Date: 1854

"She erected in her mind a mighty Staircase, with a dark pit of shame and ruin at the bottom; and down those stairs, from day to day and hour to hour, she saw Louisa coming."

— Dickens, Charles (1812-1870)

Date: 1854

"All closely imprisoned forces rend and destroy. The air that would be healthful to the earth, the water that would enrich it, the heat that would ripen it, tear it when caged up. So in her bosom even now; the strongest qualities she possessed, long turned upon themselves, became a heap of obdura...

— Dickens, Charles (1812-1870)

Date: 1857

"I ask'd to see what things the hollow brain / Behind environed: what high tragedy / In the dark secret chambers of her skull / Was acting"

— Keats, John (1795-1821)

Date: 1860

"Our instructed vagrancy which has hardly time to linger by the hedgerows, but runs away early to the tropics and is at home with palms and banyans, - which is nourished on books of travel and stretches the theatre of its imagination to the Zambesi can hardly get a dim notion of what an old-fashi...

— Eliot, George (1819-1880)

Date: 1860

"That new inward life of hers, notwithstanding some volcanic upheavings of imprisoned passions, yet shone out in her face with a tender soft light that mingled itself as added loveliness with the gradually enriched colour and outline of her blossoming youth"

— Eliot, George (1819-1880)

Date: 1860

"The thoughts and temptations of the last month should all be flung away into an unvisited chamber of memory: there was nothing to allure her now; duty would be easy, and all the old calm purposes would reign peacefully once more."

— Eliot, George (1819-1880)

Date: 1868

"A sinner's heart by lust possess'd, / Of birds unclean the loathsome nest, / Of fiends the dark abode; / A stinking sepulchre it lies, / While the poor wretch with horror flies / The sight of man and God."

— Wesley, John and Charles

Date: 1871-2, 1874

"How was it that in the weeks since her marriage, Dorothea had not distinctly observed but felt with a stifling depression, that the large vistas and wide fresh air which she had dreamed of finding in her husband's mind were replaced by anterooms and winding passages which seemed to lead nowhither?"

— Eliot, George (1819-1880)

Date: 1871-2, 1874

"Dorothea by this time had looked deep into the ungauged reservoir of Mr Casaubon's mind, seeing reflected there in vague labyrinthine extension every quality she herself brought; had opened much of her own experience to him, and had understood from him the scope of his great work, also of attrac...

— Eliot, George (1819-1880)

Date: April, 1871

"Many beliefs, in Coleridge's happy phrase, slumber in the 'dormitory of the soul'; they are present to the consciousness, but they incite to no action."

— Bagehot, William (1826-1877)