Quotes About Victorians

#1. 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

#2. 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

#3. 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

#4. I am obsessed with the Great Depression and with former showgirls - and the Victorians - the idea of wistful, dark romance.

Karen Elson

#5. 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

#6. 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

#7. The Victorians lost a few workers in everything they built, rather like a votive offering.

Christopher Fowler

#8. The Romans saw loss of virtue all around them. The Victorians decried the decline in religiosity in the next generation.

Fareed Zakaria

#9. God, they sounded like two solicitous Victorians talking about sex.

Sherrilyn Kenyon

#10. 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

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

Ford Madox Ford

#12. 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

#13. 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

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

Stephen Leacock

#15. I think that novels that leave out technology misrepresent life as badly as Victorians misrepresented life by leaving out sex.

Kurt Vonnegut

#16. 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

#17. 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

#18. 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

#19. The Victorians had not been anxious to go away for the weekend. The Edwardians, on the contrary, were nomadic.

T.H. White

#20. 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

#21. 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

#22. 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

#23. Those Victorians: endlessly fascinating, broad in their learning, heroic in their achievements, in parts completely mad.

Simon Heffer

#24. 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

#25. 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

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

Kate Williams

#27. 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

#28. 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

#29. 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

#30. 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

#31. 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

#32. 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

#33. 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

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

Pamela Horn

#35. 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