the Victorian era

I’ve written a lot about ferns in the past and even reviewed a very ferny book, so these tidbits are a nice addition to all the fernery on this blog. These are again from A Room with a View, also known as “the book that illustrates my blogposts”. Nice.

Miss Bartlett gave a kind of wriggle, and he prepared for a discussion. He had never fathomed Miss Bartlett. As he had put it to himself in Florence, ‘she might yet reveal depths of strangeness, if not of meaning.’ But she was so unsympathetic that she must be reliable. He assumed that much, and he had no hesitation in discussing Lucy with her. Minnie was fortunately collecting ferns.

[…]

And, Miss Bartlett not favouring the scheme, they walked up the hill in a silence which was only broken by the rector naming some fern.

I thought this was very interesting, for a book published in 1908, to still be so concerned with ferns and fern collecting. It truly goes to show how big the fern craze was in the 19th century.