Top 40 Catharine Arnold Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “In the words of Euripides, ‘those whom the Gods wish to destroy, first they make mad’.”

— Catharine Arnold

2. “A year after the Great Plague, London was destroyed by fire. Seventy per cent of its houses vanished into the flames. St Paul’s Cathedral, the Royal Exchange, Christ’s Hospital and the north end of London Bridge were engulfed. Thirteen thousand buildings, including eighty-nine churches, disappeared for ever.”

— Catharine Arnold

3. “However, not everyone who was entitled to an elaborate funeral received one. When Jane Seymour died in 1537, a fortnight after the birth of Edward VI, Henry VIII made strenuous attempts to restrict extravagant mourning.”

— Catharine Arnold

4. “Sir Edwin Chadwick, whose Sanitary Report proved to be a bestseller for the Stationery Office in 1842, confirmed that, every year, 20,000 adults and 30,000 youths and children were ‘imperfectly interred’ in less than 218 acres of burial ground, ‘closely surrounded by the abodes of the living’.2.”

— Catharine Arnold

5. “The experience bestowed a strange psychological legacy, leaving Steinbeck with a profound sense of vulnerability which shaped him as a writer.”

— Catharine Arnold

6. “By the mid-eighteenth century, another new attitude was emerging, one which encouraged reflection on death as a spiritual exercise and a valid form of artistic expression. The experts on Victorian death, James Stevens Curl and Chris Brooks, have described this tendency as, respectively, ‘the cult of sepulchral melancholy’ and ‘graveyard gothic’.”

— Catharine Arnold

7. “Geoffrey Chaucer’s tender-hearted prioress, Madame Eglantyne, who was said to weep at the sight of a mouse caught in a trap, would nevertheless have had a gallows on her property, upon which, at the hands of her bailiff, she would have hanged thieves.”

— Catharine Arnold

8. “A shortage of coffins was one thing, but then London began running out of graves.”

— Catharine Arnold

9. “Intent on wiping out their oppressors, Boudicca’s army descended on London and burned it to the ground. This first Great Fire of London was so intense that it melted bronze coins, scorching the earth so profoundly that archaeologists discovered a seared layer of soil centuries later.”

— Catharine Arnold

10. “Only Mary Queen of Scots challenged the prevailing orthodoxy when she wore white to mourn the death of Lord Darnley in 1567, earning the title of ‘The White Queen’.”

— Catharine Arnold

11. “Nottingham’s Rock Cemetery, with its magnificent marble angels and sandstone catacombs.”

— Catharine Arnold

12. “Despite the fact that England was nominally a Christian country, the church had no reservations about capital punishment, with St Paul and Thomas Aquinas enlisted in its defence.”

— Catharine Arnold

13. “Nelson’s body was pickled in brandy, which was replaced with wine at Gibraltar, and brought back to England, amid macabre speculation that the Admiral’s crew had drunk the embalming brandy in transit.”

— Catharine Arnold

14. “As an architectural marvel, Bethlem appeared in at least thirty-six tourist guides in 1681.”

— Catharine Arnold

15. “The body of Katherine de Valois, buried 1483, had been a grisly exhibit since she was dug up in 1502, when the chapel was demolished on the orders of Henry VII. Katherine’s body was placed in a wooden box near her husband’s tomb and Henry fully intended to have her reburied.”

— Catharine Arnold

16. “But Turner was not without his peccadilloes: a magistrate, he considered it his civic duty to witness every prostitute he sentenced being flogged at Bridewell, moving one commentator to observe: ‘Oh, Bridewell! What a shame thy walls reproaches. Poor Molls are whipp’d, while rich ones ride in coaches!”

— Catharine Arnold

17. “In 1666, an Act designed to promote the wool industry came into force, insisting that everyone should be buried in a woollen shroud. Other fibres, such as silk or linen, were banned.”

