In chapter 5 of Northanger Abbey, Jane Austen starts off by describing the activities of Catherine Morland and Isabella Thorpe, but gets sidetracked rather quickly, and spends almost the entire second half in a delightful rant about the hypocrisy of novelists who deride their own genre: I will not adopt that ungenerous and impolitic custom…
Tag: novels
Insult of the Week: you confounded fools
Middlemarch‘s Fred Vincy momentarily loses the run of himself while intervening in a local territorial skirmish: “What do you confounded fools mean?” shouted Fred, pursuing the divided group in a zigzag, and cutting right and left with his whip. “I’ll swear to every one of you before the magistrate. You’ve knocked the lad down and…
Quotation of the Week: A selfish, cold-hearted Sybarite
Miss Alicia Audley is distinctly unimpressed with her cousin Robert’s sudden interest in her enigmatic new step-mother and isn’t afraid to say so: “…pray amuse yourself in your own way; loll in an easy-chair all day, with those two absurd dogs asleep on your knees; spoil my lady’s window-curtains with your cigars and annoy everybody in the house…
Insult of the Week: Not one agreeable quality
After her beloved sister Jane’s romantic disappointment, Lizzy has had enough of pleasant, wealthy bachelors: I have a very poor opinion of young men who live in Derbyshire; and their intimate friends who live in Hertfordshire are not much better. I am sick of them all. Thank Heaven! I am going to-morrow where I shall…
A disappointing lack of Easter eggs
In our novels, relatively little happens at Easter, although it’s mentioned incidentally quite a bit, generally as a marker of the passage of time – things are due to happen before or after Easter but rarely take place on the holiday itself. One of the few mentions of anything actually taking place during Easter is…
London language in 19th century novels
I pricked up my ears (figuratively speaking) at this intriguing post by Roger Pocock of the Windows into History blog, in which he discusses a list of local words from late 18th and early 19th-century London. This fascinating list was first published in 1803, in Samuel Pegge’s book Anecdotes of the English Language: Chiefly Regarding…
Image of the Week: Dublin in 1798
This reproduction of a wonderful map of the city of Dublin, originally created by William Wilson, comes from Observations on Mr. Archer’s Statistical Survey of the County of Dublin, by Hely Dutton. The book was first published in 1801, at which time this was a very up-to-date map. (You’ll also find a map of the…
The Knavish System of Scientific Research
In Chapter 19 of H.G Wells’ The Invisible Man (1897), the central character Griffin angrily describes the unscrupulous world of scientific research and speaks of his refusal to share credit with his professor for his discoveries. Instead, he opts to go it alone until his research is ready to take the world by storm… “And…
Insult of the Week: Walk off, ye canting hag
This week’s insult comes courtesy of Maria Edgeworth’s The Absentee. The Widow O’Neill attempts to renew the lease on her property, but local rogue agent Nicholas Garraghty (known to the tenants as Old Nick) won’t humour her request. ‘Take those leases off the table; I never will sign them. Walk off; ye canting hag; it’s an…
Ladies and Gentlemen: visualising character mentions by gender in the novels
In early 2015, Adam Calhoun created a (now quite famous) series of images that visualise the punctuation from famous novels. These rather lovely images demonstrate clearly how differently writing can be structured, particularly in regard to features like punctuation: hiding in plain sight, punctuation renders writing intelligible, but goes practically unnoticed by the reader. (Until…
Out for a jaunt
Around the turn of the 19th century, if you wanted to get around in Ireland, it seems that a jaunting-car was the main way to go. These light two-wheeled carriages (which come in “inside” and “outside” varieties) make a number of appearances in our novel collection, and can also be found illustrating a number of…
On the Joy of Tea-Making
In chapter 25 of Mary Elizabeth Braddon’s Lady Audley’s Secret (1862), the narrator meditates on tea as a bewitching accessory for the attractive lady of Victorian sensation fiction. “Surely a pretty woman never looks prettier than when making tea. The most feminine and most domestic of all occupations imparts a magic harmony to her every movement,…
The Sea of Books 