The past is a foreign country
3 Mar 2025 03:55 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
cimoreneSome quotes from things I've read recently that gave peculiar insight to the society in which they were written.
On Earth a woman may not look her glamorous best in the harsh light of early dawn, but if she’s really beautiful she doesn’t look too bad. On Mars even the most beautiful woman looks angry on arising, too weary and tormented by human shortcomings to take a prefabricated metal shack and turn it into a real home for a man.
-Frank Belknap Long looking at pre-WW2 America through the lens of bad science fiction and revealing that he thinks a woman of real beauty will still look kind of bad in natural light, which seems like a peculiar definition of SOMETHING although I'm not sure what
Darnell had received what is called a sound commercial education, and would therefore have found very great difficulty in putting into articulate speech any thought that was worth thinking.
-Arthur Machen making me curious for the first time about the phrase "sound commercial education" in the Edwardian era
“The floor would have to be stained round the carpet (nine by nine, you said?), and we should want a piece of linoleum to go under the washstand. And the walls would look very bare without any pictures. [...] And, my dear, we must have some ornaments on the mantelpiece. I saw some very nice vases at eleven-three the other day at Wilkin and Dodd’s. We should want six at least, and there ought to be a centrepiece. You see how it mounts up.”
-Arthur Machen with a devastating portrait of English Edwardian suburban middle class interior design. I'm horrified by the thought of all these guest rooms with the floors only stained around the edges and fascinated by the idea that a guest room mantelpiece is naked without at least six pointless vases and a centrepiece
Next day, a little before noon, Spargo found himself in one of those pretentious yet dismal Bayswater squares, which are almost entirely given up to the trade, calling, or occupation of the lodging and boardinghouse keeper. They are very pretentious, those squares, with their many-storied houses, their stuccoed frontages, and their pilastered and balconied doorways; innocent country folk, coming into them from the neighbouring station of Paddington, take them to be the residences of the dukes and earls who, of course, live nowhere else but in London. They are further encouraged in this belief by the fact that young male persons in evening dress are often seen at the doorways in more or less elegant attitudes. These, of course, are taken by the country folk to be young lords enjoying the air of Bayswater, but others, more knowing, are aware that they are Swiss or German waiters whose linen might be cleaner.
- J.S. Fletcher providing local color about Edwardian London
As for him, he was naturally somewhat dashed by the consciousness of duty unfulfilled, but more so by the prospect of a lawn-tennis party, which, though an inevitable evil in August, he had thought there was no occasion to fear in May.
- M.R. James revealing what the Victorian gentleman really thought about lawn tennis parties, unless he just has a phobia?
"What was I saying? Well, anyhow it comes to this, that it must be Thursday in next week at least, before you can go to town again, and until we have decided upon the chintzes it is impossible to settle upon one single other thing.”
- M.R. James revealing a delightful fact about rural Victorian life wrt chintz. Personally I adore chintz, and obviously I knew that it was important to the Victorians, but the idea that you can't furnish a room until you've bought the chintz is just incredibly fun.
His interrupter was one of those intelligent men with a pointed beard and a flannel shirt, of whom the last quarter of the nineteenth century was, it seems to me, very prolific.
- M.R. James with a new (old) Type of Guy that I'm fascinated by: I did not know there were flannel shirts among Victorian gentlemen. I imagine they were not plaid/tartan flannel and would love to know what they actually were like. Is this guy the mid-19th century London gentleman's Brooklyn hipster? Or is he more like an absent-minded professor?
On Earth a woman may not look her glamorous best in the harsh light of early dawn, but if she’s really beautiful she doesn’t look too bad. On Mars even the most beautiful woman looks angry on arising, too weary and tormented by human shortcomings to take a prefabricated metal shack and turn it into a real home for a man.
-Frank Belknap Long looking at pre-WW2 America through the lens of bad science fiction and revealing that he thinks a woman of real beauty will still look kind of bad in natural light, which seems like a peculiar definition of SOMETHING although I'm not sure what
Darnell had received what is called a sound commercial education, and would therefore have found very great difficulty in putting into articulate speech any thought that was worth thinking.
-Arthur Machen making me curious for the first time about the phrase "sound commercial education" in the Edwardian era
“The floor would have to be stained round the carpet (nine by nine, you said?), and we should want a piece of linoleum to go under the washstand. And the walls would look very bare without any pictures. [...] And, my dear, we must have some ornaments on the mantelpiece. I saw some very nice vases at eleven-three the other day at Wilkin and Dodd’s. We should want six at least, and there ought to be a centrepiece. You see how it mounts up.”
-Arthur Machen with a devastating portrait of English Edwardian suburban middle class interior design. I'm horrified by the thought of all these guest rooms with the floors only stained around the edges and fascinated by the idea that a guest room mantelpiece is naked without at least six pointless vases and a centrepiece
Next day, a little before noon, Spargo found himself in one of those pretentious yet dismal Bayswater squares, which are almost entirely given up to the trade, calling, or occupation of the lodging and boardinghouse keeper. They are very pretentious, those squares, with their many-storied houses, their stuccoed frontages, and their pilastered and balconied doorways; innocent country folk, coming into them from the neighbouring station of Paddington, take them to be the residences of the dukes and earls who, of course, live nowhere else but in London. They are further encouraged in this belief by the fact that young male persons in evening dress are often seen at the doorways in more or less elegant attitudes. These, of course, are taken by the country folk to be young lords enjoying the air of Bayswater, but others, more knowing, are aware that they are Swiss or German waiters whose linen might be cleaner.
- J.S. Fletcher providing local color about Edwardian London
As for him, he was naturally somewhat dashed by the consciousness of duty unfulfilled, but more so by the prospect of a lawn-tennis party, which, though an inevitable evil in August, he had thought there was no occasion to fear in May.
- M.R. James revealing what the Victorian gentleman really thought about lawn tennis parties, unless he just has a phobia?
"What was I saying? Well, anyhow it comes to this, that it must be Thursday in next week at least, before you can go to town again, and until we have decided upon the chintzes it is impossible to settle upon one single other thing.”
- M.R. James revealing a delightful fact about rural Victorian life wrt chintz. Personally I adore chintz, and obviously I knew that it was important to the Victorians, but the idea that you can't furnish a room until you've bought the chintz is just incredibly fun.
His interrupter was one of those intelligent men with a pointed beard and a flannel shirt, of whom the last quarter of the nineteenth century was, it seems to me, very prolific.
- M.R. James with a new (old) Type of Guy that I'm fascinated by: I did not know there were flannel shirts among Victorian gentlemen. I imagine they were not plaid/tartan flannel and would love to know what they actually were like. Is this guy the mid-19th century London gentleman's Brooklyn hipster? Or is he more like an absent-minded professor?
