– It dinnae hardly hurt nae more, ma’am
– You maughtn’t mind the muckle nai more, miss, for there’s an everlasting city what swims before these eyes a-nights, and so you musn’t cry none, not for this poor Christian soul
– You must never tell the children how serious the illness is. They couldn’t bear it, and I couldn’t stand to watch them suffer. Do not tell them, even after I am dead. Promise me this.
– You must never tell my wife what afflicts me. She couldn’t bear it. I will stand the pain alone, for her sake.
– A soft and flimsy veil of mist obscures, but does not conceal, the slanting rays of the autumn sun, enrobing everything in a golden hue. A wren is singing behind a red screen of leaves. The first fingers of frost are soon to cast them all down to the earth; already one or two have relinquished their hold on the branches and floated down to rest in the black earth.
– You sha’n’t never see the sea now, not in this world for certain
– God knows the bitterness in my soul, Elizabeth
– My eyes seem to fail me earlier in the evenings now, although I still treasure your letters.
– The Accident
– You must never tell the doctor I am dying. He couldn’t stand it. He is a most sensitive doctor.
– I sometimes wonder if I am not a soul marked out for destruction, like the star named Wormwood that poisons the sea in the book of Revelation. Perhaps I was created to meet the allotment of suffering Divine Providence has apportioned out to Adam’s cursed race.
– Surely by spring I shall climb to the top of the hill again, where once we had such delightful ramblings, and gaze out once more upon a sea of trees. You will come with me, won’t you, Cassandra?
– ‘Tis the smoke-choked air of this cursed mill town, that so fills and oppresses me I think I shall never be rid of it, and if they were to cut me open after I have left this body, they would find nothing but ash and soot inside
– You questioned capitalism and the class system, if only for a moment
– He never was well, mum
“God knows the bitterness in my soul, Elizabeth”
-Alexander Hamilton
what will it take to get you people to stop leaving Hamilton lyrics on MY POSTS, aren’t Nicole’s ENOUGH???
This is “Welcome to Nightvale” all over again.
And now, the weather.
My apologies, Mallory.
I guess you could say the Hamiltoasts are just non-stop.
Isn’t this enough?
I don’t even need to quote Satisfied, do I? We’re all thinking it.
Or
–John Proctor
I sometimes wonder if I am not a soul marked out for destruction, like the star named Wormwood that poisons the sea in the book of Revelation. Perhaps I was created to meet the allotment of suffering Divine Providence has apportioned out to Adam’s cursed race.
GPOY
– You coughed at some point.
– The Snow
– You keep coughing but your husband and the doctor keep telling you you’re fine
– You’re giving birth
OH, the cough. When my family watches movies, my mom and I are like Purple Testament Guy from “The Twilight Zone” about which characters are going to die, and my dad says, “How did you know s/he was going to die?” and we say “S/he coughed once in the first ten minutes.”
“We can’t tell her she’s dying, she’s too delicate and sensitive” – doctor and husband
Rex Harrison LITERALLY DID THIS to Kay Kendall. (Also he was afraid to tell her how much he loved her because that might tip her off that something was seriously wrong.)
“We mustn’t tell him, it would distract him from The Work.”
THE COUGH
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8vNJ5Krj7SQ
– You keep coughing but your husband and the doctor keep telling you you’re fine –
Check your mirror. If there’s a hectic flush on your cheeks but your brow is alabaster, then don’t believe them.
“Dearest, you’ve come back to me! Now we’ll be happy together for ever! All my suffering was as nothing if it meant I would know the joy of this moment!”
*keels over*
This is also a Sign You May Be Dying in an Opera. (Does this series need a Signs You May Be Dying in an Opera installment? If so, I volunteer!)
PITCH IT PITCH IT PITCH IT
Your consumption hasn’t affected your singing one bit.
Someone blew a horn or kept a vow or asked someone else his name.
There’s a cup of poison, and a cup of wine, and a cup of a drug that makes you look dead, and you are trying to keep track of them all while fifty of your closest friends drop in for a masked ball with added balletic entertainment and other diversions.
ETA: Q: How do you tell if a mezzo is going to die in an opera?
A: We don’t, suckers!
It’s just sarcasm and harlotry all the way down!
Witches, bitches and britches! And possibly your long-lost mom.
Also, saucy maidservants. So many saucy maidservants.