— Catharine Arnold

18. “Another practice which also persisted for centuries was that of ‘telling the bees’ when a death had occurred in the family. If this was neglected, it was feared they would abandon their hives, never to return.”

— Catharine Arnold

19. “Burton makes it quite clear that the ‘distinguished’ nature of melancholy makes it superior to other forms of madness, as evidence of a refined nature. It is melancholy, after all, which afflicts scholars and poets: ‘Melancholy men of all others are most witty.’32 Despite the drawbacks of the condition, his ambivalent attitude prefigures that of many modern depressives, who regard the disease as an essential component of their character, even their creativity.”

— Catharine Arnold

20. “If a woman possessed the unfortunate combination of delicate skin, thin eyebrows, a curving spine and a ‘sharp tongue’, it would be almost impossible for a man to refrain from beating her.”

— Catharine Arnold

21. “In fact, the tunnel curves between Knightsbridge and South Kensington stations because it was impossible to drill through the mass of skeletal remains buried in Hyde Park.”

— Catharine Arnold

22. “The satirical magazine Punch, at that period closer in spirit to today’s Private Eye, editorialized that: ‘A London churchyard is very like a London omnibus. It can be made to carry any number.”

— Catharine Arnold

23. “Despite the reservations of Wren, Vanbrugh and their successors, burial in vaults beneath churches had continued. The processes of decomposition, shaky foundations and the British disease of rising damp caused particular difficulties. Chadwick noted that, however solid the coffin, ‘Sooner or later every corpse buried in the vault of a church spreads the products of decomposition through the air which is breathed, as readily as if it had never been enclosed.”

— Catharine Arnold

24. “Commoners’ bones may have been dug up again and slung into a charnel house: for royalty, burial was for ever.”

— Catharine Arnold

25. “One of the duties of a sexton consisted of ‘tapping’ coffins, ‘so as to facilitate the escape of gases which would otherwise detonate from their confinement’.5 On occasion, the build-up of corpse gas was so intense that coffins actually exploded. In the 1800s, fires beneath St Clement Dane’s and Wren’s Church of St James’s in Jermyn Street destroyed many bodies and burned for days.”

— Catharine Arnold

26. “Even in London, where space was at a premium, churchyards were traditionally filled with trees, evidence of a lasting pagan influence.”

— Catharine Arnold

27. “Hanging had been introduced by the Anglo-Saxons during the fifth century as a punishment for murder, theft and treason.”

— Catharine Arnold

28. “In February 1660, a Lady Monck visited the hospital, and received this greeting from one of the ‘phanatiques’: Most noble lady, now we see The world turns round as well as we. Whilst you adorn this place we know No greater happiness below, Than to behold the sweet delight Of him that will restore our right, Let George know we are not so mad, But we can love an honest lad.64.”

— Catharine Arnold

29. “Grave clothes were part of a young woman’s trousseau. These grim garments were sewn in the knowledge that they might be needed. For the same reason, a potential bride habitually prepared at least one set of burial clothes for any child she might bear. Babies dying within a month of baptism were buried in their baptismal robes and swaddling bands. Children were often elaborately dressed.”

— Catharine Arnold

30. “For, as FitzMary knelt to pray, An angel whispered in his ear ‘The Holy Land is far away, Prepare another Manger here. Build you a second House of Bread In this fair city of renown, And God His Son,’ the angel said, ‘Shall come to dwell in London Town.’ So spake the angel, bending low Reddens laudes Domino.”

— Catharine Arnold

31. “Once the corpse had been dressed, complete with a nightcap which kept the jaw closed and created the impression that the dead person was but sleeping, it was placed in an open coffin. This was lined with a sawdust mattress, to absorb the by-products of early decomposition, and scattered with pungent herbs such as rosemary to disguise the smell.”

— Catharine Arnold

32. “Bethlem became a byword for thieving, degeneracy and institutionalised corruption. One of the most notorious employees was Peter the Porter, who left his miserable charges to starve and shiver while he traded in their food and bedding.”

