The Victorians Quotes

“The 1890s were apprentice years for Yeats. Though he played with Indian and Irish mythology, his symbolism really developed later. The decade was for him, as a poet, the years of lyric, of the Rhymers’ Club, of those contemporaries whom he dubbed the ‘tragic generation’. ‘I have known twelve men who killed themselves,’ Arthur Symons looked back from his middle-aged madness, reflecting on the decade of which he was the doyen. The writers and artists of the period lived hectically and recklessly. Ernest Dowson (1867–1900) (one of the best lyricists of them all – ‘I cried for madder music and for stronger wine’) died from consumption at thirty-two; Lionel Johnson (1867–1902), a dipsomaniac, died aged thirty-five from a stroke. John Davidson committed suicide at fifty-two; Oscar Wilde, disgraced and broken by prison and exile, died at forty-six; Aubrey Beardsley died at twenty-six. This is not to mention the minor figures of the Nineties literary scene: William Theodore Peters, actor and poet, who starved to death in Paris; Hubert Crankanthorpe, who threw himself in the Thames; Henry Harland, editor of The Yellow Book, who died of consumption aged forty-three, or Francis Thompson, who fled the Hound of Heaven ‘down the nights and down the days’ and who died of the same disease aged forty-eight. Charles Conder (1868–1909), water-colourist and rococo fan-painter, died in an asylum aged forty-one.”
― A.N. Wilson, The Victorians

“Kingsley wrote to Maurice, ‘They find that now they have got rid of an interfering God – a master-magician, as I call it – they have to choose between the absolute empire of accident, and a living, immanent, ever-working God.’21 To another correspondent, an atheist, he wrote, ‘Whatever doubt or doctrinal Atheism you and your friends may have, don’t fall into moral atheism. Don’t forget the Eternal Goodness, whatever you call it. I call it God.’22”
― A.N. Wilson, The Victorians

“in which they might all be happy. I wouldn’t sacrifice myself to them, though their unhappiness, at moments, about once in three months, gives me a feeling of discomfort, and an intellectual desire to find a way out. I believe emotionally in Democracy, though I see no reason to do so.50”
― A.N. Wilson, The Victorians

“I am quite indifferent to the mass of human creatures; though I wish, as a purely intellectual problem, to discover some way”
― A.N. Wilson, The Victorians

“Oh who is that young sinner with the handcuffs on his wrists? And what has he been after that they groan and shake their fists? And wherefore is he wearing such a conscience-stricken air? Oh they’re taking him to prison for the colour of his hair. Now ’tis oakum for his fingers and the treadmill for his feet And the quarry-gang on Portland in the cold and in the heat, And between his spells of labour in the time he has to spare He can curse the God that made him for the colour of his hair.39 A.E. Housman (1859”
― A.N. Wilson, The Victorians

“For Pater, the natural response to the dark godless universe suggested by Victorian science was to live in myth, and in art. It is in the creation of art that humanity retains its dignity.”
― A.N. Wilson, The Victorians

“After Beardsley, no ‘modern art’ – not Picasso, not the Dadaists nor the Surrealists of the twentieth century – is a surprise. He has been there before.”
― A.N. Wilson, The Victorians

“decadence: the last trumpet should have sounded the moment it was written.’16 If Pater was the godfather of the Nineties, then undoubtedly its most precocious child and greatest visual genius was Aubrey Beardsley (1872–98), and The Yellow Book, the artistic quarterly which he helped to found with his friend Henry Harland, its Scripture. When he took a bundle of drawings to Burne-Jones’s studio in Fulham, the older artist told Beardsley, then aged eighteen, ‘Nature has given you every gift which is necessary to become a great artist. I seldom or never advise anyone to take up art as a profession, but in your case I can do nothing else.’17 Whistler, whose relations with Beardsley were much edgier, made a generous admission in 1896 when he saw Beardsley’s brilliantly clever illustrations to Pope’s Rape of the Lock – ‘Aubrey, I have made a very great mistake – you are a very great artist’ – a tribute which reduced the consumptive (and not always sober) genius to tears. Art historians can spot the influences on Beardsley’s work – some William Morris here, some Japanese prints there. Beardsley’s drawings, however, do not merely illustrate, they define their age, as with his design for a prospectus of The Yellow Book, showing an expensively dressed, semi-oriental courtesan perusing a brightly lit bookstall late at night while from within the shop the elderly pierrot gazes at her furiously, quizzically.”
― A.N. Wilson, The Victorians