BTW, I now have “Una Donna a Quindi Anni” from the Marriage of Figaro stuck in my head. I and my coworkers thank you so much for that.
Hey, SO MANY of the women in Mozart operas would be Friends of the Toast. Susanna would forward pieces to the Countess, trying to get her to laugh. The Queen of the Night would have all the Misandry ones printed out and taped to the wall over her desk (so would Donna Elvira and Marcellina, probably.) Blonde would say “I am an English girl and have big hair and no heart!”
“Big hair, no heart, that’s why I’m still alive.”
“Grosse Locken, kein Herz”, that favorite of the concert hall.
Mein Herz, so voller Hass, und mein Haar, so voller Geheimnisse.
As Marilyn Horne reportedly said: “I’m either the girl who doesn’t get the guy, or I am the guy, and that’s fine with me.”
Everyone knows which tenor you will ultimately end up with, but this does not stop you from dallying with a smoldering baritone, two spear-carrying foreigners, and a mezzo in trousers.
-You say “I’m going home”.
“It will be ever so lovely, will it not? We shall get there…some day.”
nae muckle the mill nae more
My long home, my last home.
You are trying to ride a horse what is TOO WILD, young sirrah, possibly coincidentally right after your fiancée has broken off your engagement.
Horses are literally always bad news. Either you are about to die or you are about to ruin yourself/your family/your best friend who never should have signed that bill for you.
OR you have unwisely pledged your little all to back an animal that is a sure winner for the Goodwood cup!
Of course! How could I forget that one?
I am reading a Victorian novel this very day. And I got to the scene where the lovely young girl is driving the pony carriage to the station to meet her father, and the ponies are being all restless and headstrong, and her hands are so small…I kept waiting and waiting for the smash, and felt positively cheated when everybody got home safely.
A doctor has warned your parent or guardian that you need to spend more time outdoors and less time reading books.
Source: currently rereading the Anne of Green Gables series, in which 50% of the characters are dying of consumption at any given time
“Doctor Crumpetbottom tells me that my illness could be ameliorated by getting fresh air, but it’s too late as my body has already begun the process of melding with the divan.”
Similarly: Your mother has started giving you cups of cream at meals, while your siblings and cousins continue to drink only milk.
Oh god, The Golden Road broke me as a kid.
:sniff:
And Sara ducking out of telling Cecily’s fortune because she just knows. . .
Oh, Sara. You know she’s dying, and she wants to hear a fun fortune like the other children got. You couldn’t just lie about it? You had to leave her disappointed?
…I mean, you lied about Sara Ray’s fortune. So.
brilliantly flushed cheeks
Looking at you Ruby Gillis, looking at you.
RIP, beautiful young lady with many beaux and a rosy future! WE SHOULD HAVE KNOWN
Ruby Gillis was too beautiful for this world!
Only the harlots, though. The others die of, I don’t know, heart failure and World War I.
(Also, that whole “spend more time outdoors lest Consumption” passage in the original apparently–at least according to TVTropes–is a coded way of saying that Anne had hit the puberties. Because apparently reading + menstruation = TB.)
Ooooh that makes so much more sense! I mean, as much sense as it can still make in the context of modern medical knowledge.
OK but I just read a historical romance that had a whole plot about tuberculosis (that was actually pretty thoroughly researched by the author, for once), and it turns out that consumption was extremely common. 50% of the characters might have been a pretty solid number if they lived in close quarters.
“By the late 19th century, 70 to 90% of the urban populations of Europe and North America were infected with the TB bacillus, and about 80% of those individuals who developed active tuberculosis died of it.”
ooohh ALSO that would explain the deathly-ness of “damp anything” & “rainy nights” because if your immune system wavered at ALL, you probably got chomped by the TB bacteria like a cow pushed into the Amazon.
solid #actually
According to the episode of American Experience I just watched, TB has killed more people than anything else. Whoa.
Conversely, if you are a spunky adventurous girlchild, you will likely be struck down in some near fatal accident or illness for being too adventurous. (Jack and Jill by Alcott, Pollyanna, What Katy Did, etc)
What Katy Did
or
Turn Clumsy Girls into Delicate Women by Paralysing Them from the Waist Down
also or
Disabled People should just Cheer Up and Stop Whining
There’s an incredibly interesting book on this exact topic called “Take Up Thy Bed and Walk: Death, Disability, and Cure in Classic Fiction for Girls.”
no but when do we get to read Signs You Are In A LMM Novel
also whenever LMM comes up I feel duty bound to remind everyone to read The Blue Castle
THE BEST. Though I must say as I get older part of me wishes she would’ve just stayed with Roaring Abel and Cissy (and that Cissy and her baby hadn’t died because she had sex that one summer.)
