Reading A. N. Wilson’s The Victorians, I came across this nugget. When Charles Dickens bought a new house, he had some fake book-backs made as a decoration for one of the rooms. Some were labeled as follows: “The Wisdom of Our Ancestors – I. Ignorance. II. Superstition. III. The Block. IV. The Stake. V. The Rack. VI. Dirt. VII. Disease.” (Wilson points out that Dickens was able simultaneously to romanticize the past – and in this dichotomy embodied an important facet of the Victorian character, its complicated attitude toward modernity.)