Kathleen Rear

“Grown-ups don’t look like grown-ups on the inside either. Outside, they’re big and thoughtless and they always know what they’re doing. Inside, they look just like they always have. Like they did when they were your age. Truth is, there aren’t any grown-ups. Not one, in the whole wide world.”

“…at first, but slowly it gathered speed. After some time it lifted briefly, but came down again and bouncily proceeded another three hundred yards before finally, agonizingly, and barely getting airborne. The chief engineer, who had run along beside the plane much of the way, fell to his knees and wept. Just taking off was a unique triumph. No plane in the Atlantic race had done even that”

This fascinating, lively guide clarifies the sometimes bizarre maze of rules, regulations, and customs that governed everyday life in Victorian England. Author Daniel Pool provides countless intriguing details (did you know that the “plums” in Christmas plum pudding were actually raisins?) on the Church of England, sex, Parliament, dinner parties, country house visiting, and a host of other aspects of nineteenth-century English life — both “upstairs” and “downstairs.”

“I used to dream about escaping my ordinary life, but my life was never ordinary. I had simply failed to notice how extraordinary it was.”

“I don’t mean to be rude’ I said, ‘but what are you people?’
‘We’re peculiar,’ he replied, sounding a bit puzzled. ‘Aren’t you?;
‘I don’t know. I don’t think so’
‘That’s a shame.”