Or the characters are pretending they are dying of consumption or some such thing. There are a LOT of women in that series who are not actually dying but hassling their families for decades by constantly claiming they are on the verge of kicking the bucket. Mrs. Douglas in the Island and Mrs. Gibson and Ernestine Bugle in Windy Poplars off the top of my head…not to mention Aunt Mary Maria in Ingleside, who I am pretty sure emerged directly from a lower circle of hell.
Should anyone need an image of what forms thwarted female personalities take under patriarchy, just read Montgomery’s books.
Don’t forget Taking A Walk On A Damp Day!
Dack-tahs? What do they know?
You were walking out in the rain. True, you were wearing a heavy coat and hat, and you brought an umbrella, but the fact remains that you were walking in the rain. If female, you were walking in the rain unaccompanied.
i came down with a surprise flu this morning, and every single item on this list applies to me.
tell my dearest Lydia i shall be with her in Paradise.
“Would it not be terrible for my darling children to be left without some provision in the event of my demise? O, I cannot bear to think of them reduced to scrounging and scrimping and millinery piecework, or, what’s worse yet, thrown on the charity of my estranged and unscrupulous uncle! Directly on the morrow, I shall take counsel with my lawyer and draw up the papers necessary to guarantee their future happiness.
“But first: a fast carriage ride on a wet night!”
“Odd Women” for the win!
Any decent major character in a Gissing novel is either going to die or eke out a loveless life in thankless labor to support some aged/infirm/vitriol-disfigured dependent.
Also “No Name” by Wilkie Collins. Except I think that one was a train crash.
This one is right up there with “I’ve had the realization that the murderer’s alibi can’t possibly be true, so I’m going to make an appointment to tell the detectives about it for oh…about 24 hours from now. But first: off to make some cryptic comments to the killer alluding to what I may know!”
Oh, it’s often not even cryptic. The number of heroes who get overpowered with the urge to enter the murderer’s lair, alone, at midnight, without telling anyone where they’re going, and say “I’ve worked out you’re a serial killer, what are you going to do now?”
*coughBlomkvistcough*
If anyone here is unaware of the BBC radio comedy “Bleak Expectations”, they need to fix that post haste.
I treated myself to it last winter and it is AMAZING. Crying with silent laughter on the train amazing.
Making future plans that sound happy (including excursions, picnics, and anything that involves re-uniting family members.)
Planning for one’s own happiness is so revoltingly indulgent, that it must be punished with a protracted, bed-ridden, illness that comes to a violent end.
Even the beef tea holds no appeal for you.
wow good to know I’m about to die then, because I haven’t had anything to eat yet today, and beef tea still sounds DISGUSTING.
You cuddle kittens and hide in closets. And are just Too Saintly To Live.
–You have been bitten by a tenement-dwelling urchin during London’s recent “HIghgate Walkers” infestation.
–The safety protocols for your Clocktopus Automaton have failed.
–The MInistry of Difference Engineering has reclassified you as “Superfluous.”
–Your Phlogiston Cannon has sustained critical damage.
–You sense the aetheric barrier thinning around you.
–Your brass goggles have been treated with a contact poison.
–What?
–Look, these are all
–The setting is explicitly
–FINE.
–(puts on steam-powered top hat and LEAVES)
The thing is, steampunk just doesn’t have time for the drawn-out maudlinity of your true Victorian-novel death. Steampunk deaths tend more towards the quick, dramatic boom! or else rapid yet horrible death throes.
“Perhaps I was created to meet the allotment of suffering Divine Providence has apportioned out to Adam’s cursed race.”
Read that as Dear Prudence at first. (What terrifying powers has Mallory been granted?)
An evanescent radiance fills the air, and illuminates each person gathered ’round my bed in turn, as if their tear-streaked countenances reflected the light of Heaven itself–everyone, that is, except Eldridge, ’cause he’s just nasty.
“A soft and flimsy veil of mist obscures, but does not conceal, the slanting rays of the autumn sun, enrobing everything in a golden hue. A wren is singing behind a red screen of leaves. The first fingers of frost are soon to cast them all down to the earth; already one or two have relinquished their hold on the branches and floated down to rest in the black earth.”