“Blavatsky’s new Scripture, Isis Unveiled (1877), was written by invisible Spirit hands. Half a million words long, it began by denouncing the scientific materialism of Darwin and Huxley, and went on to expound its key doctrine, namely that all wisdom is One, that science is not opposed to religion, and that religious differences are man-made. Anyone who has nursed the thought that ‘deep down all religions are saying the same thing’ is more than halfway towards Theosophy. It appealed, said Peter Washington somewhat dismissively in his Madame Blavatsky’s Baboon, to: the world of autodidacts, penny newspapers, weekly encyclopedias, evening classes, public lectures, workers’ educational institutes, debating unions, libraries of popular classics, socialist societies and art clubs – that bustling, earnest world where the readers of Ruskin and Edward Carpenter could improve themselves, where middle-class idealists could help them to do so, and where nudism and dietary reform linked arms with universal brotherhood and occult wisdom.7”
― A.N. Wilson, The Victorians

“In addition to the devastating ravages of capitalism, rural England in late Victorian times suffered a series of terrible natural calamities. In 1865–6 and 1877 outbreaks of cattle plague (rinderpest) and pleuropneumonia were so severe that the government had to restrict the movement of cattle and pay compensation to the owners of slaughtered beasts to check the spread of infection.8 A run of wet seasons from 1878 to 1882 produced an epidemic of liver-rot in sheep in Somerset, north Dorset and the Lincolnshire marshes – 4 million sheep were lost in the period.9 The floods caused wipe-out for many arable farmers. Foot-and-mouth disease raged, out of control, through British livestock from 1881 to 1883. Wheat and wool – the two staples of English and Welsh prosperity since the Middle Ages – fell into the hands of overseas markets.10”
― A.N. Wilson, The Victorians

“No one who came to this exotic part of London could fail to be impressed by the fact that this squalid, wicked and poverty-stricken square mile yet ‘contains one of the main supplies of London’s wealth and commerce, as well as one of its most curious sights, the London Docks. The extensive basins, in which may be seen the largest ships in the world; the immense warehouses which contain the treasures of every quarter of the globe – wool, cotton, tea, coffee, tobacco, skins, ivory; the miles of vaults filled with wines and spirits; the thousands of persons employed – clerks, customs officers, artisans, labourers, lightermen, and sailors – make the Docks a world of itself, as well as a cosmopolitan rendezvous and emporium.’4”
― A.N. Wilson, The Victorians

“This was the side which Ruskin acted up when he stayed as Gladstone’s guest – ‘We had a conversation once about Quakers,’ Gladstone recalled, ‘and I remarked how feeble was their theology and how great their social influence. As theologians, they have merely insisted on one or two points of Christian doctrine, but what good work they have achieved socially! – Why, they have reformed prisons, they have abolished slavery, and denounced war.’ To which Ruskin answered, ‘I am really sorry, but I am afraid I don’t think that prisons ought to be reformed, I don’t think slavery ought to have been abolished, and I don’t think war ought to be denounced.”
― A.N. Wilson, The Victorians

“Dickens, by contrast, wrote as a child, he understood as a child, he thought as a child: and when he became a man he never put away childish things. It”
― A.N. Wilson, The Victorians

“The Rose and the Ring (1855): his old trick of puncturing snobberies and class-obsessions was never more deftly employed than in chronicling the fortunes of Rosalba, first seen as an urchin in the Park, to be condescended to by the odiously bourgeois Princess Angelica, but soon revealed as a princess. The physical unimpressiveness and general dinginess of the British royal family is never actually alluded to, but you feel it constantly hinted at in Thackeray’s satire. Children still find it funny, but it remains one of those many mid-Victorian children’s books which are ultimately written for the amusement of the adults who had to read them aloud.”
― A.N. Wilson, The Victorians

