Huxley

At first critics classified authors as Ancients, that is to say, Greek and Latin authors, and Moderns, that is to say, every post-Classical Author. Then they classified them by eras, the Augustans, the Victorians, etc., and now they classify them by decades, the writers of the '30's, '40's, etc. Very soon, it seems, they will be labeling authors, like automobiles, by the year. — W. H. Auden

The Victorians have been immoderately praised, and immoderately blamed, and surely it is time we formed some reasonable picture of them? There was their courageous, intellectually adventurous side, their greedy and inhuman side, their superbly poetic side, their morally pretentious side, their tea and buttered toast side, and their champagne and Skittles side. Much like ourselves, in fact, though rather dirtier. — Robertson Davies

Those Victorians: endlessly fascinating, broad in their learning, heroic in their achievements, in parts completely mad. — Simon Heffer

God, they sounded like two solicitous Victorians talking about sex. — Sherrilyn Kenyon

She had what the Victorians would call a finely shaped head. You could imagine the skull quite easily.
I'd know her head anywhere.
And what's inside it. I think of that, too: her mind. Her brain, all those coils, and her thoughts shuttling through those coils like fast, frantic centipedes. Like a child, I picture opening her skull, unspooling her brain and sifting through it, trying to catch and pin down her thoughts. What are you thinking, Amy? — Gillian Flynn

The whole question of evolution seems less momentous than it did, because, unlike the Victorians, we do not feel that to be descended from animals is degrading to human dignity. — George Orwell

I am obsessed with the Great Depression and with former showgirls - and the Victorians - the idea of wistful, dark romance. — Karen Elson

The Romans saw loss of virtue all around them. The Victorians decried the decline in religiosity in the next generation. — Fareed Zakaria

The Victorians were great engineers. They engineered a [schooling] system that was so robust that it's still with us today, continuously producing identical people for a machine that no longer exists. — Sugata Mitra

One thing is certain: the riddle of mind, long a topic for philosophers, has taken on new urgency. Under pressure from the computer, the question of mind in relation to machine is becoming a central cultural preoccupation. It is becoming for us what sex was to the Victorians
threat and obsession, taboo and fascination. — Sherry Turkle

Today's ghost stories tend to be much more physically or psychologically violent. The Victorians were much more leisurely about what might or could happen, building suspense layer by layer rather than punching you in the face. — Otto Penzler

They were simple, earnest people, those early Victorians, and had not yet learnt the trick of avoiding disturbing thoughts and sights. — Ford Madox Ford

For all her active goodness, Florence Nightingale herself was far from being the angelic figure of popular adulation: according to Lytton Strachey's Eminent Victorians she was a self-righteous, domineering amazon, who was ruthless in her compassion, merciless in her philantropy, destructive in friendships, obsessional in her list for power, and demonic in her saintliness. — David Cannadine

The Victorians, especially southern Victorians, needed a lot of room to stray away from each other, to duck tuberculosis and flu, to avoid rapacious lust, to wall themselves away from sticky emotions. Extra space is always good. — Gillian Flynn

I closed my eyes. "Crap. I'm not ready to start Clocking again. The trip back to get Ringo was fine because I kind of know the Victorian rules. And Victorians believe in bathing." I grimaced and Archer laughed, a deep rumble in his chest. "And don't even get me started on street-dumping chamber pots. Seriously? Why even bother. Just dangle your business out the window and let fly. It's the same thing." Archer's — April White

If two people want to get married, get married! The Victorians had a great saying: As long as it doesn't scare the horses, do what you want. And I absolutely believe that. — Joan Rivers

The many faces of intimacy: the Victorians could experience it through correspondence, but not through cohabitation; contemporary men and women can experience it through fornication, but not through friendship. — Thomas Szasz

The privileged Victorians who did most to improve the lives of the poor were not ashamed of their pious intent: they were superiors seeking to help inferiors. — Michel Faber

Doctor MacKenzie says Sometimes I think the Victorians had the right idea. When you lost a family member back then you were suppose to be in full mourning, dress in nothing but black, for a whole year. Then you went into something they called 'half mourning' for another full year, adn during those two years, you were pretty much expected to have emotional breakdowns, you could do it whenever you felt you needed to, and everybody would support you. Now?, A month after a tragedy, maybe two, and you're expected to be all better-or down pills so you can pretend you are. — Mercedes Lackey

In 1895 Lady Londonberry commented acidly on a bridegroom who had 'married the 10,000 a year as well as the lady. — Pamela Horn

The Victorians needed parody. Without it their literature would have been a rank and weedy growth, over-watered with tears. — Stephen Leacock