This is true if you’re in a Hardy NOVEL, but not in one of his damn poems, because the man was convinced that he was about to die for thirty years.
You offer your sobbing friends and relatives locks of your hair to remember you by.
You updated your will to screw someone over. Then you changed your mind and you MUST convince someone to destroy the will, RIGHT NOW, THIS VERY NIGHT.
You’re out for a carefree day of yachting with your wife, who hates you.
You are haunted by visions of burying grounds.
“You’re out for a carefree day of yachting with your wife, who hates you.”
Variations on this appeared in both of Mallory’s “Who’s Getting Murdered In These Patek Phillipe Adverts?”
The curtains became very heavy.
Also the needle is too heavy.
So did the needle. You cannot lift your needle.
The wasted hands pluck incessantly at the coverlet.
After long years of wandering, of sinning, of wild and bitter rebellion, the lost sheep has at last returned to the fold; the wanderer, broken and repentant, wakes to find himself again in his childhood bedroom, where the very furnishings that he knew in his innocent youth seem to mock him; the vainglorious dreams of those long-buried days rise again before him with all their old glamour, and he sees them now for what they were: demons of temptation that he, alas! was all too weak to resist. “I will atone,” he thinks. “I am still young; this weakness will pass. When I am well I will begin again. I will make it right.” And the vision of himself, restored to his former strength, pushing aside old betrayals and enmities, expiating, by a lifetime of good works, his years of dissipation, is so strong that he breathes aloud, “I will make it right.” But a spasm overtakes him in mid-sentence. His sister hastens to his bedside, and by the light of her lifted taper he reads in her pitying face the terrible truth, that he cannot ever make it right in this world. He lifts frightened, imploring eyes to hers, unable to speak the fear that fills his soul. But she, taking the neglected Bible from the table, and seating herself by the bed, reads aloud, in a voice low but filled with calm assurance, those awful words of comfort that are given to those in the last strait of despair, “A broken and contrite heart, O God, thou wilt not despise.”
This is terrifyingly good. You could definitely have made…less per word than a man, cranking out three volume novels or magazine serials that got the great, soft heart of the reading public where it lived.
Thank you! But I think I would have gotten bogged down once I actually had to come up with a plot.
I don’t know – Charlotte Yonge managed to get about 800 pages of plot out of just stringing together deaths in The Daisy Chain.
The best thing about this thread is finding out how many Toasties are avid readers of Charlotte M. Yonge.
Grace Livingstone Hill, is that you??
I think it’s about two parts Bleak House to one part Mary Barton, with just a dash of The Heir of Redclyffe.
Most of these are Bessy, and the rest are Mrs. Hale. “Oh, I couldn’t bear to tell my husband that I’m dying. I think it’s best that he find my death a sudden and unexpected shock.” Although given his “oh btw Margaret, we’re moving in two weeks, please tell your mother because I’ve misplaced my spine” bit, it was maybe fair.
The river never stops running, and the waves keep lapping on the shelving shore.
The sea wind will soon take away this pesky cough.
Somebody you are related to dreamed of a little child every night for a week.
Everyone thinks your chronic invalidism is nothing but affectation.
You’re about to understand what it was that the waves were always saying.
You trip over a croquet hoop. (The Clever Woman of the Family)
My head-canon for that one is that Bessie was already in premature labor due to a nasty infection, and that’s WHY she tripped over the croquet hoop, because feverish and feeling very weird.
someone else has read this excellent book! glorious! 🙂
You are the picture of health, but have no constitution; if you get so much as a cold your doctor will not answer for the consequences.
You have chosen to nurse your greatest enemy through a dangerous fever brought on by his own reckless folly. He survives.
Flushed cheeks, shining eyes
the only morbid reason I can imagine that “keeping your death from a loved one” was a collective cultural imagining, is that death was so present and unavoidable?
Perhaps Victorian Me would have dreamed of having the *possibility* of a family member “remembering me as I was was” as opposed to having to help slog through my slow decline by tuberculosis, or in *exotic* Victorian novels, the much grosser cholera.
Well at least cholera is quite quick, even though it involves much more poo.
Isn’t that partly because he was so rude to her most of the time that she would have been justifiably suspicious? I knew an old actor who used to tell Rex Harrison stories. Perhaps I’m mean for posting this.