“Inexpressibly delirious seems to me, at present in my solitude, the puddle of Parliament and Public upon what it calls ‘the Reform Measure’; that is to say, the calling in of new supplies of blockheadism, gullibility, bribeability, amenability to beer and balderdash, by way of amending the woes we have had from our previous supplies of that bad article. The intellect of man who believes in the possibility of ‘improvement’ by such a method is to me a finished-off and shut-up intellect, with which I would not argue.”
― A.N. Wilson, The Victorians

“Cameron entitled the picture Alethea, truth, and the model was Alice Liddell.”
― A.N. Wilson, The Victorians

“The more we consider these mid-Victorians,’ wrote Munby’s biographer Derek Hudson, ‘the more we realise how many, including some of the most sensitively intelligent, were forced by the pressures of a materialist age to live out a world of fantasy in their daily lives.’1”
― A.N. Wilson, The Victorians

“From 1864 to 1870 Rossetti was at work on his masterpiece, one of the great morbid statements of all nineteenth-century art, the Beata Beatrix in which he depicted Elizabeth as the Beatrice of Dante’s Vita Nuova.”
― A.N. Wilson, The Victorians

“Mill. It was a battle which took half a century to win, but Mill’s rallying-cry is still impressive: I know there is an obscure feeling, a feeling which is ashamed to express itself openly – as if women had no right to care about anything, except how they may be the most useful servants of some men … This claim to confiscate the whole existence of one half of the species for the supposed convenience of the other appears to me, independently of its injustice, particularly silly.16 He ended on a dark note: I should like to have a return laid before this House of the number of women who are actually beaten to death, kicked to death, or trampled to death by their male protectors; and in an opposite column, the amount of the sentences passed, in those cases where the dastardly criminals did not get off altogether. As the Norton case had made clear thirty years earlier, these cases were not limited to the poorer classes.”
― A.N. Wilson, The Victorians

“John Ruskin did not go to school. Nor did Queen Victoria, nor John Stuart Mill, George Eliot or Harriet Martineau. It would be absurd to suggest that Disraeli, Dickens, Newman or Darwin, to name four very different figures, who attended various schools for short spells in their boyhood, owed very much to their schooling. Had they been born in a later generation, school would have loomed much larger in their psychological stories, if only because they would have spent so much longer there, and found themselves preparing for public examinations. It is hard not to feel that a strong ‘syllabus’, or a school ethos, might have cramped the style of all four and that in their different ways – Disraeli, comparatively rich, anarchically foppish, indiscriminately bookish; Darwin, considered a dunce, but clearly – as he excitedly learned to shoot, to fish and to bird-watch – beginning his revolutionary relationship with the natural world; Newman, imagining himself an angel; Dickens, escaping the ignominy of his circumstances through theatrical and comedic internalized role-play – they were lucky to have been born before the Age of Control. For the well-meaning educational reforms of the 1860s were the ultimate extension of those Benthamite exercises in control which had begun in the 1820s and 1830s. Having exercised their sway over the poor, the criminals, the agricultural and industrial classes, the civil service and – this was next – the military, the controllers had turned to the last free spirits left, the last potential anarchists: the children.”
― A.N. Wilson, The Victorians

“anodyne”
― A.N. Wilson, The Victorians

“Broad Church,”
― A.N. Wilson, The Victorians

“Gifford Palgrave,”
― A.N. Wilson, The Victorians

“The poor, and the children of the poor, continued throughout this decade to lead their scarcely endurable existences. On 13 April 1861 the Statistical Society of London visited a single room, occupied by five families. A separate family ate, drank, and slept in each of the four corners of the room, a fifth occupying the centre. ‘But how can you exist?’ asked the visitor of a poor woman whom he had found in the room (the other inmates being absent on their several avocations).39 ‘How could you possibly exist?’ ‘Oh, indeed, your honour,’ she replied, ‘we did very well until the gentleman in the middle took a lodger.”
― A.N. Wilson, The Victorians