Only the old are innocent. That is what the Victorians understood, and the Christians. Original sin is a property of the young. The old grow beyond corruption very quickly. — Malcolm Bradbury

A great deal has been written about the forthrightness of the moderns shocking the Victorians, but there is no shock like the one which the forthrightness of the Victorians can give a modern. — Margery Allingham

The whites who administered Native American subjugation claimed to be recruiting the Indians to join them in a truer, more coherent worldview - but whether it was about spirituality and the afterlife, the role of women, the nature of glaciers, the age of the world, or the theory of evolution, these white Victorians were in a world topsy-turvy with change, uncertainty and controversy. Deference was paid to Christianity and honest agricultural toil, but more than few questioned the former, and most, as the gold rushes, confidence men, and lionized millionaires proved, would gladly escape the latter. So the attempt to make Indians into Christian agriculturists was akin to those contemporary efforts whereby charities send cast-off clothing to impoverished regions: the Indians were being handed a system that was worn out ... — Rebecca Solnit

The Victorians did not have some secret formula, since lost, about how to expect the best of marriage and still put up with the worst. Rather, they were much more accepting than we are today of a huge gap between rhetoric and reality, expectation and actual experience. In large part, this was because they had no other choice. — Stephanie Coontz

Of course, Lady Arabella could not suckle the young heir herself. Ladies Arabella never can. They are gifted with the powers of being mothers, but not nursing mothers. Nature gives them bosoms for show, but not for use. So Lady Arabella had a wet-nurse. — Anthony Trollope

The core character of Victorians is one of aspiration and ambition, and Victorians have, since first settlement days ... demonstrated that core character over and over again. — Ted Baillieu

My father wasn't a cruel man. And I loved him. But he was a pretty tough character. His own father was even tougher - one of those Victorians, hard as iron - but my dad was tough enough. — Anthony Hopkins

This cultural, technological, and meritocratic environment hasn't made us a race of depraved barbarians. But it has made us less morally articulate. Many of us have instincts about right and wrong, about how goodness and character are built, but everything is fuzzy. Many of us have no clear idea how to build character, no rigorous way to think about such things. We are clear about external, professional things but unclear about internal, moral ones. What the Victorians were to sex, we are to morality: everything is covered in euphemism. — David Brooks

After nearly a year of mourning, I feel like the Victorians when Edison came along- all those years in the darkness, and then electric light. I've got the earth between my toes. — Harriet Reuter Hapgood

The Victorians lost a few workers in everything they built, rather like a votive offering. — Christopher Fowler

Are we really so far from the Victorians? Much of what our society holds important was shaped in the 19th century. — Kate Williams

the English explorer Richard Burton told the story of an Englishman finding his new wife unconscious on the marital bed, having chloroformed herself. She had pinned a note to her nightdress which read: 'Mama says you're to do what you like. — Sam Miller

The one thing the Victorians really believed in was philanthropy. I think we've forgotten the obligation to be philanthropic. I think we need smaller government, but I want to make it clear I'm not the Sarah Palin of the Cotswolds. — Susan Hill

Virtually all political discourse in the days of my youth was devoted to the ferreting out of hypocrisy ... Because they were hypocrites, the Victorians were despised in the late twentieth century. Many of the persons who held such opinions were, of course, guilty of the most nefarious conduct themselves, and yet saw no paradox in holding such views because they were not hypocrites themselves-they took no moral stances and lived by none. — Neal Stephenson

The making of miracles to edification was as ardently admired by pious Victorians as it was sternly discouraged by Jesus of Nazareth. Not that the Victorians were unique in this respect. Modern writers also indulge in edifying miracles though they generally prefer to use them to procure unhappy endings, by which piece of thaumaturgy they win the title of realists. — Dorothy L. Sayers

Christina Hoff Sommers quotes one professor's compliant about "students who have been trained to take a 'feminist perspective'": "For them reason itself is patriarchal, linear, and oppressive." In other words, Women's Studies agrees with the Victorians that women are the less intellectual sex; the difference is that in the view of Women's Studies this doesn't make them inferior but superior. — Bruce Bawer

Mount Pleasant was an older town, where no two houses, standing side by side, seemed to come out of the same architectural style, with nineteenth-century Victorians up against pastel-colored postwar ramblers. Most of the houses had traditional flower gardens with marigolds and zinnias, and some with head-high sunflowers. — John Sandford