Nothing we post here can hurt them now.
What kills me about the whole thing is Rex Harrison’s friend Terence Rattigan going, “Oh, how awful for you. What a great idea for a play, though!” and then writing a play about it.
–The War That is Ending Any Day Now
–A letter home declaring your undying love for Jacinta and promising to marry her upon your triumphant return has just been posted, but not before you have read it aloud to your gallant best friend and/or man-servant
–Your valiant and weary commander has just made an Impassioned Speech
–You play any instrument or do well at sports that involve running, riding, shooting or throwing
–Why is it so cold?
–A beautiful, young nurse grasps your hand fervently and looks meaningfully into your eyes, she looks hauntingly like Jacinta, if Jacinta was a nun
–Mother? Is that you?
– It was the drains. They never fixed the drains. They fixed the drains and made them worse. Either way, they should have known better. You’re dying of typhoid and it’s Their fault, because They never fixed the drains. (You are, of course, either too young or too saintly, or both, to make a fuss about this.)
Put things at my bed-side that have seen the sun and heard the happy singing of the birds, papa! I want to look upon leaves and flowers and all things that grow.
It’s getting wery dark, sir.
So I have read further in Mrs. Oliphant’s tale, and I’ve got another one–
You are a baronet who has led a blameless life since your return from the West Indies 35 years ago, and reared your oldest son in the expectations of a oldest son and heir. And now an old acquaintance has turned up on your doorstep, muttering cryptic comments about the old days and the demands of justice.
I’m pretty sure that you are not long for this world, and that your young Paul is in for a shocking surprise.
(My comment appears to have been eaten)
– Your past indiscretions are about to be exposed to your husband
– You have just turned away your hotblooded French accomplice for whom you have no further use
– You have just discovered something vital in old papers, and have positively _flammable_ quantities of gin in your system
– It’s getting wery dark, sir
(Guess what I’ve been reading…)
What’s worrying/hilarious is that so many of these apply to the British girls’ comics that were hugely popular in the UK and Ireland from the ’60s to the ’90s. These comics are hard to explain to anyone who didn’t grow up with them, but they were FULL of stories about noble young girls, frequently Victorian orphans, who were dying and refused to tell anyone lest it make them suffer.
The ultimate one was Miss Angel, a rich young woman who discovered she was dying from some unspecified ailment and “to spare my parents the sorrow of watching me die” faked her own death (thus depriving them of more time with their daughter) and starting a home for picturesque orphans in a converted stable. Even as a kid I thought, “she could have helped those orphans a lot more if she’d stayed at home and used her parents’ vast riches.” Anyway, these comics – Mandy, Judy and Bunty were the big ones – are amazing and I strongly recommend picking up one of the annuals from the 70s and 80s if you ever come across one. They also featured genuinely terrifying “spooky” stories, some of which haunt me to this day.
Oh goodness! I read those, but had completely forgotten them! UNTIL NOW.
Ooh, and I missed one!
– The lawsuit on which you pinned your hopes has come to a disappointing end.
Gods, the deaths in that book!
You are a golden-haired, beatific child who urges your mother, almost at the last, to “kiss poor Carton for me.”
Obligatory: https://www.youtube.com/embed/8vNJ5Krj7SQ?list=RD8vNJ5Krj7SQ
“At least I had my revenge first on that brat Jane Eyre.”
Nearly anything that can make a person queasy makes me queasy, yeah?
I have learned to never ever to just say "Ugh, I'm queasy today" to people unless I know them really well, or they will immediately ask if I'm pregnant. I once had a coworker who was REALLY insistent about it–and this when I had an IUD and my boyfriend at the time had a vasectomy. No. I was not pregnant.
You had an affair
You want more than women are supposed to want
You are too good/beautiful for this world.
You had an affair
You want more than women are supposed to want
You are too good/beautiful for this world.
Vampire Diaries, unless there are two shows out there that are this totally batshit.
You came in with the tide, and you will go out with the tide.
You stop sewing because the needle is too heavy.
You just collapsed in the pasture.
because we are too meny.
You happen to be a Harlot With A Heart Of Gold. The only way to survive this condition if you find some hopelessly emo Nietzsche Wannabe protagonist to redeem, even though he should be kicked in the balls for all that whining. But in most cases, it’s the Incurable Cough Of Death for you.