“Thackeray’s The Rose and the Ring (1855), Christina Rossetti’s Goblin Market (1862), Kingsley’s The Water Babies (1863).”
― A.N. Wilson, The Victorians

“bagatelle!”
― A.N. Wilson, The Victorians

“The berlin, barouche, calèche, coupé, clarence, daumont, landau and phaeton all crowded the streets of London in that supposedly prosaic railway age.”
― A.N. Wilson, The Victorians

“George Alfred Henty (1832–1902), who began his writing career in the 1860s. Henty – educated at Westminster and Caius, Cambridge, the son of a wealthy stockbroker – had been commissioned in the Purveyor’s Department of the army, and gone to the Crimea during the war. There he had drifted into journalism, sending back reports for the Morning Advertiser and the Morning Post before catching fever and being invalided home. He continued to work in the Purveyor’s Department until the mid-Sixties, when the life of the war correspondent and the writer of boys’ adventure stories seemed overwhelmingly more interesting and better paid. Four generations of British children grew up with Henry’s irresistible stories, beautifully produced, bound and edited, on their shelves. The Henty phenomenon – over seventy titles celebrating imperialistic derring-do – really belongs to the 1880s, but deserves a mention here not only because of his radical and political views, but because of the direction taken by his career as a writer. The Henty story, by the time he had got into his stride, followed the formula that a young English lad in his early teens, freed from the shackles of public school or home upbringing by the convenient accident of orphanhood, finds himself caught up in some thrilling historical episode. The temporal sweep is impressive, ranging from Beric at Agincourt to The Briton: a story of the Roman Invasion; but the huge majority are exercises in British imperialist myth-building: By Conduct and Courage, A Story of the Days of Nelson, By Pike and Dyke, By Sheer Pluck, A Tale of the Ashanti War, Condemned as a Nihilist, The Dash for Khartoum, For Name and Fame: or through the Afghan Passes, Jack Archer, A Tale of the Crimea, Through the Sikh War. A Tale of the Punjaub (sic); The Tiger of Mysore, With Buller in Natal, With Kitchener in the Soudan, and so on.”
― A.N. Wilson, The Victorians

“Writing in the Quarterly Review Cecil insisted – in October 1862 – that the democratic idea is not merely a folly. It is a chimera. It is idle to discuss whether it ought to exist; for, as a matter of fact, it never does. Whatever may be the written text of a Constitution, the multitude always will have leaders among them, and those leaders not selected by themselves. They may set up the pretence of political equality, if they will, and delude themselves with a belief in its existence. But the only consequence will be that they will have bad leaders instead of good. Every community has natural leaders, to whom, if they are not misled by the insane passion for equality, they will instinctively defer. Always wealth, in some countries birth, in all intellectual power and culture, mark out the men to whom, in a healthy state of feeling, a community looks to undertake its government.”
― A.N. Wilson, The Victorians

“would eventually demonstrate the ‘missing links’ in the chain. But in the case of some structures in the natural world – such as that of the eye for example – modern biochemistry has revealed a complexity which makes Darwin’s explanations seem clumsy. In the view of Michael Behe, ‘Each of the anatomical steps and structures that Darwin thought were so simple actually involves staggeringly complicated biochemical processes that cannot be papered over with rhetoric. Darwin’s metaphorical hops from butte to butte are now revealed in many cases to be huge leaps between carefully tailored machines – distances that would require a helicopter to cross in one trip.’15 The use of the word ‘tailored’ here begs huge questions. Many would think that the ‘argument by design’ or the ‘creationist’ viewpoint, however satisfying to those who entertain it, still fails on a scientific or analytic level to explain how, in the evolutionary story, you get from a to c without passing an invisible b. This is the objection to Darwin which, for some people, has never been answered.”
― A.N. Wilson, The Victorians