Shakespearian types...is Macbeth too much for a 12 year old?

Herbert seems to think that what Elsie thought was "I'll marry you if Papa say it's all right, and he'll probably say no," was actually, "Yes, I'll marry you! Once I get the tiny matter of my father's permission out of the way." And Elsie isn't sure she wants to marry him, because she wants to belong to her father for a bit longer, but she's afraid that her father will pity Herbert and so say yes.

Agreed on "limb", but the skirts on table legs thing is pure urban legend -- the sort of thing where someone snarks "oh, she's so prudish she'd probably do x..." and the next person picks it up as "she actually DOES x". It is true that 19th century decorating taste tended to the extravagantly swaggy, but that's more a matter of "look how sumptuous I can afford to be in our shining new industrialized middle class!"

drat! can we just pretend it's true? (Elsie would probably put skirts on the furniture ... if papa told her to. And didn't insist she do the sewing on Sunday.)

can we just pretend it's true?

No. Sorry. It's a bit of a twitch of mine. But I'll totally go along with your Elsie hypothesis.

No. Sorry. It's a bit of a twitch of mine.

high-fives amych

ION, I need to whine about some shallow first-world stuff.

Dear Editor and Marketing Persons, answer my emails! I need to determine the text for my promo postcards! Plus, it freaks me out that I haven't heard from any of you for a week.

Dear Ebay UK sellers I've emailed: would at least ONE of you get back to me about if you'd be willing to ship to the USA? Please?

Shakespearian types...is Macbeth too much for a 12 year old?

Well, there's all sorts of murder and betrayal and whatnot, but I think I was reading Agatha Christie around that age, and it's no worse than that. Okay, maybe a little worse.

As I thought, her father's objections are that they're too young, and that his daughter is not going to marry a cripple.

(Elsie, by the way, is being a coward. She doesn't want to marry him, and is counting on her father saying no so that she doesn't have to be the one to tell Herbert no.)

Tuberculosis most often presents in the lungs, but can infect any part of the body. It cripples by eroding the joints and vertebrae. It's a terrible disease, and in the 19th and early 20th century, it infected 20 percent or more people in certain areas and was almost always a death sentence. Because it takes a while to be fatal and there's a lot of suffering, it's the perfect disease for the 19th century novel, allowing for lovely deathbed scenes.

My great-grandmother died of tuberculosis when my grandmother was 12, leaving her to care for her three siblings, one of whom died of TB a few years later.

Elsie, by the way, is being a coward. She doesn't want to marry him, and is counting on her father saying no so that she doesn't have to be the one to tell Herbert no.

That's one of the upsides to being completely under Daddy's thumb. Daddy gets to do the nay saying.

While I wouldn't rule out syph, TB does infect bone sometimes. There's a variant called Potts Disease that affects the spine—it's probably what Alexander Pope had. It also can affect joints so causing a limp doesn't seem out of the question.