Reading a novel after reading semiotic theory was like jogging empty-handed after jogging with hand weights. What exquisite guilt she felt, wickedly enjoying narrative! Madeleine felt safe with a nineteenth century novel. There were going to be people in it. Something was going to happen to them in a place resembling the world. Then too there were lots of weddings in Wharton and Austen. There were all kinds of irresistible gloomy men. — Jeffrey Eugenides

The Victorians had not been anxious to go away for the weekend. The Edwardians, on the contrary, were nomadic. — T.H. White

Why didn't you go with your parents?" I shouted at Michael.
"Because I knew they were all right!" he shouted back, fixing his eyes on me. "I wasn't so sure about you! I couldn't call on you after your arrest. All I could do was vouch for you."
I blinked. "You vouched for me?" New Victorians charged with crimes could get out of paying bail or remaining imprisoned if they had someone powerful and aristocratic enough to speak on their behalf.
"Yes! Didn't you parents tell you? I met them at the courthouse the day your counsel summoned them."
I shook my head, and committed a note to memory: If parents survive, kill them. — Lia Habel

I think that novels that leave out technology misrepresent life as badly as Victorians misrepresented life by leaving out sex. — Kurt Vonnegut

Look, let me give you the CliffsNotes: You're a bitch in this life and Daniel doesn't care. Shocker! He courts you for a few weeks, there's some exchanging of flowers. A big kiss and then kaboom. Okay? Not much more to see.

You don't understand.

What? I don't understand that Victorians are as stuffy as an attic and as boring as watching wallpaper peel? Come on, if you're going to zigzag through your past, make it count. Let's hit some highlights.

Luce didn't budge. Is there a way to make you disappear?

Do I have to stuff you in this Announcer like a cat in a suitcase? Let's move! — Lauren Kate

The thin end of the sensible clothes wedge had been inserted in society by the disgraceful Mrs Bloomer a decade and a half before the year of which I write; but that early attempt at the trouser suit had been comprehensively defeated by the crinoline--a small fact of considerable significance in our understanding of the Victorians. They were offered sense; and chose a six-foot folly unparalleled in the most folly-ridden of minor arts. — John Fowles

Every society in every period does or doesn't talk about certain topics. We don't discuss money much; it's almost certain that most people don't know how much their colleagues earn. The Victorians, in contrast, were very happy to discuss money. They weren't, however, happy to discuss sex. — Judith Flanders

The Victorians pioneered numbers of commercial rackets about which their descendants complain (the manufacturers of Bovril, it appears, were virtually official sponsors of the Boer War). — D.J. Taylor

Dickens is a much misunderstood and mis-approached writer, in that he tends to be read, particularly in the twentieth century, as a social commentator - like the great Victorians, a realist in his way. But he isn't at all like that. His genre is actually more like a fairy tale - weird transformations, long voyages from which people come back altered, parental mysteries, semi-magical twists. — Martin Amis

I'm not a Dickens guy. In grad school I had to take at least one course on the Victorians, so I took The Later Dickens, because that was what there was. — Lev Grossman

The Victorians, for instance, couldn't get five minutes' peace without falling over a ghost. So what has changed? Have all the spectres left town? — Jan-Andrew Henderson

It was the Victorians who covered the piano legs and drew a heavy curtain over what a lady got up to in her boudoir. — Laurie Graham

If I could create an ideal world, it would be an England with the fire of the Elizabethans, the correct taste of the Georgians, and the refinement and pure ideals of the Victorians. — H.P. Lovecraft

Sex has become one of the most discussed subjects of modern times. The Victorians pretended it did not exist; the moderns pretend nothing else exists. — Fulton J. Sheen

The daughter of the literary biographer Leslie Stephen, and close friend of the innovative biographer of the Victorians, Lytton Strachey, Woolf herself put forward, in 'The New Biography' (1927) (reviewing work by another biographer acquaintance, Harold Nicolson), her own memorable theory of biography, encapsulated in her phrase 'granite and rainbow'. 'Truth' she envisions 'as something of granite-like solidity', and 'personality as
something of rainbow-like intangibility', and 'the aim of biography', she proposes, 'is to weld these two into one seamless whole' (E4 473). The following short biographical account ofWoolf will attempt to keep to the basic granitelike facts that Woolf novices need to know, while also occasionally attending in brief to the more elusive, but equally relevant, matter of rainbow-like personality. — Jane Goldman

Victorian racehorse owners frequently named their horses after murderers. That was so astonishing. Can you imagine the equivalent today, with a horse named, say, Boston Strangler, running in the Kentucky Derby? This was a new discovery. The Victorians didn't think it was odd, so no one ever mentioned it particularly. — Judith Flanders