1) If you show even the slightest bit of happiness in anything, anything at all, you risk having the universe suddenly take notice and delivering you a beating like you have never felt before, reminding you strongly of how good you had it during your previous beating.
2) Ninety percent of the time the weather is cold and cloudy. The other ten percent of the time the weather is actively trying to kill you.
3) As learned as someone in the 1800's was, no matter how many languages they spoke, no matter how well they could play the piano, paint, sing, or how well versed they were in philosophy, Scripture recital, or identifying interesting flowers at 1,000 paces the one gap they had in their knowledge is “extremely local map reading” forcing them to lose their bearings or any ability to follow a road so they end up wandering the countryside for days the instant they set foot off their property.
4) On a related note, although they excelled at knowing by heart fifty years of worth of gossipy minutia regarding anyone within fifty miles of them, it is apparently possible to harbor a cunning, loud, and extremely homicidal maniac in a spare bedroom for years at a time without anyone in the house being any the wiser.
5) If your personal code of honor demands that you venture out on your own and wander the countryside for four days, the clothes on your back, a crust of bread, and a handful of spoiled porridge is all you really need. When a stranger finally takes kindness on you (Danger! See Number 1 above!) all they will say is that “you look a little pale” I can only imagine this is some sort of code for “Holy God, you smell like a three-day-dead Viking”.
6) The state of the art in makeup kits in the 1800s was such that a man can disguise himself as a woman, hold conversations with his household staff, party guests, and girlfriend and have none of them guess his true identity until he wants it revealed. This might be related to Number 4 assuming people of that era enjoyed playing the parlor game “Extremely Willful Ignorance”. (Servant: “Madam, a strapping six-foot-four gypsy... ahem... “woman” who looks nothing at all like your boss has suddenly appeared in the kitchen and wants to tell your fortune in what I assure you is a perfectly natural gravelly slur...”)
7) Men have two gears that they snap into and out of nearly randomly: Gear 1: “Disgust-filled Misogynistic Tyrant”. Gear 2: “Poetry-Spewing Weirdos that think 'no' means 'yes, oh, God, yes'”.
8) Men and women either possess beauty far, far surpassing the Greek ideal, or are pockmarked and goitered half-orcs that make you want to vomit until you go mercifully blind. That is, until you fall in love with them at which time they are promoted to “plain but passable”.
My next book will be “2030” by Albert Brooks. This dystopic vision of life twenty years from now is just what I need to cheer me up after reading about a typical day in the life of a 19th century Englishwoman.
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