Commonplace Book

'The humility of the female passed away with the Victorian era; a modern woman could no more write Mrs. Browning's Sonnets from the Portuguese than she could emulate Ellen in The Wide, Wide World. But the sisterhood of women has a far stronger claim upon her than it had upon her grandmothers; and she would do far more for her fellow-women than her great-aunts would ever have done. The proverbial spite of women against each other is a played-out bogey, as dead as many another doornail of the past. Nowadays women admire one another's beauty and talents quite as much as men admire them, and are quite as ready to do justice to and appreciate the same. Moreover, there has sprung up a spirit of camaraderie and loyalty among womankind which was almost unknown in past generations. Except in particular and exceptional instances, women have ceased to be rivals and have become friends.'

from Miss Fallowfield's Fortune by Ellen Thorneycroft Fowler (Chapter XII)

Commonplace Book

'...one of the results of great wealth - as of great poverty - is the early death of romance. The woman who is so poor that nobody wants to marry her, and the woman who is so rich that everybody wants to marry her, are both too clear-sighted to be taken in by Love's assumption of blindness. They know well enough that the bandage across the eyes of the so-called "little blind god" is all humbug; and that he can see as far into a bank-book as most people, and take aim accordingly...'

from Miss Fallowfield's Fortune by Ellen Thorneycroft Fowler (Chapter II)

Commonplace Book

'...It is a generally accepted though utterly erroneous article of belief that melancholy people have deeper feelings than cheerful people; and that those who are endowed with a sense of humour have of necessity therefore been denied a sense of pathos. A woman has only to wear a sad expression of countenance and talk in a whining voice, and people give her credit for unfathomable depths of sentiment and emotion; while her sister who goes smiling through life and irradiates cheerfulness wherever she may be, is credited with utter want of heart...'

from Miss Fallowfield's Fortune by Ellen Thorneycroft Fowler (Chapter II)

The Ingoldsby Legends, First Series by Richard Barham (1840)

I think this strange conglomeration of prose and poetry was first featured individually in Bentley's Miscellany in the late 1830s. They purport, quite lazily, to be snippets of family history saved by the Ingoldsbys at their manor, Tappington (pronounced Tapton, of course) Everard in Kent. I say lazily because none but a fool would think them other than satire. Their intent is to entertain, with stories in verse and prose of vengeful ghosts, foul murder plots, family feuds and mayhem in a welter of different historical periods in Britain, all involving some member or another of the fictitious Ingoldsby family. And of course one of the threads joining them is humour, often scabrous and wild, Barham's specialty. There is an odd point at play here where we are in the twenty-first century: Barham's family actually owned a tiny little old manor called Tappington Hall near Denton in Kent, which seemingly now markets itself as the original of Tappington Everard in these pieces. But it's pretty clear from Barham's descriptions that he intended a much grander sort of house - and there is one very close by, Broome Park. Perhaps the truth is somewhere in between. This first series of roistering, much more eighteenth century-feeling pieces than nineteenth, was followed by another in 1843 and Barham's death in 1845. Then a third series was cobbled together and published in 1847. They continued to be extraordinarily successful throughout the rest of the century, only to subside into near nothingness in the following, and on into ours. Not a lot else to say. Some are joyful and splendidly silly, some just miss the mark. And on the whole I prefer his two prior sustained narrative efforts, the pseudonymous Baldwin, and the cracking Some Account of My Cousin Nicholas, but, overall, no complaints.

Commonplace Book

'"Dignity and decency depend up to a point on money," said Clement.

"Indeed that is true," said Dudley. "You have only to go round the cottages. It seems absurd to say that money is sordid, when you see the things that really are."'

from A Family and a Fortune by I. Compton-Burnett (Chapter 4)

Commonplace Book

'"How did you hear?" said Clement.

"Well, well, little birds flit about the chairs of people who are tied to them. And it would be rather a sad thing if they did not, as they would be the last to hear so much, when it seems that they ought to be the first. So the news came, I won't say how."

"I will do so," said her father. "It came through a tradesman's lad, who comes to our house after yours, or who comes to it on the way to yours and to-day chose to come again on his way back."

"So Jellamy was the bird," said Mark.

"Well, anyhow we heard," said his aunt. 'But I should have liked to hear it from one of you, coming running down to tell me."

"We should have been down in a few minutes," said Justine.

"Would you, dear? But the minutes passed and nobody came. And so we came up to hear for ourselves."

"A bold step for anyone tied to a chair," muttered Clement.'

from A Family and a Fortune by I. Compton-Burnett (Chapter 4)