— Catharine Arnold

33. “In the same year, looking for a diversion from ill-health and overwork, Loudon reviewed a three-volume romance entitled The Mummy’s Tale – A Novel, for The Gardener’s magazine. Set in 2126, in an England that had reverted to absolute monarchy, this featured prototypes for espresso machines, air-conditioning and, most prophetically, ‘a communication system that permitted instant world dissemination of news’.”

— Catharine Arnold

34. “Against all odds, Bethlem survived. The Bishopsgate building endured the Civil War, the Great Plague of 1665 and the Fire of London a year later, after which the hospital’s governors realised that it needed a new home. In 1676 ‘New Bedlam’ opened in Moorfields, with patients transferred to a ‘palace beautiful’ designed by the genius polymath Robert Hooke.”

— Catharine Arnold

35. “Children were the primary victims of these filthy conditions and there were numerous anecdotes of undertakers temporarily storing the bodies of newborn infants in their own premises until there were enough dead babies to make it worthwhile giving them a decent burial.”

— Catharine Arnold

36. “Meverall, meanwhile, had his own claim to fame in the death stakes. At the age of twenty-three, the young doctor succumbed to an attack of smallpox, and every aperture in his sick room was carefully closed up. He became unconscious due to lack of oxygen, and was assumed to have died. It was not until his body was being prepared for burial that he was exposed to fresh air, and came to his senses just in time to escape being buried alive.”

— Catharine Arnold

37. “In his study of Dr Leo Stanley, the historian Ethan Blue makes it clear that Stanley was no ordinary prison doctor. Dr Leo Stanley was a eugenicist who later became famous for a bizarre series of medical experiments conducted upon the prison population of San Quentin.”

— Catharine Arnold

38. “I went down and down,’ he remembered, ’until the wingtips of angels brushed my eyes.”

— Catharine Arnold

39. “Influenza had brought the all-conquering German army to its knees, while the Allies, stricken too, took advantage of their enemy’s weakness to regroup.”

— Catharine Arnold

40. “One victim was sixteen-year-old John Steinbeck. The future author of The Grapes of Wrath returned home from his Californian school one day looking ’pale and dizzy.”

— Catharine Arnold

41. “Stressing that ‘the many shall not be placed in danger by the few’, the paper urged readers to wear a mask. ‘Those who are not doing so are not showing their independence – they are only showing their indifference for the lives of others – for the lives of the women and the helpless little children who cannot help themselves.”

— Catharine Arnold

42. “Medical science had little to offer in the way of prevention or cure, apart from the process of disinfection, notification and isolation as recommended by Dr Niven. There was little consensus on treatment apart from the traditional recourse to bed rest, opiates and folk remedies, while to make matters worse, significant individuals refused to take the threat of Spanish flu seriously.”

— Catharine Arnold

43. “In a strange twist on the concept of flu prevention, ‘vaudeville theaters were only allowed to be half full – members of the audience had to leave the seat on either side empty so that they would not breathe on one another. To further protect themselves many wore surgical masks, so that even when they laughed the sound was muffled.”

— Catharine Arnold

44. “This drastic treatment worked, and John recovered sufficiently to attend the last three weeks of school before the summer recess, but he was left with lung problems for the rest of his life.”

— Catharine Arnold

45. “William Maxell, who became Mary’s editor at the New Yorker. William recalled a poignant sense of loss when his own mother and new-born sibling died from the disease: ‘From that time on there was a sadness which had not existed before, a deep down sadness that never went away. We aren’t safe. Nobody’s safe. Terrible things can happen to anyone at any time.’36.”

— Catharine Arnold

46. “Horatio Nelson set the standard after he was mortally wounded by a sniper at the Battle of Trafalgar in 1805. Nelson’s body was pickled in brandy, which was replaced with wine at Gibraltar, and brought back to England, amid macabre speculation that the Admiral’s crew had drunk the embalming brandy in transit.”

— Catharine Arnold